Mixed Media Pets and kids are welcome at this family-friendly firm
Barb Epstein (pictured here with office mascots Mojo and Jingo) enjoys seeing her staff’s children in the office, and says the open-door policy boosts morale. Photo by Jenny Krol.
“ Having really good morale and a positive workplace helps you put out better product for the client. ”
There’s a lot of buzz these days about work-life balance and how desirable it is, and how much it boosts productivity and thus profits. There are workshops and seminars and books and coaches to help executives figure out what work-life balance is and how to get it (or create it).
For Barbara Epstein, founder and president of Marketing Midwest, Inc., an Edina-based media planning and buying company, work-life balance is just another name for common sense. She can’t even remember a time in the last 16 years that her staff’s children, stranded because of a sick daycare worker or some other last-minute emergency, weren’t welcome in the office. Children’s drawings and messages (“You are very, very nice”) dot the doorways and desks. And the open-door policy extends to pets: two poodles, Mojo and Jingo, share a room with the firm’s public relations director.
Flexibility is rare enough among bosses; more unusual still is the boss who believes family isn’t an intrusion but an improvement in the office atmosphere.
“I really enjoy seeing the kids,” Epstein confessed. “It’s a real day brightener. Sometimes we will give them jobs to do. Amy’s daughter Rachel set up a whole library for us.”
What looks like a magnanimous gesture is also, as it turns out, a shrewd business decision for the 12-person company. According to Epstein, when her employees know that they aren’t going to be penalized for having a life outside of work, when they know they can cope with emergencies by bringing their kids to work, production is up, company morale is up and turnover is down.
Epstein sums it up this way: “Having really good morale and a positive workplace helps you put out better product for the client.”
The Epstein connection
When Epstein started the company in 1989, she didn’t set out to prove that flexibility made good business sense. She had other things on her mind: she wanted to revolutionize the practice of media buying. She believed that if media buyers took the time to negotiate made-to-order advertising schedules, rather than rely on industry standards, they could buy success for their clients without draining their wallets.
“I believed buying could be done another way,” she said. Standard practice, she said, “was not necessarily the best thing for the client.”
Tasha Coats, managing director and co-owner of Marketing Midwest, gave an example: rather than buy radio ads throughout the 6 to 9 a.m. drive-time slot, a savvy media buyer might notice that the client’s target audience was listening mainly from 7 to 8 a.m., and negotiate for ads during one hour rather than three. This approach is painstaking and requires more personal attention than a big agency would give to a similar job, Coats said.
A buyer working for a national agency, said Coats, might take two days and go through two or three rounds of negotiation on a typical client’s media purchase. The buyers at Marketing Midwest, she said, are more likely to spend three weeks, and four to seven rounds negotiating a similar job.
“Our clients aren’t the biggest,” said Epstein, “so we need to be smarter.”
Marketing Midwest’s now considerable reputation is based mainly on that simple theory and its corollaries. In order to get the best bargain, you have to hire the best negotiators, and Epstein has been careful to hire senior buyers with years of experience. Clients are often sold on the fact that a youngster just out of school won’t be handling their account, she said. “We do not have people learning at our clients’ expense.”
This year, Marketing Midwest projects $10 million worth of client billing; though they’re nowhere near the size of national media marketers, they’re close to the top among local firms. Coats described the company’s growth as slow and steady; even after 9/11, when business for many advertising companies tanked, Marketing Midwest continued to do well, she said. Almost all their business these days comes through referral—a sign of happy clients. And this year, they were recognized by the Twin Cities Media Network’s Diamond Awards: four of the six nominees in the Agency Media Buyer of the Year award—Amy Mozey, Janet Bezanson, Liz Dodge and Michelle Benson—were from Marketing Midwest.
Epstein and Coats agreed that their company policies have made them a coveted destination for employees. “For somebody that wants a career in this business, this is the place to work because it’s the ultimate in terms of balance,” said Coats.
