Near the end of the telephone interview, Fathom CEO Scot Lowry stops in mid-sentence.
“Sorry,” he explains. “The reason I just hesitated is that we have a gong in our big training room, and every time we get a new customer, somebody rings it. Somebody just rang it.”
By all indications, that gong has been going off regularly. The Valley View online marketing firm, which traces its roots to 1997, was named the second fastest-growing company in Cleveland in 2010, based on 2009 revenues, by the Weatherhead 100.
Lowry says that growth has come because
Fathom gives customers what many online marketing firms do not: a clear indication of how marketing solutions result in revenue and return on investment.
Fathom, on the other hand, tracks both and reports it to the client. At the top of Fathom’s home page is a line that keeps a running tally of how much revenue Fathom has generated for its customers. As of Sept. 7, the year-to-date total was $147,243,733.
“Most of the companies that come to us don’t know how to turn the online channel into revenue,” Lowry says. Further, he says, most online marketing companies don’t know how to translate what they do in terms of revenue to the customer.
Instead, they tend to focus on SEO (search engine optimization) or traffic to web pages -- which Lowry says is not an indication of how many deals resulted or how many sales were made.
Fathom grew from a small web development firm called Vendor Tech, which eventually merged with IT consulting firm Fathom IT in 2004. The next year, after e-mail distribution and pay-per-click management services were added, the company spun off Fathom SEO. In 2006, Fathom SEO added video production and marketing services and built a recording studio.
As a comprehensive online marketing firm, the SEO tag no longer defined the company, Lowry says.
“Today we have an incredibly powerful array of capabilities, and we dropped SEO from the company name because of that,” he says. “And we’ve been in the process of communicating to the world that SEO isn’t enough. You’ve got to look at a complete matrix approach at using all forms of online (marketing). And that isn’t based on what we have, it’s based on what the client needs.”
The flagship product is called Your Top Salesperson, described as a “complete, fully customizable online marketing service that delivers results that matter to your business.”
Employment has followed revenues. With only 20 employees five years ago, the company now has 130 -- 20 of them coming from the recent acquisition of Columbus-based
Webbed Marketing, which provides complementary services and has deep expertise in social media.
Lowry says Fathom is hiring, with 12 open spots at present.
Source: Scot Lowry, Fathom
Writer: Gene Monteith