When Josh Fendley and four tech-savvy friends left their digital agency to launch a smaller venture, they were looking for a business name that would convey their small staff’s concentrated experience.
Ample fit the bill, and is still a point of pride because one of the firm’s selling points is its size.
"Clients realize that if I’m the one selling them on doing the work, they’re going to be working with me the entire time if they choose to engage us," Fendley says. "When we left our last agency, we were all directors of this and that, but decided we wanted to get back to doing work instead of just managing it."
Fendley says the trick of being small is to carefully select experienced employees, with an eye to maintaining company culture. “We have only one relatively young employee, and we belabored on whether or not we should do that,” he says.
Recently, Ample has been pivoting away from marketing to focus on building websites and developing strategic, creative digital projects, including video and websites that easily scale down desktop applications for mobile interfaces and apps.
"All the sites we create automatically scale and reformat," Fendley says. "Not a lot of people are actually doing that."
Ample also developed its own content management system.
Along with size and experience, Ample’s culture is shaped by its brainy core. "We love being presented with something we don’t know how to get through. We love to figure out how to do it," Fendley says.
Ample is primarily a Ruby on Rails shop, but also offers help with strategic planning.
So, when Ample got a call from a New Jersey nonprofit seeking to outfit students with disabilities with human-read audio books, its developers created an iTunes-like app compatible with a variety of devices.
"A lot of our long-time clients pay us to think for them, and I think that’s where we’re most successful,” Fendley says, noting that new business largely comes from referrals, and the team is turning away prospective clients.“Clients are your best salespeople. If you do well by them, them will typically give you some good karma back."
By Robin Donovan