We had a great third quarter and I’m honored to report that our sales were stronger in Q3 2021 than in any quarterly period going all the way back to 2015.  That’s a strong indicator of the good work and positive results we are generating for our clients, and that growth is also a credit to the intensity, focus, and hard work of everyone on the AMP team.  We spent the third quarter putting in place the building blocks and infrastructure of a company that can break quarterly sales records by wider and wider margins for years forward.

It was an incredible quarter beyond the sales success.  We dug in on the operations and fulfillment side of the business to add new services to our existing digital solutions and to increase the value of having AMP as your back office, full-service marketing partner.  At every turn, we’re taking small steps to reduce grit and to increase ease, both for team members and for AMP clients.  Whether it’s new real-time reporting functionality through Tableau, a slightly more comprehensive and convenient onboarding experience for AMP Video clients, or one of the other many small, iterative, well-executed improvements that we implemented during the past three months, the compound effect is powerful:  We’re laying the groundwork for a period of more rapid expansion and growth.

I love this upcoming season ahead of us.  I love the light electric charge in the air on a crisp fall morning, and as a small-town Midwesterner, I still feel like a kid when I watch the combines pulling in the corn and soybeans, leaving clean fields and huge stores of grain.  There’s a special sense of energy in October, a feeling of open appreciation in November, and a positive sense of anticipation during December that helps to make selling during the fall and early winter especially rewarding.  I think many business owners have that same good feeling, that it is “stock up” time… a time to perhaps work on their local marketing, a time to shake the aggravating online pebbles out of their shoes with some professional help, and a good time to make sure that their marketing is working as hard as they’ve been working.

For us too, it’s a great time to be digging into our work with an awareness of the wide open opportunities in front of us.  We have a unique set of DeKalb-built digital products, and because we’ve built those products ourselves instead of licensing them, we’re perfectly positioned to evolve our products and adapt them as online needs change.  For the past 24 years, our exclusive focus has been on the very practical needs of family owned businesses, rather than on national clients or multi-location franchises.  That’s very rare in the tech-enabled digital agency world, where most of our competitors built their products initially for large companies first.  We have very few competitors with a practical product set built first for family owned businesses, fewer yet who have a genuinely full-service, do-it-for you culture that comes with the products… and none with prices that match ours.  That’s an advantageous set of circumstances, by design.

Let’s tap into all of the good energy of the fourth quarter and finish 2021 stronger than we’ve ever been.