It was a great feeling to come together as a team at our Annual Meeting to celebrate the successes of 2019 and to discuss the wide open opportunities ahead of us in 2020.
The auditorium at NIU was packed with the best people, bar none, in the local advertising industry. The feelings and emotions present in that room and shared there – from the back seats to the stage up front – included warmth, joy, and appreciation. We felt the pride of hard-earned accomplishment. We tuned into a strong sense of purpose in our working hours, and we left with a clear-sighted sense in where we are going in our professional lives and as a business together.
It was an honor to review our accomplishments in the second half of 2019:
- Year over year increases in OPTIMA™ sales six out of six months
- Year over year increases in CloseBy® Text sales five out of six months
- Year over year increases in Google Street View Trusted five out of six months
- Total sales year over year increases five out of the last six months
- 49 individual promotions in 2019, including four individuals promoted twice in the year
- 31% growth in AMP’s total 401K investment assets during 2019
- Measured product results for our customers – calls, map actions, website referrals, messages delivered, and leads generated – set all-time records, whether from the HomePages®, CloseBy® Text, OPTIMA™ or Google Street View.
- We’re diligently building the back-office utilities to expand and strengthen our product offerings in an orderly and intelligent way.
This is a great time to “AMP it Up” at AMP. Our business circumstances are unique: There’s a huge, unfilled need for what we do here. Nearly every business is a very good prospect for one or more of our products. We have the benefit of a fractured competitor landscape, characterized by an absence of rivals who make it their business to call in-person on businesses in our communities, and by rivals who cannot match our low rates. Best yet, when a prospect buys and becomes a customer, the results that we deliver are often game-changing for their business.
That unique business environment right now, taken alongside the accomplishments and momentum of the year behind us, should have us all setting big goals then taking – and tracking – the small daily steps to accomplish them. Winners keep score! What can you do during February and all year long to live a little larger and a little more fully in the hours that you work? What can you track? Where can you win? Let’s regard today as a starting point, and let’s welcome the huge opportunities ahead of us in 2020.