We recently connected with Chris Wizner and have shared our conversation below.

Chris, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

Covid was the a huge point of change for our marketing agency. We always dreamed of a day pre-covid where clients would adopt virtual meeting technology and work remote situations. Before covid, we would lose deals if we could only meet virtually and after covid more than 50% of our deals are made on virtual meetings. Sometimes we never meet the client in real life ever and other times we’ve met them years later. Additionally our team used to be limited to local within a 30-60 minute drive from our Malibu headquarters which made finding good talent extremely challenging and after Covid we were able to hire remote employees from anywhere in the world and work seamlessly with them. Covid also forced us to innovate and improve everything about working remote including creative ways to do team building, regular meetings to cover accounts and more. Overall going to a hybrid model of remote first has been one of the most successful milestone changes we have ever made.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I grew up in the 90’s watching Melrose Place, a cool TV show about young executives working at an advertising agency and always thought that looked fun and exciting! Flash forward 24 years, I went down that path and have a team of nearly 30 creatives doing launching full marketing campaigns for a variety of dream clients. It took an immense amount of determination and grit to achieve this dream which began at age 16 with my first paycheck from Taco Bell that i used to purchase the first computer tower that I launched my marketing agency with. A few years later I got a scholarship from the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce for my business and attended Santa Monica City College. After 4 F’s and 2 A’s in advertising and contract law, I dropped out and pursued my marketing agency dream to it’s fullest potential without ever looking back. All this time later, I was recognized as a star pupil and face of a bond measure political campaign in 2022 for Santa Monica City College. I took an extraordinary path and approach, but I always followed my passion and stayed laser focus.

Vivid Candi today is beyond my wildest dreams when I began. We have the most incredible team of exuberant creatives executing full service marketing & advertising campaigns for amazing clients all across the country including many restaurants, hotels, movies and more. Our agency is “360” meaning we can execute every single part of any marketing strategy we develop for our clients in a seamless and streamlined way.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2012 our marketing agency was really more focused on website development which was our top source of revenue. There was a big shift in the marketplace with DIY websites like SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify and many more coming out which certainly hurt out business. We could have kept fighting that uphill battle, but instead we made a major pivot toward marketing starting with social media marketing. In just a few years, marketing revenue began to our perform our website design revenue which ultimately led us gong “all in” on rebranding as a marketing agency which ironically was always the vision going back to that show Melrose Place that influenced us. That pivot was a milestone in our journey that ultimately led to the fastest most sustained growth we ever saw.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

In 2008 the economy was crashing and in a blink of an eye we had over $250k of past due receivables. We quickly learned that clients felt a domino effect from the economy and simply decided to pay vital vendors like rent vs services like ours. This put us greatly behind and forced me to save the company by lending it $55k from my own savings. Sadly, that money never came back and the lesson learned was to make the tough decisions and cut payroll and staff if your numbers tell you to do so vs hoping things will magically get better.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vividcandi.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vividcandi
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wizner-56911715/