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Top 10 Most Inspiring Women 2016

Nancy Dibert

Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation | CEO | Visit Website

Jane Clark, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Brandswan, a Delaware web design agency

Why We Chose Nancy Dibert

I digitally met Nancy on twitter back in 2009. Everyone on #netde knew her and looked to her as an authority in the twitter universe. If you’re an entrepreneur in Delaware, you have most likely seen Nancy’s diligent social media outreach on Google Plus, Twitter and even Facebook. Every post is thoughtful, relevant —and for me, enlightening. Every day I learn something new, which in the marketing industry is basically a necessity. I met Nancy in the flesh at the last Mascara and Mimosa event. When she approached me and introduced herself, I could barely speak. I was surprised she knew who I even was!”

“Before I could stutter out my words of praise and adoration, she told me something that I will carry with me always: she loved my work and she said it doesn’t go unnoticed. Nancy is a true gem. I was humbled that someone as successful as her was building me up and took notice. I look up to her immensely. Find out how it all started for her below.”

Jane Clark, Co-Founder of BrandSwan

Nancy Dibert

Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation | CEO | Visit Website

 

The Story

Tell us how it all started. Why? What’s the story?

I’ve been active on the Net since its infancy, including writing HTML code for Netscape. I managed a solo website design practice from 1993 to 2002 when my husband fell 15’ out of a ceiling and suffered major head trauma. He was life-flighted to Christiana Care where he was in the neuro-critical care unit for eleven days. When they discharged him, he required around the clock care. He didn’t know who I was for several months. Finally, after multiple surgeries and therapies, he began to recover.

Having lived through such a traumatic experience, we knew we never wanted to waste a moment apart and decided to form Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation to build on our expansive experience of working with credit unions to meet their marketing and advertising objectives. Don, my dear husband, came up with the name as a nod to Einstein’s E = mc 2, along with our tagline of “theory that is relative to your marketing needs.” As I’m a member of Mensa, he knew that I would see the humor.

It’s now nine years later and we’re going strong! While our niche is credit union marketing, we serve a diverse set of clients across almost all industries including non-profit, government, education, private industry, and more.

Biggest Success

What is your biggest success so far?

We’ve been very fortunate to have many successes so far with the business. I would say that what I find the most satisfying is that employment with Epic Marketing has allowed our employees to collectively purchase seven homes. For a small company, that’s a lot! I couldn’t be more proud of our team and the effort they put forth day in and day out. We’re more than associates – we’re family. Seeing them build a future and be able to purchase homes has been a great joy for me. I’m certainly grateful for the successes we’ve had with landing great clients, contracts, and industry awards; however, the personal success that Epic has brought to our employees means more to me.

Biggest Challenge

What is the biggest challenge in your industry? What are you doing to deal with that?

The budget – the dreaded marketing budget – that’s the biggest challenge for marketers, whether in-house or at an agency. Sometimes it’s difficult for clients to realize that setting a reasonable budget for marketing activities is as important as the budget for insurance, equipment, or anything else. What’s worse, when the economy starts to falter, marketing can be one of the first cuts. It’s exactly at that time that marketing is even more vital to the longevity of a company.

When we are approached by a potential new client, one of my first questions is to ask about the project budget. I usually get a response along the lines of asking us to give our best estimate. This doesn’t work out too well. I then explain to the potential client that we work with clients that have a variety of budgets – everything from $500 a month to $600,000 a year, and that it would behoove them to give us as much guidance on what they were thinking as possible. We certainly don’t want to come back with a barebones quote with minimum impact when they had planned to spend a significant amount – or, conversely, quote them a package with all the bells and whistles when they really only wanted something economical. Once we get over the budget issues, things go well. There’s a perception that agencies will try to sell a client on the most expensive and labor heavy option there is. At Epic, we don’t operate like that. We’ve found that working with our clients as collaborators to save as much expense as possible while getting the most advertising bang for the buck is a winning combination.

Advice

What advice would you give to a business owner starting out in your industry that you wish you would have known going in?

I would advise anyone looking to start a business to surround themselves with the best team they can assemble. This isn’t just for employees, but also includes attorneys, accountants, bankers, and other support organizations. Not only do you need to have each of these important team members on speed dial, you need to have a relationship with them. That’s where networking comes in nicely. When I call my attorney, he knows who I am, what my business is, and what our objectives are. That familiarity is priceless during a crisis (and there will be a crisis at some point).

Surprise Tidbit

What don’t most people realize about you or your company?

Most people don’t realize that, for the most part, our employees work remotely and live all across the U.S. Working digitally has its challenges, but it also comes with lots of perks. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do travel almost weekly to be on-site for clients, but the majority of my time is spent working from home. We now have a print shop with full offset and digital print capabilities. That was a big decision for us to move into that arena mainly because we’ve spent so many years working digitally. In our home office, we also have a full-fledged production room, along with a professional sound booth for doing commercials, voiceovers, jingles, etc. We made those investments to support the business and to keep the costs down while providing new services to our clients.

Tomorrow we’ll post another #bossbabe. Don’t turn that dial…

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