Agencies say 'Bravo' to nerds
Web developer Sierra Bravo rebranded its applications division, now known as the Nerdery, which thrives by letting others be creative; St Paul Pioneer Press story by Leslie Brooks Suzukamo
The Facebooking, Twittering, YouTubing explosion of social media has been very good for Bloomington Web developer Sierra Bravo. So much so that it gave itself a makeover this spring.
The company's program that partners with advertising agencies to come up with Web applications has been rechristened Nerdery Interactive Labs, or the Nerdery for short. The name is supposed to emphasize the company's strength in assembling developers with specialized knowledge of writing code for online ad campaigns, no matter what the job.
Despite this flash of marketing, coming up with branding campaigns or ad slogans isn't the strength of the Nerdery, say co-founders Luke Bucklin, Mike Schmidt and Mike Derheim.
"We don't do creative," Bucklin, the president, said "Our focus is, when you decide what you want to do, take it to us."
It's been a winning strategy so far. The company, which launched in 2003, has been growing at about 50 percent a year, reaching $6.4 million in revenue last year.
This year, Sierra Bravo expects to hit $10 million in sales, and executives say the company was ahead of monthly revenue targets for the first four months.
But it hasn't been immune to the economic slowdown: In mid-May Sierra Bravo laid off seven workers, about 9 percent of its 79 employees.
Although the company has a lot of potential work in the pipeline, "We couldn't afford to have people on the bench waiting for jobs to come in," said Mark Malmberg, the company's communications director.
About 80 percent of Sierra Bravo's revenue is from its partner work with ad and marketing agencies, the rest from direct work with clients and other Web development work.
The company touts its employees' skill at using Microsoft .Net development tools, Adobe Flash or Java script. On the in-house blog, they celebrate their nerdiness by posting things like a list of their 35 favorite fictional nerds, from TV's MacGyver to "Little Women's" Jo.
Bucklin said the company does do a little strategic work when it is hired directly by clients searching for direction in their Web development.
But the overwhelming bulk of its business is partnering with advertising agencies, and it is there that the Nerdery isn't trying to be the creative force behind the campaign, just the guys who are supposed to make it work.
Sierra Bravo didn't start out this way.
The company's original mission was to write Web tools for old "legacy systems" that pre-dated the Web in the construction and manufacturing industries.
That was the kind of work the three co-founders had done when they worked together at Southwest Data Systems, now known as Infinitivity.
They worked on applications for mundane tasks like keeping track of employee hours or printing customer order tickets in a warehouse.
The challenge was to get the system to mesh with something for which it was never designed. Think of it as solving Rubik's Cube with a few of the pieces missing.
Then a few years ago, David Annis, an interactive producer at the Fallon Minneapolis ad agency, asked if Sierra Bravo could donate some time to help the agency build a Web site for kids.
Annis liked their work and hired them to do more work for the agency.
After he left Fallon to work for a new agency called Zeus Jones, also in Minneapolis, he kept hiring them.
The main reason, he said, was when they built their finished product, it looked like the agency's idea, not Sierra Bravo's.
That may sound odd, but getting a Web site that does exactly what an ad agency wanted in the first place is rare, he said.
Often, Web development agencies have their own creative people with their own ideas of what the site should look like, feel and do. Creative differences can and do crop up.
"We're unique because we didn't come up as a Web development agency," Bucklin said. "We came up as an engineering company. ... We are the rare case where we just want to do the development."
"Our roots are around legacy integration, which is parallel to what we're doing now," said Schmidt, 35, the company's senior vice president. "We're still the technology experts."
"It's sort of like playing Sudoku," added Derheim, 30. "You're playing around with a problem and there's always a solution."
Sierra Bravo recently got publicity for building a social media application called "Skimmer" for Fallon.
The ad agency is using Skimmer in-house to help its workers make better use of media like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
And the company used Adobe tools called Flex and Flash to create a social media application for the Balcom Agency in Fort Worth that lets cell phone users report the weather from their location and share the results.
"It comes down to your capabilities, and quite frankly, we didn't know anyone else with that expertise," said Chip Hanna, interactive account director for the Balcom Agency, a marketing and advertising service in Forth Worth, Tex.
He wasn't bothered that Sierra Bravo — or the Nerdery, as it now calls that part of its business — doesn't tout a creative background like a lot of other Web developers.
"That's what we bring to the table," he said.
Leslie Brooks Suzukamo can be reached at 651-228-5475.
COMPANY SPECS
Name: Sierra Bravo
Location: Bloomington
Owners: Luke Bucklin, Mike Schmidt, Mike Derheim
Business: Social media Web site development for ad agencies
Web sites: sierra-bravo.com, nerdery.com
Founded: 2003
Employees: 72
2008 revenue: $6.4 million
Competition: Scores of Web development agencies that work in advertising or social media.
Challenge ahead: Surviving the recession and continuing to grow.
Media Contact
Mark Malmberg
Communications Manager
Office: (952) 948.1211 x1069
Cell: (612) 850.3178
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