(To be read from the bottom up in Morgan Freeman's voice.)
New organization
Going global
In 2019 we celebrated Advance B2B’s 5th birthday. Along with other celebratory activities we designed a new logo, refreshed our website, and ordered some cake and new swag like stickers, snapbacks and socks.
We also got slightly closer to our sister agency Matter and combined our efforts under an unofficial new title: “Malmi Marketing Mafia”. Thanks to this, we got some extra know-how and more power to create awesome HubSpot websites. We also focused on some strategic recruitments to strengthen our martech skills.
We also noticed that after two years of using the agile model with our customers, we were now quite naturally part of a phenomenon called growth marketing.
Other notable things: we got some more office space and needed to come up with better names for our meeting rooms. We had a competition to come up with the best name, and among the top contestants were Boothy McBoothface, Closet McClosetface and Roomy McRoomface. Unfortunately we were unable to reach an agreement for months and due to this, our meeting rooms are now called 1, 2, 3 and 4.
As a cherry on top (of our birthday cake), we organized our first growth event and founded a book club for our customers. 💜
At some point we also noticed that we didn’t have an official video to present our company, so we made one (in Finnish). 👇
(We also appointed ourselves The Malmi-est Marketing Agency of the year, even though this title only exists in our heads. Malmi is a shady neighborhood where our office is located. See year 2015 for details.)
In 2018 we got a new majority owner: the Bravedo community, which aims to be the best seedbed for both companies and people.
From Bravedo, we gained capital for growth as well as expertise: Iikka Lindroos, an expert on both large companies as well as start-ups, was appointed the chairman of the Advance B2B board.
Other notable events include: we organized our first official crayfish party, HubSpot founder and CEO Brian Halligan visited our office, and we published the first issue of our very own joke magazine Kevytpörriäinen (unfortunately only in Finnish).
We also filmed and published 8 episodes of our marketing-themed #Iltavuoro talk show (in Finnish), which was a product of its time and hopefully will never be continued again.
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In 2017 we built our service offering by focusing on our B2B brand marketing know-how, and we also added paid advertising services to our portfolio.
In October, we launched a “compulsory remote work week”, which at the time was so unheard of that even the prestigious magazine Talouselämä wrote about it. Our goal was to learn and try out new ways of working, and also to lend our helping hand to get rid of any negative stigma related to remote work.
(And, as we all know, in retrospect this was an awesome idea, as we then went 100% remote in 2020! 🦠😷)
During the Christmas season we fought over who had the ugliest Christmas sweater.
In 2016 we built the foundation for our growth by investing in service process development and learning. Among other things, we created a new team to focus on international SaaS clients, and began planning and piloting our agile marketing model. We were unhappy with the way marketing was led, and felt we needed a new service model in order to be agile, test more, and learn more.
With the Fuel Digital business deal, we were able to start working on important things sooner than expected or planned.
In 2016, our annual revenue eventually grew 122 %, and we had 11 employees by the end of the year. Additionally, we received a HubSpot award for Happiest Customers in the EMEA area.
In April 2015 we needed an actual office space, so we moved to Malmi in Northern Helsinki (where else would our office be?).
The office building is an old livestock feed storage, built in 1926. In the beginning we could fit four desks into the office space, and we figured that's probably more than enough.
We also had a shower for those of us who liked to bike to work. Unfortunately we never had time to get a door for the shower because we knew we'd eventually have to move into a bigger office anyway. Luckily we found the perfect office space in the same building, one floor up!
Other notable things: partnering up with HubSpot. During the first year we reached both the gold tier and the platinum tier soon after. We sold our services under "inbound marketing".
Watch the video below (in Finnish) to see what our first office looked like!
Back in the dark ages (and/or 2014) Paavo Laaksonen and Mikko Seppä did something crazy. They left their well-paying full-time jobs to start an inbound marketing agency.
The big idea was to help B2B companies grow by creating marketing their customers would love.
But first, they created our culture code (in Finnish) and wrote it down on the whiteboard (see image).
