In college, Brandon Dempsey had an idea for a consulting company that would teach managers how to manage people they couldn’t see. This company ended up building work from home programs for large companies like Mastercard, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Progressive Insurance just as broadband was hitting people’s homes.
Dempsey sold the company four years later and went on to build a digital marketing company focused on teaching small businesses how to do online marketing. By 2010, the company merged with an offline marketing company to become goBRANDgo!.
goBRANDgo! Is a marketing firm that builds and executes successful marketing campaigns for industrial companies. The team works to iterate with each client’s sales team to drive ROI and growth for the business with a mission to empower people and organizations with innovation, imagination and inspiration to see higher and be better.
Starting with one partner and one employee, Dempsey said they grew the business too fast and in 2012 had to recalibrate, bringing the focus of a fixed fee marketing service with a niche in manufacturing and distribution. “This unlocked our growth and in 2020, we purchased an old school building and launched a nonprofit to service the manufacturing and distribution industry in St. Louis,” said Dempsey. “Our passion has always been to help smaller companies compete and win vs. companies much larger than them.”
According to Dempsey, the firm’s secret sauce is constantly testing different approaches and bringing what works back to other clients. “Since we have a niche, it’s allowed us to build repeatable frameworks for marketing and sales,” he said. The company now has a four-person leadership team and is an employee-led organization with 80 percent of the deliverables produced for clients as repeatable and proven frameworks with more than 50 clients.
Looking toward the future, Dempsey said the continued growth will include adding to the staff in the Philippines, leveraging artificial intelligence, while growing the nonprofit to include a training program for newer members of the team to teach them the manufacturing and distribution industry.
“I have worked for a few years building a management team and in order to build this team, I had to let them make mistakes and know when to set boundaries and when to let them learn through experience,” said Dempsey. “This was my first time building a new leadership team as well, so I was making mistakes as I went along.”
Embracing his superpower for relentless energy and execution, Dempsey’s success has led to being named a Titan 100.
