Cary Sherburne: Hi. I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink and I'm here with Chuck Stempler who is President and Owner of AlphaGraphics in Seattle. Welcome.

Chuck Stempler: Thank you.

Cary Sherburne: But we’re not really here to talk specifically about AlphaGraphics. A couple, three months ago I interviewed you for WhatTheyThink about a new business that you started up, and maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that and how that’s going and what are some of the new developments.

Chuck Stempler: Well, the business we were talking about is our initiative in what we refer to as search engine marketing, more conventionally known as Paid Search. It’s going well. We have been growing the client base at about a compounded rate of 8-9 percent a month so it’s a fairly rapid growth, but it’s off of a fairly low number so I’m not going to get myself too excited. It’s got a lot of skill ability to it, so if anybody out there is thinking about it, don’t be worried about our growth rate. But what we have built is a hyper-local solution for people in the print space, and it comes along with an extremely deep set of key words that are revolving around all of the products and services that are typically done in the print market from quick print through, say, at least mid-size commercial.

It is a solution that is very powerful, but most importantly, 100 percent transparent and measurable. So unlike the old days, placing an ad in the Yellow Pages and then hoping the phone rings and never really knowing where that phone call came from, we’re able to actually deliver every contact, improve every point of contact. We don’t answer the phone on behalf of the client. We don’t respond to their emails, but we do report and we do capture all this information. We’re able to take the owners or the delegated managers of these programs through the results on a monthly basis and help them, in essence, fix any bugs in their process and optimize their solution.

And we have a number of clients who have reported within their first year that their business has grown. And a couple have actually indicated that in their total business over 10 percent of their sales is directly attributable to the clients that we have delivered via these products.

Cary Sherburne: Wow, that’s great.

Chuck Stempler: People are searching for print every hour of the day and they’re primarily going online. And organic is another great tool but is extremely difficult and, quite frankly, not free.

Cary Sherburne: And slow.

Chuck Stempler: Yes—to get there. So this is a—for some people this is the or; for some people this is a combination effort, and one plus one in the organic, plus Paid Search, often can equal three. But if you’re looking to be found by people who would like to buy your products and services, this is the place and this is a method of accomplishing it.

Cary Sherburne: Now how do people get more information about this?

Chuck Stempler: Primarily, you would probably want to try and reach me at AlphaGraphics. We’re in Seattle and our local phone number is 206-448-9100 and my extension is 122.

Cary Sherburne: 122. And so they can call you up and have a conversation about how you might be able to help them speed up their growth rate and implement search engine marketing maybe a little more painlessly…

Chuck Stempler: Absolutely.

Cary Sherburne: …than they think it might be done.

Chuck Stempler: And it’s a long term relationship. This is not a here’s your program and no, please don’t ever call us again. We report monthly, we schedule calls monthly, and some people would like to speak to us every month; some people we’re like fine, we’ve got it from here. But if this is something that you’d to try and understand a little bit better, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Cary Sherburne: Terrific. Thanks, Chuck.

Chuck Stempler: You’re welcome. Thank you.