We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Randall Huft. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Randall below.

Randall, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One deeply underappreciated facet of entrepreneurship is the kind of crazy stuff we have to deal with as business owners. Sometimes it’s crazy positive sometimes it’s crazy negative, but crazy experiences unite entrepreneurs regardless of industry. Can you share a crazy story with our readers?

I was directing a television commercial for a small, family owned nursery. Our concept was to highlight the distinction that unlike the big corporate competitors, this nursery was “family owned.”

So I wrote a script that called for several members of the family to speak on camera and talk about their business..

It was a disaster.

They couldn’t remember their lines, they spoke out of order, the children were running around… it was an utter failure.

Then I had an idea… I told the cameraman to start rolling on their “rehearsals” and chatter and arguing..

While the family was sorting out who said what and when, we were capturing the scene on video, and I thought I could piece together a fun commercial that told the story we wanted to tell, using the outtakes.

In the editing booth, my editor and I put together little snippets of the outtakes that actually not only got in all the information we wanted to convey, but also showed the family as sweet, loving, imperfect, and real.

The commercial won an ADDY award as Best Commercial of the Year, and then went on to win “Best of Show.” It was quite an honor to receive that award for a piece of work that seemed like it was headed for failure, but out of the ashes, came a beautiful story and a wonderful bit of advertising.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We provide marketing, branding, advertising and communications. The subsets of those include: Television and radio commercials, magazine ads, brochures and collateral, social media, logo design, websites and SEO, public relations, online advertising, and more.

We’ve had the honor of working with some of the biggest and best known companies in the world, including: AT&T, United Airlines, Avis Car Rental, Winchell’s Donuts, Loews Hotels, Toyota, IBM, Nestle’s, Walgreen’s, and The Walt Disney Company.

Our work is imaginative and effective. We specialize in keeping advertising and marketing costs low, so that every campaign delivers a superb ROI.

We often hear that our work produces the best results our customer has ever seen, which is probably why some of our clients have been with us for decades… a rarity in the ad world.

Equally (if not more) important, we are nice people and easy to work with. Our clients become our friends, and we treasure those relationships.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

When Kia Motors first came to America, their offices were right next door to ours. We kept sending them little reminders that there was an ad agency right next door and that we would love to work with them.

One day, we had the bright idea to put a sign on their entrance door saying something to the effect of: “Come see your new advertising agency” and we drew chalk footprints from their office, across the parking lot, to our office.

We thought we were so creative that they would have to respond. So we waited for their call. And waited. And waited.

Finally, we couldn’t wait any longer, so we called their office. We asked the receptionist if they saw our cute message. She said we couldn’t have picked a worse time to pull that stunt. Apparently, the chief executives from Korea were in town for a visit, along with their advertising agency. We heard that the Kia executives had to apologize to their existing agency and assure them that they hadn’t made a switch and weren’t even considering one,

It ended with a, “don’t call us, we’ll call you” type of message… exactly the opposite of what we were intending.

Years later, I did some work for both Kia and Hyundai, but never revealed that I was the same guy behind that stunt. I guess that cat is now out of the bag!

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

We had some tough times and learned some difficult lessons early on. We used to purchase media on behalf of our clients, and pay the media outlets (like radio or television stations), and then bill our clients. However, we had several clients stop paying their media bills – one of them even went bankrupt – and we were stuck with the bills. And they weren’t small.

Today, we don’t extend credit to anyone. If our client needs a loan, we suggest going to a bank. We aren’t a lending institution, we are a marketing and advertising agency. If that costs us some business, then those probably weren’t the right clients for us to begin with.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.inov8.us
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InnovationMarketingCommunications
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/theinnovationagency