Meet Brendan Bonham and Atish Doshi of The Black Sheep in The Loop

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brendan Bonham and Atish Doshi.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Brendan and Atish. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
The Black Sheep is a marketing and media company that connects brands and student housing properties with students on over 150 college campuses across the United States.

15 years ago, we started as a media company with a print publication at the University of Illinois. Our paper, originally titled “The Booze News” was started as a joke, but quickly took off on campus.

The paper grew, eventually changing its name to “The Black Sheep” and expanding to Michigan State, Western Michigan. Our first mass print expansion put The Black Sheep at 15 schools in 2011. The media side of things continued to grow with print in 30+ markets by 2013.

Around the same time, The Black Sheep began diversifying its portfolio to cover grassroots marketing by building brand ambassador campaigns on campus.

As print began dying off on a campus-level, we began contracting our papers and focusing our efforts on digital media (editorial, social, video) and grassroots marketing.

Currently, our position is that we can help brands and student housing properties reach students through a 360-degree approach. We lead with marketing as it’s our biggest growth driver, but this is amplified through local social, video and editorial to have a strong online and offline approach.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We’ve faced several challenges as The Black Sheep has grown. We’ll focus on ones we think other companies, too, face.

Our initial challenge was cash flow. We decided to avoid any sort of big fundraises, so our initial challenge was balancing cash flow with growth/expansion. Print media advertising has a slow turn-around time on top of already-thin margins, so always having the cash we needed on hand, as opposed to owed to us, was a constant issue. Not having a ton of money to blow on whatever we wanted forced us to make smart decisions on spending money, and we’ve carried that with us as we’ve grown. This also forced us to be bottom-line driven and ensure we had a sustainable business model we could scale, as opposed to being user-driven and figuring out monetization later.

An everlasting challenge we face is a balance between youth and business expertise. Our target market in everything we do is college students. In turn, if we want our approach and our voice to ring genuine, we need to maintain a youth culture. As our business grows, we need more people who have experience in these various fields. When you hire, it’s going to be one or the other, so how do you maintain that balance? We constantly reflect and self-correct.

Business organization is another big one. When you’re a 2-person company, everyone does everything. When you’re a four-person company, most people do most things, etc… This SHOULD hold true to employee 6-8, but we let this slide until we were at 10-12 employees. Suddenly, we realized that there was, at best, vaguely defined organizational structure at The Black Sheep. It took about eight months, but we developed more specific roles, teams and team leaders with a clear delegation of responsibility. It has been immensely helpful.

Most recently, the biggest challenge we face is a matter of business focus. Right now, we do some things very well, some things good, some things fine, and, frankly, some things poorly. We’re now faced with deciding on what we need to change to continue to amplify our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses.

The Black Sheep – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We are a marketing and media company that specializes in connecting brands to college students on campus around the country through field marketing that’s amplified through local social, video and editorial.

We ONLY focus on college students. Not high school seniors, not recent graduates. If they’re not on campus, we’re not interested.

We work most closely with college housing brands, working with them on brand awareness, lead generation, etc. If a college student sees a social post online, or a person on campus handing out information for housing brands, they’re probably affiliated with The Black Sheep. We also work with several big name brands to assist with user acquisition, product distribution and sampling and other lead generation tools to drive success.

We’re most proud of our ability to evolve with the current college landscape. Not to reiterate too much, but we started as a print newspaper. When college kids stopped caring about it, so did we. When we saw data showing Instagram is the social future, we doubled down our efforts on that platform and have grown a strong local reach through that platform.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Atish: For me, it was this past summer when we moved into our new offices. It wasn’t that the office was cool or anything special, but it was the culmination of years of growth and hard work to get to where we are today. We went from working out of my basement to a small co-working space to a bigger co-working space to the basement of another co-working space to finally have our own space and 20+ employees. The fact that some of the employees have been along for the ride over the years and get to share in that growth is a really special thing.

Brendan: Every year, we do a holiday party with our employees. This last year, one of our employees took a bunch of video at the party and compiled it into a short about The Black Sheep. So many of the cut-aways focused less on our business and more about the interpersonal relationships that have grown from this business. We’re CERTAINLY in this business to make money, but that human element made me very proud, not just because many people here are like family to me, and not just because I’ve met several of my lifelong friends doing this. It’s the proudest moment for me because you need great people to take your business somewhere great, and people can only be great when they’re willing to put in the work. Working with people you care about makes you put in the work.

Contact Info:

• Address: 226 S. Wabash, Unit 1000, Chicago, IL 60604
• Website: www.theblacksheeponline.com
• Phone: 3098386197
• Email: brendan@theblacksheeponline.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/TheBlackSheep99/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBlackSheep99/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheBlackSheep99

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