ROYAL OAK – Airfoil Public Relations, after a decade in the Southfield Town Center, will be moving to new custom-built offices in Royal Oak in January. The move is part cost-cutting, part culture-creating.
The cost cutting part is Airfoil recovering from the loss of about 20 percent of its billables when long-time client Microsoft Enterprise Product Group ceased to be part of the Seattle software giant’s long-term plans.
The culture-creating part is founder and CEO Lisa Vallee-Smith’s efforts to provide her staff of 50 with the opportunity to foster creativity and to leverage a fresh perspective, she said. The new Airfoil Royal Oak headquarters is in the Main North building at the corner of 11 Mile Road and Main Street.
“Our lease at the Town Center was up,” Vallee-Smith said. “We were looking for efficiency and cutting costs. The same thing in California.”
Airfoil’s Northern California office was moved over the summer from Sunnyvale to downtown San Jose.
“Sunnyvale four years ago was up-and-coming, but affordable,” he said. “Now it has become very expensive. But San Jose has become a magnet for both large employers and small businesses. It’s also more conducive to recruiting new employees from San Jose State University.”
Airfoil has six employees in San Jose and also one in New York City to service the new WorkWave (previously Marathon Data Systems) account. WorkWave provides integrated services to mobile workforce companies in the field service, transportation and logistics industries.
Airfoil also announced a week ago that it has added four other new clients that will replace hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue lost when the Microsoft business left. The other new clients include:
Ambassador – a referral marketing platform that helps enterprise companies track, manage and analyze referrals.
NH Learning Solutions – a network of 17 Centers across 10 Midwestern and Northeastern states, including Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.
Automation Alley – a technology business association and start-up accelerator working to grow the Southeast Michigan economy.
Glance Networks – delivers a personalized customer service experience for 3,000 healthcare, financial services, technology, SaaS, retail and travel and leisure organizations.
“We won’t realize that new revenue until next year,” Vallee-Smith said. “Our fiscal year starts in January. Our folks are going for renewals now.”
She said Airfoil’s revenue for 2016 will probably remain flat over this year. The head count isn’t projected to rise, at least through the first quarter, Vallee-Smith said. Still, Airfoil will probably open an account position in either Michigan or California sometime in the new year.
“Other than that we have no plans to do any significant hiring through the first quarter of next year,” Vallee-Smith said.
For more information click on www.airfoilgroup.com.
