“Maybe I am out of touch, but your promo article appears to be the first relevant message on social media. Thanks.”

Now that’s a good start to a Tuesday! You can read the original article here: Social Media is Not a Content Channel.

The SuperGroup, in collaboration with Ketchum Digital, co-created The 711 Club to support 7-Eleven’s new Brazilian Coffee offerings.

LEADERS & SUCCESS
Share Those Resolutions
By Sonja Carberry

Companies announce their strategic intentions to stakeholders each year. It’s a good idea, says Peter Handal, CEO of Dale Carnegie Training. Every firm, regardless of size, should make business-focused New Year’s resolutions.

“It’s really very important to step out of the day-to-day and look at the big picture,” Handal told IBD.

Not all annual declarations are created equal. How to make sure yours is a winner? “The important thing is to be specific and make sure it’s attainable,” Handal said.

And don’t just file those pledges away. Handal advises creating accountability by telling your plans to people around you.

Some resolutions for 2010:

• Develop internal strength. With its “Healthier Team Members, Healthier Bottom Line” initiative, Interstate Batteries is resolving to build up its 1,400 employees with on-site fitness programs plus incentive and recognition efforts.

“Interstate Batteries is investing heavily in its employees’ health because we believe wellness leads to a more engaged, productive and happy team member,” said Chris Willis, vice president for human resources and counsel at the car battery firm.

• Invest time. Vanessa Ogle, founder of digital media firm Enseo, plans to schedule opportunities each week to meet with vendors, customers and employees. She wants to thank them and talk about how her team can better serve its retail, hotel and stadium customers.

“One thing that’s true of entrepreneurs is that we work in the business more than we work on the business,” Ogle said.

She recently scheduled extra time with a client so she could discuss business in general after dealing with immediate concerns.

“I got so much out of that hour,” Ogle said. “It was incredibly valuable.”

• Widen your horizons. When the real estate market slowed, Amir Korangy continued publishing his New York City-based Web site and magazine, the Real Deal. He also had more downtime than usual.

Korangy used those extra hours to educate himself on business issues and revive relationships with past clients. Of equal importance, he says, was the time he spent learning to play the piano and volunteering with inner-city kids.

“In 2010, my resolution as CEO is to commit to these practices that I involuntarily picked up and incorporate them into my regular agenda,” Korangy said.

• Attract more green. Chris Wallace, principal of the marketing firm SuperGroup, plans to push his firm forward ecologically in 2010.

“As a responsible citizen, I will drastically lower the overall environmental impact of my business’s operation,” he said. “As a prudent capitalist, I will leverage these efforts to attract green-seeking clients and gain market share from my less forward-thinking competitors.”

• Sharpen that focus. “I resolve to filter out all the noise that comes with being an entrepreneur and focus on what matters in terms of accomplishing set goals.”

So says Isha Edwards, brand marketing manager of consultancy Epic Measures.

Some of that racket comes from chatter on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. Instead of trying to keep up with them all, Edwards plans to pick the medium that best reaches her target audience “and then really concentrate on those efforts.”

This morning we were delighted to see that PROMO magazine has published a lengthy article that highlights The 711 Club, a viral site we co-created with Ketchum Digital. Not only that, it was the top story on promomagazine.com and on their weekly newsletter “PROMO Extra.” Not bad!

Here’s the full text of the article. You can read the original article here.

7-Eleven is promoting the Brazilian flavors it added to its roster of in-store brewed coffees last February with an interactive virtual dating game, “Wake Up with a Hot Brazilian” that could win players a discount on their next cup of joe.

“It’s definitely a big deal for us to win this award,” says Chris Wallace, founder and partner at The SuperGroup. “More importantly, when you win and you’re featured on their site, they get an enormous amount of traffic. So we saw an enormous peak in traffic at the the711club.com site, not just from people coming from the FWA site but from people re-tweeting the link to their friends.

Read “How To Avoid SEO Failure”

Here are a few excerpts:

See what the search engine sees

The old rule against Flash-heavy sites is changing since Google starting working with Adobe to make graphics searchable. But search remains a text-focused medium, and that means it pays to see your page as the search engine sees it, according to Steve Gavette, managing director of the search agency Visible.

To do that, Gavette recommends looking at your site in a browser like Lynx. Or, you can click on the “cached” link in Google search for your site and then follow it to the “text-only” link, says Chris Wallace, founding partner and COO The SuperGroup.

Either way, both methods will give you better insight into what the search engine sees when it looks at your website. If you don’t see anything at all in the text view, you definitely have a problem, according to Gavette. But according to Wallace, a Flash-heavy site will be just fine, provided that each page’s content (Flash or otherwise) is located in a universally accessible location like an XML file.

Ask about relevance everyday

If you’re not asking about relevance, you’re definitely failing at SEO, says The SuperGroup’s Chris Wallace. “Much like a credit score, no one knows exactly how specific factors affect rankings,” he adds. “But as a general rule of thumb, always ask yourself: What more can I offer the users who I want to attract? How can I be the most relevant website on a particular topic? This means an abundance of informative content, and a diversity of content that a user might be interested in. Don’t just load your site down with text. Make sure to include PDFs, videos, and even links to outside resources that would be helpful for your users. Do anything you can to make your site extremely relevant and useful for a visiting user, even if that means providing links to outside resources. This will rank you higher in search engines.”

SUPER OFFICE
by Jessica Kuhn

HOW Magazine
August 2009

Inspired by Walt Disney World’s Space Mountain, Atlanta-based firm The SuperGroup took an intergalactic approach to styling its workspace. Take a peek at this far-out studio.

Yesterday’s vision of the future – you know, the one where we’ll all drive flying cars and wear metallic jumpsuits – hasn’t happened, but don’t tell the folks with The SuperGroup, a creative agency in Atlanta.

“Our office is an intergalactic experience. It belongs on ‘Star Trek,’” says Chris Wallace, a founding partner of The SuperGroup. “It’s a respite from reality. It feels very sealed off from the rest of the world … and it’s an environment that gives us permission to boldly go where no other agency has gone before.” We couldn’t agree more.

Where did they come up with the whole intergalactic space theme? Space Mountain at Walt Disney World, of course. While on an annual company retreat at the theme park, Wallace says they looked around and started pondering, “why can’t our office be more like this?”

They embarked on their quest and moved into their space in 2007, incorporating an unforgettable glowing blue tunnel that leads to a stark white studio, clear glass tubing and a circular, elevated command station where the partners – Wallace, Gabe Aldridge and Brad Lewis – direct the starship.

Since all three of The SuperGroup partners are musicians, it was important for them to provide multiple creative outlets beyond the decor for the entire staff, like the music and bar/lounge area. “It allows everyone to have somewhere that they can escape to a get their creative juices flowing. Plus, we can be as loud as we want here,” Wallace says.

The SuperGroup is by no means traditional, and Wallace says their fun and quirky attitudes carry over to their work and the clients they attract.

Motivation in Action: Time Off to Rock
May 12, 2009
By Kassia Shishkoff

When the employees at SuperGroup take time out from work during the day, they don’t gather at the coffee station or the water cooler to chat. Instead they gather in the storage room for a jam session.

Okay, so not everyone plays music—others write screenplays or make short films—but the three founders and about 85 percent of the staff do. Chris Wallace, one of the founding partners of the Atlanta-based graphic design and interactive development firm, plays keyboards.

“We kind of fell into it because we’re all musicians,” says Wallace of himself and his co-founders, Gabe Aldridge and Brad Lewis. “We encourage everybody to have side projects. The only real [criterion] is that they have to be creative in some respect.”

At almost every job employees have downtime, Wallace explains, but rather than use it to browse the Internet or chat online, the workers at SuperGroup keep their creativity flowing with projects or hobbies. This keeps them from burning out on whatever they’re doing for work, according to Wallace.

“Keeping our creative muscles flexed is a really big concern here,” says Wallace. “We try and come up with as many ways as possible so people don’t get into a rut where they’re not really producing. We demand a lot out of them creatively, so it’s our responsibility to put them in an environment where they can flourish in that respect.”

Not only are the breaks enjoyable for everyone, says Wallace, but they also increase productivity.

“We noticed that when we spent some time focusing on music and activities or anything to creatively get our mind off the task at hand, when we finally came back to that task the work was exponentially better,” says Wallace.

All this takes place in the big storage room at SuperGroup. All the music equipment is kept there, and people are allowed to make messes with paints and other craft supplies. The room is far from SuperGroup’s neighbors because, according to Wallace, it can get pretty loud in there.

No SuperGroup employees are ever told to take time off work when it could be detrimental to their projects, but if someone isn’t making headway, says Wallace, that person is encouraged to take a break and come back to it later. One time the whole group was having trouble with a project so Wallace took everyone to see a movie to take their minds off it.

“Quality of work is the most important thing,” says Wallace. “Where we really want to stand out is that we do the best work in the world.”

At SuperGroup, turnover is relatively nonexistent, according to Wallace. Employees are generally there to stay, and they strive to keep it that way. In addition to their daily creative breaks, the group goes on a trip to Disney World each year.

“We try to give back to them to let them know we appreciate that dedication,” says Wallace. “Even though they might work very hard, they’re happy to be doing it.”

Read “Time Off to Rock”

Modern Luxury Media magazine, The Atlantan, featured The SuperGroup partners in “THE RADAR | BIZ” section of their May/June issue:

| By Felicia Feaster | Portrait by Sarah Dorio |

In 2002, three clever, computer-savvy Gen Xers – Chris Wallace, Gabe Aldridge, and Brad Lewis – with a techie bent and plenty of time spent rocking out in local bands, founded the Web and interactive-focused creative shop The SuperGroup. The first year, Wallace jokes, their revenue stream was “zero.” Their creative epicenter was Aldridge’s College Park bungalow, where meetings were held around his grandmother’s dining room table. But Wallace says The SuperGroup now competes with renowned agencies such as New York’s TBWA, the Grey Group and TribalDDB. “That’s not to say they know who we are. But they are certainly losing business to us,” Wallace laughs. Projected earnings for 2009 are $3.2 million, and this June the group launches its first global endeavor, funded through the Wiliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Surfing the wave of China-chic, The SuperGroup has helped develop an instructional language program called The Forgotten World that will allow students in China’s rural Gansu province to learn English through an inventive mix of pop culture, games and comics.

Today the innovative creative agency boasts a staff of 12 and a reputation for expertly tapping into the techie trends that make the Twitter and Facebook generation buzz. With its fingers on the hot buttons of interactivity and social networking, The SuperGroup has managed to laser-train its indie smarts. It’s even taken mundane or smirk-worthy hygiene products and talking-about-the-weather and made them look hip in irreverent Web and package designs for companies like Johnson & Johnson and The Weather Channel. Displaying an anarchic sensibility that evokes Monty Python, Dadaist collage and YouTube viral video, the group’s oddball, highly entertaining approach is typified by a recent Kimberly-Clark Web project for Wypall Wipes with the offbeat feel of a Coen Brothers film. Though they’ve demonstrated their ability to hook blue chip companies like Coca-Cola and Disney, The SuperGroup hasn’t lost its hipster spirit or an awareness of the cultural zeitgeist that keeps the Fortune 500 crowd knocking. Like the teenage son who keeps his cool-hunting dad aware of the hippest iTunes downloads, The SuperGroup entices old school companies with its ability to tap into cutting-edge trends that give its work that special balance of novelty and authenticity.

All three founders keep current by rocking out in local bands and embracing an eccentric staff, including a performance artist named Dance Buffet, a screenwriter, and an indie record label owner. And instead of some gleaming corporate tower, The SuperGroup’s peculiar brand of fan boy cool is perhaps best epitomized by its Krog street digs; an office-slash-play zone featuring an interior design by ai3 (www.ai3online.com) that looks straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or some swinging sixties Carnegie Street pad. Tricked out with Crush soda orange chairs and bottles of boozing options, from absinthe to rye whiskey, the space reflects the trio’s desire to play grown-up on their own terms. “We want this place to be an oasis,” says Aldridge. “It’s a home for failed rock stars. We offer an attractive plan B.”

Read “Wonder Boys, Activate” on Page 50

By Brian Quinton

A Web campaign to get visitors to design themselves and their friends into a customized Disney Main Street Parade has produced thousands of parades in two months and plenty of viral buzz for Walt Disney World Resorts.

The interactive promotion was created by digital agency The SuperGroup to give a viral spin to the company’s “What Will You Celebrate?” integrated media campaign.

Users who go to the site can pick from a number of reasons to have a parade, including birthdays, family reunions, congratulations, first Disney visits and “true love,” and create a banner to mark the event. They can then upload up to four photos to create custom characters that will be integrated into the parade video.

Those characters can then be outfitted with costumes, placed on a float and filmed as part of a Disney Main Street parade, complete with the iconic Cinderella’s castle in the background.

A recorded guide talks users who may not be computer adepts through the process of creating and styling the custom characters.

The resulting 60-second video can be sent out to friends, posted to a MySpace page or embedded on a personal Web page.

The “Magical Parade” microsite launched on Feb. 1 and in that time users have produced more than 125,000 parade videos.

“Working with Disney has been a real treat for us because from our company’s inception, they’ve been a major influence and inspiration,” SuperGroup president Chris Wallace said in a statement.

Read “Disney Virtual Parade Goes Viral”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

At one time they were just the scrappy little kids at large Web-design agencies.

Years later, they consider themselves some of the pickiest around when it comes to hiring for their own interactive Web shops.

“You have to be creative, and you have to enjoy what you do. That’s hard to find,” said Gabe Aldridge, one of three principals with The SuperGroup, which operates out of an eclectic high-tech office in Inman Park.

It’s an ironic situation — a company that is hiring but can’t find the right people with ease — given that the state’s unemployment rate in November rose to 7.5 percent. But The SuperGroup’s owners place most of the weight on the “interactive” part of their work — and finding local talent with those skills is still tough, they said.

Though Atlanta is ripe with technology companies, it does not have the same cache as New York or San Francisco when it comes to cutting-edge interactive design companies. That limits the talent pool and the attractiveness for out-of-town recruits.

Joe Schab, a managing director for digital marketing company LBi, said finding highly skilled designers is problematic regardless of economic conditions.

“This industry is growing so rapidly,” Schab said. “We’re in a perpetual war for talent. We largely have not had difficulty in attracting really good people. That being said, we also know those people are in demand elsewhere.”

For entry- and mid-level jobs, Schab said LBi will look in Atlanta, mostly to keep recruiting and hiring costs lower. For senior-level jobs, the company will cast a wider net — New York or San Francisco, Dallas or Chicago — though it has filled some of those jobs with locals.

Chris Wallace, another principal with The SuperGroup, said “we have to scour the whole nation to find people, and sometimes the whole world.”

The firm, which has 15 employees, recently hired designers from Ecuador and Thailand.

“There’s difficulty in attracting talent,” Wallace said. “Atlanta isn’t known as an interactive hub.” But, his pitch to prospective employees is simple:

“‘Don’t move to New York. The place you want to work is here,’” Wallace said.

To hire, the Super Group bypasses corporate headhunters, who first look at someone’s education, skills and years of experience. High-techies may need not apply: Wallace went to art school, Aldridge has a degree in poetry and Brad Lewis, the third principal, is a theater major. All three play in bands.

“We don’t have one computer science major on the staff,” Lewis said. “We look for people who, if we weren’t employing them would be doing this stuff anyway. They eat, sleep and breathe it.”

They want people who can design an interactive Web site from a client’s request of nothing more than “do something cool.”

The firm’s recruiting tool instead is a Web site for the FWA: Favorite Website Awards, started in 2000 to showcase cutting-edge Internet sites. Wallace considers it the “creme de la creme of the interactive awards.” The winners are from the top 20 or 30 interactive agencies — the ones that designers want to work for, he said.

But that means the SuperGroup could compete against the likes of Razorfish, an interactive advertising firm owned by Microsoft.

Seattle-based Razorfish, which has a large office in Midtown Atlanta, employs more than 2,000 workers worldwide and has offices in every major city, including New York, San Francisco and Chicago.

Shannon Denton, senior vice president and general manager for the Atlanta office of Razorfish, says the cusp of innovation — people trying stuff that’s different — is in New York and San Francisco. He considers Atlanta to be a follower.

“After things have been tried a little bit, Atlanta will jump on the bandwagon,” Denton said. “It won’t be a leader.”

Razorfish vice president Scott McVay said the interactive design market in Atlanta was fragmented and lacked a major agency leader until about a year ago. That’s changing, he said.

“We’re having more and more success in finding qualified people here in Atlanta, and we’re finding it easier to bring people to Atlanta,” said McVay, who has lived here for eight years.

“The ideal person, if you think about the types of people we have, include people on the technology side, user-experience side, strategists. What we’re looking for is a person’s ability to truly understand customer needs and then translate that into an experience. That’s kind of a nuance trait.”

The economy continues to affect the industry but still offers opportunities for those with the qualifications.

LBi, which has 60 full-time employees in its Atlanta office, was “in a massive, massive hiring mode,” earlier this year, Schab said. That has stopped for a while, and business has slowed, but Schab said they haven’t faced the material slowdown that others have.

“Budgets are being reduced, clients wait longer to sign off on projects, and when they sign, the projects are smaller,” he said. But his view of 2009 is “pretty good” at least for the first half of the year.

Read “Web Warriors Wanted”

Each month DesignHide puts together relevant questions in the design industry today, and asks some of the most creative and insightful designers and design agencies to respond:

On your website you have a long and impressive list of clients, including household names likes Bud Light, Geico, Nestle, The Weather Channel, AOL, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, and Nascar… really, the list goes on and on! You started SuperGroup in 2002. Many creative companies have been at it for much longer and have hardly dreamed of such an impressive list of clients. Can you give us some insight into how TSG got where it is today?

It’s a complex mixture of strategy, guts, talent, determination and luck that have lead to us working with such great clients and great projects. But two things have been particularly impactful in our ability to secure great clients: The focus and expertise we offer in the field of new media, and an exceptionally high level of customer service.

Since many of the clients we want to work with already have primary agencies, we thought it was important to target these agencies as our customers, rather than the brands they represent. Many had in-house interactive departments, but very few agencies had the specialized abilities that we pride ourselves on.

On top of that, we know that our industry is very competitive, and so our clients really have to love working with us. It’s easy to convince yourself that the reason your clients choose you is because your work is leaps and bounds above everyone else, but the fact is it’s just not true; there’s a lot of talent out there. We’ve tried to distinguish ourselves from similar companies by simply being more attentive, and more willing to do “whatever it takes” to get the job done right. This, more so than anything else, is the reason why our clients continue to contact us when they need quality interactive work.

What were the most important steps that The SuperGroup took as a company in the first couple of years, while you were still building your portfolio, that enabled you to attract bigger clients?

Pretending to be bigger than we were. We call it the “David Bowie” approach: Pretend to be a huge rock star long before you actually are. Eventually, people believe you. We approached clients that most start-ups wouldn’t dream of pursuing. Most attempts failed of course (in fact, we hardly had any business at all in our first year), but slowly one by one clients took a chance on us because of the confidence we exhibited. Once our foot was in the door, we killed ourselves to over-deliver.

An issue that many small design companies face is the challenge of breaking out of their local community to find potentially “bigger fish.” What can less established firms do to sell themselves? How does one compete without already having a laundry list of name brands under their belt?

Spec work. Everyone hates it, but if your idea is good enough, clients don’t care if you’re a small fish. Sure, you run the risk of them saying, “Thanks for the great free work, we’ll let our real agency take it from here,” but the smart organizations will say, “Why aren’t we getting this kind of work from our current agency? Maybe we should switch.”

Your company has three primary focuses: interactive development, creative consulting, and graphic design. Are these services that you’ve offered from the beginning? Which has been the most integral to The SuperGroup’s growth?

We have always offered these services because they are three faces of the same deliverable. But, hands down the most lucrative and important of these is creative consulting; the idea is king. Since the beginning of The SuperGroup, we wanted to be thinkers, not just doers.

Another difficulty that many design companies face is working out the legal and logistical complications often associated with partnerships. The creative realm is especially predisposed to partnerships, but in fact many “partners” concede that they have no real plan or legal documents for their arrangement. Has TSG faced challenges in this regard, being that you were founded by three partners? If you were going to do it all again with the knowledge you have now, do you think there would have been times when having one guy in charge would have benefited the company?

Having three partners (me, Brad Lewis, Gabe Aldridge) has been a huge benefit for The SuperGroup because we followed the cardinal rule of partnership: each of us brings unique and valuable assets to the table. All too often, service-based companies are started by partners who do virtually the same thing, which is a recipe for resentment and disaster. Having three partners has allowed TSG to be a full service shop from the very beginning, splitting the varied responsibilities of running the company between uniquely qualified individuals.

On the news lately, and especially during the recent election, there has been lots of talk about the evils of Wall Street and the humble, hardworking people of Main Street. As a small to midsize business, have you been effected by the crisis and in what ways?

Everyone is nervous about the economy, and when people are nervous, they hang on to their wallets. The same is true of our clients, but luckily our services are a frugal alternative to more expensive marketing mediums (print/radio/television). We don’t see the clouds of doom on the horizon, but we are taking steps to ensure that expenses are closely watched, and sales efforts are strong. We think that as long as we’re offering a valuable service, customers will always be there.

As far as politics are concerned, I firmly believe that small businesses and businesses in general should be taxed less, not more. Tax the hell out of capitol gains and personal income tax if you must, but taxing business does nothing but drive up the cost of goods and services, and eliminate jobs. As an owner of a small business, I use profits to plan for growth, particularly in the form of new hires – as Uncle Sam takes more of those profits away, that means fewer jobs and slower growth.

Is a weak economy going to hurt design agencies any more or any less than everyone else?

It’s hard to tell. On one hand, “intangible” creative services are often the first to be slashed from the budget. On the other, as consumer spending decreases, companies have to spend more in advertising and marketing efforts to win those dollars. The trick is simply to make sure that as companies cut back their spending, your services are so valuable that they cut from somewhere else.

Companies of all types are inventing new ways to get their message and their brand in front of people. Whether it is ‘flip-book’ type ads on subway walls, energy drinks being distributed by way of Mini Cooper, or in your case, a social networking website for Bud Light. Turning to the creative side, what do you see as the next trendy way to market products?

In regards to the world of interactive, information and content are flowing more and more freely from one source to another. Some companies are fighting this trend tooth and nail through strict DRM, and others are adopting the “open source” model. The latter is absolutely the correct course of action, as DRM is a battle against the very consumers that they rely upon, waged with weapons that degrade the quality of their product. The more forward-thinking companies realize that information and content can’t be controlled, and therefore can’t be sold, so they invest their efforts in alternative revenue streams.

I foresee a future where all sorts of rich content is available for free, while being brought to you by a corporate sponsor. Music, television, movies, and games will be available free of charge courtesy of your friends at the _____ company. Just as corporations pay big bucks for celebrity endorsements, they will one day pay huge fees to be aligned with quality content – more than enough to make up for the fact that nobody’s selling CDs anymore. So don’t be surprised if the next RadioHead album is titled “Hot Pockets.”

Stretching it out even further, what role will an agency like The SuperGroup play in 10 or 15 years? Does it look anything like today?

Interactive changes at the speed of thought. Literally every moment of every day, interactive technology is adapting and improving. What it will look like in 10 to 15 years is hard to say, but what’s certain is that demand for interactive services will be stronger than ever. It’s not a question of whether or not interactive will be the dominant marketing medium, it’s a question of which mediums won’t be in some way interactive. As we move in that direction, The SuperGroup’s desire is to simply be at the forefront – creating the projects that push the boundaries and changing the perception of what’s possible.

Read “Designer Spotlight: The SuperGroup”

26. Offer employee benefits. The SuperGroup, an Atlanta creative agency, covered health insurance premiums starting with its first employee. Now the $3 million company’s 12 employees receive paid health, vision and dental insurance, as well as an annual company retreat and an hour break each day (in addition to lunch) to do something creative outside of their jobs. “In our industry, we sell our talent,” says Chris Wallace, 28, who co-owns the company with Gabe Aldridge, 34, and Brad Lewis, 37. “We need to do everything we possibly can to attract and keep the right people.”

Since its founding in 2002, the company has only fired one person and no one has ever quit, says Wallace. Part of the benefits that TheSuperGroup offers is its office culture: Once the business started making money, the founders invested in a cool office, complete with a big-screen TV and classic games like Battlezone and Tron. Senior employees also enjoy profit-sharing perks, says Wallace.

27. Pay up. In the beginning, Wallace says that he, Aldridge and Lewis drew straws to see who would have to learn Quickbooks and manage payroll. Lewis lost and had been the keeper of paychecks until last year, when the trio decided that his time would be better spent on management issues instead of cutting paychecks. They recently hired a payroll firm, which decreases their liability. Most payroll firms ensure that taxes are paid in a timely manner, eliminating the possibility of liability due to missed tax payments. That wasn’t an issue for TheSuperGroup, but it’s one less thing the partners have to do themselves, says Wallace. “It gets to a point where you say, ‘I think we could make more money if you took the time you put toward payroll and put it to other things.’ That’s the time to let go of the reins.

36. Connect online. As the co-owner of an interactive marketing agency, Wallace knows the importance of a good website. He and his colleagues devote a great deal of time to building the site, keeping it updated and optimizing it for search engines. “We want to make sure that when someone types in ‘Atlanta’ and ‘digital agency,’ we come up,” he says. “That’s someone who’s already interested in what we do.”

50. Live your dream. Taking on the demands of a startup requires a mind-boggling mix of smarts, flexibility, stamina, endurance, tenacity and humor. But at the end of the day, experts and entrepreneurs all agree on one thing: It’s worth it. “We started so we could work at a place that was ideal,” says Wallace. “We try to extend that philosophy to all our employees. And we try not to make the office synonymous with pain and suffering. I genuinely­­­­­ feel like most people feel privileged to work here, and so do we.”

Read “50 Steps to a Startup Success”

Click play to listen to Phil Leigh’s interview as described below (Chris Wallace, pictured left):

“Sales of recorded music in the United States are now about 30% lower than when Shawn Fanning introduced Napster in 1999. Sales in the physical form (e.g. CDs) are down by nearly half. There is little doubt that the Internet has been a “game changer” for the record label business. In this audio program we explore a couple of ways that the Internet can add revenues. One is already generating more money for the industry and promoting new artists. The second appears to be an idea whose time has come. The first example is Internet radio whose potential was amplified recently by the 3G-iPhone and Apple’s iPhone Apps Store. Our first interview is with Tim Westergren who is the founder of Pandora (Internet Radio). Tim reports that iPhone downloads of Pandora software have nearly doubled the number of new subscribers daily.

Moreover, Pandora enables listeners to buy tracks with the “push of a button” and Tim notes that they are one of the top affiliates for download stores like iTunes and Amazon. Pandora engaged a 3rd party research firm to investigate the buying habits of its listeners and discovered that 40% are buying more music than before joining the service and only 1% are buying less. Finally, unlike the broadcast radio stations, Internet radio pays mandatory royalties to the record labels.

Confessedly, Pandora also announced that the royalties that it pays the record labels are too high. About $17 million of the company’s total annual revenues of $25 million are used to pay such royalties. However, the impact of the iPhone apps store is changing the whole conversation about Internet radio. There are two ways to solve the problem.

First, the labels can agree to accept lower royalty rates. Second, Pandora can seek incremental revenues by utilizing more advertising. My guess is that the likely solution will involve a combination of the two.

The second new way to get paid for music stems from our interview with Chris Wallace of The Super Group. His company is a website design and construction firm that specializes in providing interactive tools designed to engage website visitors. I contacted Chris because I read an article in The Wall Street Journal about his management policies.

He permits employees to work of projects of their own during “downtime”. Although The Super Group retains the rights to the work product, employees appreciate the opportunity to pursue their passions on company time. When they work on personal projects, Chris feels they tend to be extraordinarily productive.

For example, in a recent contract with The Weather Channel, Chris’ company created an interactive animation tool that website visitors can personalize and send to friends and family. The background audio was music composed by one of The Super Group employees during his office “downtime”. Thus, wherever the animation gets sent on the Net, so also does the music.

Chris and I explore ideas for creating interactive animations that might apply to musicians and an associated advertising sponsor. For example, an Indiana Jones animated game might contain background music of John Williams, thereby generating revenues for both the Indiana Jones trademark as well as John Williams’ music. Coke or Pepsi might, hypothetically, sponsor the game much like Dr. Pepper seeks identity with Jones by placing images on individual bottles.”

Web-Design Firm Uses Projects Employees Pursue in Their Spare Time at Work to Help Win New Business.

In its early days, Chris Wallace’s company didn’t always have enough work to keep its staff fully occupied designing interactive Web sites for clients. But it didn’t want to lose any talent. So he and his co-founders decided to tell employees they could pursue their own interests in their downtime, doing just about whatever they wanted, on the clock.

An unexpected side benefit emerged. Employees spent some of their spare time writing music and building photography and video skills. When the company needed ideas to pitch to potential clients, it tapped into employees’ personal projects. Mr. Wallace says he has had meetings with potential clients where 40% of the work he showed them was done by employees in their downtime.

His company, SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia Inc., has grown to 15 employees and expects to post close to $3 million in revenue this year. These days, downtime is less frequent. But management’s philosophy is the same: As long as employees get their work done, they’re free to pursue outside projects from their cubicles. The company continues to lean on employees’ personal projects to help win new clients and expand the work it does with existing clients.

The model works, Mr. Wallace says, because of the company’s small size and collegial atmosphere. Most people in SuperGroup’s Atlanta headquarters know what their colleagues are working on in their personal lives. Twice a week, the whole staff gathers to discuss both company business and personal projects. “A larger organization wouldn’t have that intimate knowledge,” says Mr. Wallace, who is the company’s director of technology.

That knowledge proved handy last year, when the Weather Channel approached SuperGroup about putting together an interactive Web site to promote its winter ski forecasts. SuperGroup employees insisted they could write and produce the music on the site, but Weather Channel executives “were hesitant,” Mr. Wallace says, because that wasn’t an area where SuperGroup had a lot of experience.

To prove its abilities, Mr. Wallace presented the Weather Channel team with a CD of employees’ original music — and won the business. SuperGroup wrote all of the music for the project.

For employees, the cross-pollination between their work and their personal lives can be an opportunity to turn a hobby into a line on their resume — and an ego boost. “I jumped at the chance to put my music out in front of anybody,” says Elliott Rothman, a SuperGroup Web developer. Music he wrote and his guitar playing were used in the Weather Channel project.

On average, employees spend about a half-day each week working on outside pursuits. Mr. Wallace says occasionally employees have to be reminded that clients come first and they need to drop what they’re doing if a client has an urgent request.

Mr. Wallace is careful to weed out potential hires who seem to thrive on a more regimented structure. For the most part, he says, granting employees more freedom engenders loyalty and hard work. Employees tend to “come in early and stay late.”

Read “Tapping the Creativity of Downtime”