Tom Duffey

Owner and CEO, Plastic Components Inc:

“We really had no market presence. We’re a really good manufacturing company… (but) our reputation in the marketplace was very limited and didn’t represent how good we really were. We had a brochure, we had a website, but they didn’t accurately represent what we were as a company.

“I wasn’t aware of (the strategic value) as much until we were done but, even today looking back, the stuff Anne did for us provided a strategic foundation for all the tactical stuff we’ve done since then.”

“We all think we know what’s important to our customers, but we weren’t entirely right about that. Anne came up with information that caused us to change how we operate and market ourselves.

“Anne found that up-front engineering support was critically important. Although we should have known that intuitively, Anne’s research brought it right to the surface. As a result, we made adjustments to our business to strengthen our engineering department. We got our engineers more actively involved on a daily basis with customers, working through design issues. We built that into our marketing and business development strategy as well. 

“The research Anne did had an immediate impact, not only on our marketing effort, but on the way we ran the business. It was huge.”