We recently connected with Scott Kaufmann and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Scott, thanks for joining us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

Very soon after launching Highnoon, we established employee-lead committees for things that mattered to us – like food insecurity, animal welfare, youth education, etc. And those have thrived. We’ve had book drives, blood drives, planted trees, cleaned up trash, had pet hugging day and sustainability training. We also decided to play match-maker for our staff – helping those that want to help, find organizations where they could lend their talents. Amazingly, nearly every team member at the agency indicated interest in volunteerism. We’ve been able to connect and help dozens of team members find organizations they are passionate about – and we provide paid time off, in the middle of the work day, to support their philanthropic activities. There are some great quotes from team members about their volunteerism in this article on our blog: https://highnoon.co/blog/why-we-volunteer

Scott, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up collecting absolute vodka ads because I thought they were clever and artistically done. And in general, I thought advertising was just cool. It looked like an opportunity to think in new ways, and tell a story that hadn’t been told in a certain way before. But I was also a computer nerd. I spent nights putting together computers, learning to code and figuring out the early versions of the internet (BBS’s, AOL, Prodigy…). I then majored in Finance and Marketing. Fast forward to the end of college, and there was a new industry that was based on the things I loved – advertising, art, finance and computers. So I got into digital advertising. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but this seemed to check a lot of boxes, and that’s about as far as my thinking went at the time. Fast forward a couple decades and i’m running Highnoon. Highnoon is a full-service marketing and advertising agency, working with some pretty incredible national brands, and we’re thrilled to be one of the larger and fastest growing agencies on this side of the US. Our mission is to help organizations who have bold visions realize those to become remarkable.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We launched Highnoon in February of 2020. Launching a new marketing agency, weeks before the COVID shutdowns started in the US, might seem less than ideal. And in many ways it was difficult. We had to transition to remote work, we had to work with clients who were nervous about the future and still needed to produce results, we had to manage costs and try our best to keep employees engaged and morale high during a challenging period. But, despite all of that, I feel very fortunate. We developed very scalable processes and systems for many things, albeit on a compressed timeline. We have great clients and they were patient and worked well with our team. We continued to upend the norm for many of the areas we service, and despite an initial dip, we rebounded stronger than ever.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

In my former company, we were fairly small at the time – less than 10 people if my memory serves me correctly. We had been talking to an organization about working with us. I wont mention that organizations name, but they are the largest in their field and known nationally (globally, really). They called us and said they had made the choice to go with another agency. I felt deflated. But my partner didn’t. He called them back and told them they were making a mistake, explained his rationale, and asked for a single in-person meeting to discuss. They reluctantly obliged. I figured it was because they felt bad for us. We went there, talked through everything, revised our proposal, and were selected in the end. We worked with them for over 5 years with tremendous success in nearly every initiative. I learned a lesson from him, which is that it isn’t over, until it’s over.

Contact Info:

• Website: highnoon.co
• Instagram: instagram.com/meethighnoon/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meethighnoon/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/31409496/admin/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/meethighnoon

Image Credits
© Highnoon 2020-2022