Today we’d like to introduce you to Marc and Todd Reifenrath.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Marc and Todd. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Spinutech started in 2000, riding the crashing waves of the dot-com bubble, as three college kids from small-town Iowa. We lacked experience in those early years, but it was outweighed by passion and a desire to succeed. At first, we worked out of college apartments at the University of Northern Iowa (go Panthers!). We joined the local chamber, began networking with an older and wiser crowd, and earned our first clients. We were an early innovator in the creation of dynamic and interactive websites (without using Flash and other “cheats”), which was a novel idea at the time, and created what would come to be known as our Spinternet content management system.
By 2003 we moved to our first official “world headquarters” in a loft on Cedar Falls’ historic Main Street. We had a few years of experience under our belts, the office was large enough for our growing team, and made us feel like we had arrived (no longer working out of our apartments). By this time, we had clients in several states and continued to increase the sophistication of the websites that we were building.
A short two years later, in 2005, we moved into our current office (also in downtown Cedar Falls). This accommodated an even faster growing team with clients in over 25 states. In 2006, we opened an office in Des Moines to be closer to key clients and extend our reach. Most recently, we opened a Chicago office (in suburban Elmhurst) in 2016 with an initial team of six that has quickly grown to ten full-time professionals.
Spinutech is now nearly 50 strong across two states and three offices. We have clients in all 50 states and eight countries. Our largest recent growth has been in digital marketing. We are a certified Premier Google Partner and work closely with national brands like John Deere, Pella Windows, and others. We have clients in all types of businesses including healthcare, manufacturing, banking, insurance, associations, non-profits, and franchise/dealer networks.
We are excited about our recent expansion into Chicago and we look forward to bringing our team’s experience and passion to a new set of clients. The new location is also enabling us to tap into Chicago’s talent pool to expand our design, development, and digital strategy teams with highly specialized and experienced professionals.
Has it been a smooth road?
We encounter challenges like all growing businesses but have been fortunate to avoid over-extending ourselves. We made it through our first 10 years with zero turnover and still have our first five team members. We’ve done this by creating a great culture that attracts passionate and compassionate team members and loyal clients in interesting businesses. By diversifying our clients, we have also avoided pinning our growth too tightly to one client or industry.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Spinutech story. Tell us more about the business.
Spinutech started as a strategy-driven web design and development firm. At our core, we are a web design and development firm with the experience and capabilities to build large-scale websites and web-based solutions. We focus on ease-of-use and creating solutions that deliver results for our clients.
As the digital space has evolved, our capabilities have grown to include a range of digital strategy and marketing services. Today we often build a client’s website and provide ongoing digital marketing support through SEO, paid search, display, remarketing, email marketing, video, social media, and more. Our specialty is working with clients to attract qualified traffic and, through an easy-to-use website, convert them into a lead, sale or other measurable outcome.
Our industry changes constantly and quickly and we hold ourselves to a high standard. We give our team the resources necessary to stay abreast of new technology, trends, and best practices and are always looking for new opportunities to help clients grow their business or improve efficiency.
Our focus on transparency sets us apart from many competitors. We are upfront in our approach and transparent in billing, results, media spend (important in digital marketing where so many firms blend their fees with the cost of media), and even share our mistakes with the goal of allowing us and our clients to learn from them (and avoid repeating them). The great thing about digital is that you can fail (and react) fast. It’s what we do with the results that sets us apart.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We are already in a mobile-first world and the trend toward mobile and non-traditional devices is accelerating. The internet is one of the fastest evolving revolutions ever and directly impacts the daily experience of billions of people. It’s amazing that the iPhone is only ten years old and hard to remember what the world was like before everyone had social media, email, and the rest of the internet in their pocket.
The ability to deliver rich media, such as video, over the internet is already commonplace but has only begun to affect traditional media outlets, though we may be nearing a tipping point where our consumption of content moves further away from magazines, newspapers, and broadcast and cable television. The internet of things (IoT) provides a glimpse of how pervasive internet-connected devices will become. Voice search and devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home make accessing information even easier.
Websites and web-based applications will continue to evolve and we anticipate continued movement toward mobile websites instead of apps. Perhaps most notable will be the continued evolution of digital marketing. Everything mentioned above is another data source to be mined by marketers to target potential customers. It is already possible to advertise to people based on demographics, purchase and travel history, and other behavior-based factors. Digital marketing sophistication will continue to improve and we shouldn’t be surprised to see heightened concerns over privacy as users begin to understand how their digital behavior is used to target them.
Contact Info:
- Address: Spinutech Chicago
116 N York Street
Suite 200, Elmhurst, IL 60126 - Website: www.Spinutech.com
- Phone: 866-414-7746
- Email: info@spinutech.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spinutech
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/spinutech
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