Wier/Stewart, one of Augusta’s flagship marketing firms, recently announced several internal promotions and an update on expansion efforts, including a future branch in Atlanta.
“We are hoping to open a physical office in Atlanta at some point,” said Daniel Stewart, president and chief operating officer of Wier/Stewart. “It will give us sort of a home base for recruiting, client meetings, things like that. Nothing is set in stone at the moment, but that is the goal. We’d love for that to take place this year.”
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W/S already has Group Director Christina Tucker and Production Lead Robbie Jordan working in Atlanta.
During the pandemic, W/S employees had to adapt to the challenges of working remotely. Instead of setting the company back, the change allowed team members to come up with better ways to serve clients.
“When it comes down to it, remote work is possible,” Stewart said. “We don’t like it as much because we like the atmosphere we’ve created in person with our team.”
Stewart said during renovations to the W/S offices in 2019, the team rented out space in the Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau building to still work together in person.
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“Looking back, we all could have gone remote for six to eight months and been fine,” Stewart said. “A big part of your relationship as a creative firm is the physical interaction with clients. But we’ve learned that even with our Augusta clients, we can meet more often via Zoom. It increases the amount we see our clients because they’re not always traveling to our office.”
The virtual aspect has made life easier overall for W/S, but daily challenges still exist.
“Everything we do is a custom solution for our clients. There’s no off-the-shelf recommendation or ‘gold, silver, or bronze package’ for our clients,” he said. “That can make scaling difficult because you’re always starting new. You have new clients with completely different goals and challenges.”
Stewart said the overall goal for the firm isn’t to get huge or double in size but to become more meaningful to its clients. That’s the reason for expanding the services offered from just graphic design in the beginning to social media management, central advertising and more.
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“It’s all about thoughtful, custom solutions for our clients,” Stewart said. “We haven’t taken our own advice very much over the years. We haven’t done a lot of outbound marketing for ourselves. It’s all opportunity for us going forward.”
Learn more about past and present projects from Wier/Stewart at wierstewart.com.
Tyler Strong is the Business Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at tyler@theaugustapress.com.
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