WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) - Daniel Baird has his fingers in a lot of different areas, but marketing is front and center in all he does at his company, Freedom Creative Solutions in Winston-Salem.
Freedom Creative Solutions recently won the Truliant Small Business Award from the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce. The award was sponsored by Truliant Federal Credit Union.
Jill Atherton, the chamber’s vice president of economic and community development, said that winners of the award are judged on the mission and vision of their company, community contributions, how they handle business hurdles, and their business growth, among other things.
“We were all pretty excited to be recognized like that,” Baird said. “It’s quite an honor. Something we’ve been working towards is to be a complete business, a business who can help a wide variety of people. We like being active in the community.”
He said that his company works with various nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity of Forsyth County and the Children’s Home.
“We try to provide them with affordable services,” Baird said. “We routinely give nonprofits a discount and also donate printing or wide format - whatever services we can.”
Baird started his company in 2002 with his sister, Elizabeth Barnette, in a small spare bedroom in their parents’ house in Walkertown. In those early days, the business was known as Freedom Mailing and was a small direct-mail business.
The company incorporated in 2004 and moved to Walkertown shopping center. Baird bought out his sister’s part of the business in 2008 and hired his first full-time employee - a graphic designer - the following year.
In 2010, he hired a full-time web developer and changed the company’s name to Freedom Creative Solutions. In 2011, the business moved to its current location at 427 West End Blvd., near the Snob Consignment Shop, in Winston-Salem.
“I wanted to be downtown,” Baird said.
Today, Freedom Creative Solutions is a multi-faceted marketing company with six full-time employees. The company provides marketing products and service to other businesses. In addition to direct mail, the company offers wide-format and digital-production printing, including vehicle wraps, banners, signs, posters, business cards and flyers. The company also provides graphic design and web design services, and has started shooting and editing videos for customers.
“All of them have the common theme of marketing and trying to help small and mid-sized businesses grow,” said Baird who is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University and has a background in marketing.
He said that it’s always cool to walk around Winston-Salem and other places in the Triad and see his company’s work.
Freedom Creative Solutions’ clients also include large businesses and nonprofit organizations.
“One of our longest-term accounts has been Forsyth Tech,” Baird said. “We’ve been working with them over a decade.”
The City of Winston-Salem has used Freedom Creative Solutions’ services since the early 2000s, said Ed McNeal, the city’s director of marketing and communications.
McNeal that that Baird is one of the first people the city calls for print, graphic and direct-mail projects.
“He has always done a really good job for use and (provided) great customer service,” McNeal said.
Baird said that the company’s sales rose 65 percent in 2014 over 2013.
Four years ago, 75 percent of Freedom Creative Solutions’ services were direct mail, but now that side of the business accounts for 30 percent of the company’s sales. Now, wide-format and regular, digital production printing account for the bulk of the company’s business, and web design is a fast-growing division.
But Baird said he has seen resurgence in direct-mail requests from clients.
When the Internet got its start, a lot of nonprofit organizations and companies used it to email newsletters and other correspondence to save money, he said.
“But they found that for fundraising, it just wasn’t the same as sending somebody a letter in an envelope with a response envelope,” Baird said.
First, he noticed nonprofits going back to direct mail, and now businesses are considering direct mail because of spam blockers and other reasons.
Baird gave several reasons for his company’s success.
“One thing that helps us is we concentrate on design and the products, not just the products,” he said. “Often times, those two things are split up. Usually, you have a design company and then you have a company that produces the prints. I thought it would be more effective if we incorporated those two things together.”
Jason Kercheval, a graphic designer for Freedom Creative Solutions, has found it helpful to work on a project from start to finish - creating a logo from nothing at a computer, printing it out, applying it to a substrate and then handing it to a customer.
“As a designer, being able to be part of every step of that is cool,” Kercheval said.
Baird also said that his company has benefited from investing in modern technology and providing custom marketing services for customers.
“Every company and person has different needs,” he said. “I want to provide for them what’s going to work best for their business or nonprofit.”
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Information from: Winston-Salem Journal, https://www.journalnow.com
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