We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stu Swineford a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Stu, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.

For years, we were a 1% for the Planet Partner and still align with their objective to gain traction and drive donations to nonprofits with an environmental focus. A couple of years ago, we moved away from 1% in order to gain a bit more control over the organizations to which we donate regularly. We still support environmental causes and have been supporting a variety of organizations who do great work in the environmental space since our inception. We are currently supporting the work of the Nederland Area Trails Organization and Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado by serving on NATO’s Board, providing pro-bono support for their marketing, and volunteering on trail projects for both organizations.

Stu, 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 stumbled into marketing in the early 90s when I was working as a salesperson at one of the top-3 catalog bike companies in the US. One day, the owner invited me to go on a lunch ride. I immediately thought, “Well, that’s a strange way to fire someone,” and joined him. He suggested my background would make me a good candidate to help write copy for the organization and I jumped at the chance to help out. (I’m a helper, at heart.)

About 6 weeks later, with an upcoming deadline to get a catalog shipped, the graphic artist working on that project resigned – effective immediately. Since I knew how to turn on the Mac, I volunteered to take over production of the catalog – finding myself promoted to Marketing Director at the tender age of 23.

I worked for this company for several more years before taking a series of new opportunities that allowed me to serve in pretty much every role in the digital marketing space over the next several years. Eventually, I figured I could probably work out how to do all of this myself, launched a small development agency with a partner in 2007 that we rolled into Relish Studio in 2008.

I’d be the last to suggest that my progression was linear, but 16+ years later and Relish is still going strong.

At Relish, we like to say, “We help good people do great things through digital marketing.”

We see marketing as relationship-building at scale. Though your organization may be B2B, you are always working with people. If you treat every interaction as an opportunity to expand and nurture a relationship, you’ll come out on top.

Our bread and butter at Relish is helping business leaders cut through the complexity and frustration they are feeling with their marketing. We start with creating a plan – putting strategy before tactics – to ensure everyone on their team has an understanding with where we are going, so we can all row in the same direction.

From strategy, Relish provides a variety of services including website design and development (we specialize in WordPress and Duda websites), content marketing, and marketing consulting services (we serve our clients as their Fractional CMO).

Have you ever had to pivot?

Pivots are a part of life. I believe very strongly that the only constant is change and we all need to be flexible enough to not break when the winds of change are raging.

We’re experiencing a huge shift in the marketing space right now with AI. It’s an interesting time in marketing for sure, and we believe that AI is a valuable tool that can be used to help with ideation, data processing, and much more. And we’re confident it will only get better over time.

One of the reasons I love marketing is that it’s always changing. When I started, the internet was in its infancy. Marketing was all about print, TV, radio… I built my first website in 1995 and have seen remarkable changes in how organizations can get their message out there over the past 30+ years. It’s exciting to be able to consistently learn new things every day.

The world is going to continue to change. What we think of as cutting-edge marketing now will be old-school in just a few years. With marketing, you can’t be resistant to change. It’s part of the game.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I love helping people. Whether that’s making an introduction, listening to the challenges they are facing, or building out their online presence to help them build relationships online – any day during which I can provide assistance to another person is a winner.

I set a goal quite some time ago to be able to donate $1M to a single charity at some point in my life. I amended that goal several years ago to have a larger, ongoing positive affect on the non-profit world – to help get 20 nonprofit organizations to $2M/year in recurring revenue.

I’ve not yet reached either goal, but they are what drive my desire to help others and keep moving forward in the creative space.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://relishstudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/relishcolorado/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RelishStudio
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/sswineford
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Relishstudio
• Other: http://www.linkedin.com/company/relish-studio
  https://relishthis.org
  https://goo.gl/maps/t2XiJ6CosB52
  https://www.pinterest.com/relishstudio/