Lanmark360 | 2018

Lanmark360 celebrated its 40th birthday in 2017, which prompted the agency to look back and forward. The look-back part came in the form of reinforcing ties with its longest-standing clients, while the look-forward component found the agency focused on growing its team of developers.

Lanmark president Howard Klein put out a call for top talent, dispatching the agency’s lead developer to the technology hotbed of Austin. There, he built out a new software development team.

“One of the things we got heavily into in the past few years is software development,” Klein notes. “Building out the team allows us to meet the changing needs of our clients.” He adds such work requires a different mindset from the more traditional type of assignments it usually handles, but reports Lanmark “met that challenge head-on.”

The firm enjoyed another year of steady growth in 2017, during which revenue jumped 7.1% to $10.5 million. It grew by five staffers and added two new roles: a director of advocacy and a strategic business development post.

While Klein is happy with the firm’s recent performance, he concedes Lanmark “worked very hard for minimal growth.” The agency added two clients in 2017: Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Amabrush, a maker of automatic toothbrushes that launched on Kickstarter. The agency lost two others, specialty chemical firm Kuraray America and fitness program The Max Challenge.

That jibes with a trend Klein has noticed: Clients moving a greater share of their work in-house or pursuing project relationships. “It’s always been challenging for us to take on smaller projects and still be competitive in price and be able to compete with smaller agencies and in-house resources,” he explains.

To combat that trend, Lanmark developed a service dubbed 360Pop. Klein says the offering provides “a streamlined workflow to accommodate the smaller-scale projects that in the past were more challenging for us to take on.”

Lanmark’s legacy is in the dental world. To better serve one of its major clients, dental equipment manufacturer Dentsply Sirona, the firm opened a satellite office in Charlotte, North Carolina, last year. “We will never lose sight of dental,” Klein promises.For 2018, he expects Lanmark to continue to pursue more digital work, including further experimentation with tactics such as VR. He also views rare diseases as a potential area for growth.