It was a great feeling to kick off the New Year with a week-long series of Team Appreciation Meetings. What a year, with so much to celebrate and recognize!   It’s fun every 12 months to look back and salute great personal and team performance, to share personal shout-outs, and to laugh together at some truly hilarious blooper reels.  It’s also great to get quiet and get serious together about the huge opportunities in front of us as a new year begins.  The theme of the meetings, Edge of Glory, describes our current opportunities perfectly.

I don’t think there’s ever been a more dynamic time at AMP than right now. We drove year-over-year monthly topline sales increases every single month of 2021 and with January nearly done, our winning streak will extend again, to 18 straight months.  In 2021, we achieved 30% growth in OPTIMA™ sales, 33% growth in GSV sales, and 28% growth in CloseBy® sales.  We also set records for average account value, average revenue productivity per person, and we achieved the highest rates of customer renewal and increase in the 24 years we’ve been in business.

I’m proud of those incredible business benchmarks because they are an indication of the good work that we are doing for our customers.  We are driving great results for the family owned businesses who are our customers.  We helped deliver more than 11.3 million requests for directions, more than 16 million phone calls, and more than 28 million website referrals from managed listings, and we helped over half a million four and five star reviews get posted with our reputation management solutions.  It’s a privilege to set family owned businesses up with sophisticated websites, beautiful virtual tours, high ranking video content, and a text platform that lets them reach out to their customers to drive business whenever they want to.  I’m proud of those stats too because they represent the steady evolution of a great group of fun, hard-working people.  What started as – and still continues to be – a smart, practical community publishing company is really beginning to “grow up” in the complex local digital ecosystem that is so important to independent businesses and so challenging for them to navigate on their own.

As our local marketing solutions continue to develop into a full set of do-it-for-you services, and as we become a slightly better and slightly stronger company every single month, we need to remain laser-focused on the two fundamentals of our business.  Those two fundamentals are (a) making strong, value based sales one customer at a time; and (b) delivering excellent service and support, one customer at a time.  Geographic growth, personal achievement, financial advancement, career growth, and the good feeling that comes from winning during the hours we work in our lives all come down to those two fundamentals.  We’ve got a great year in front of us in 2022.