A Derby digital marketing firm which is celebrating 20 years since it started out offering business coaching advice has unveiled plans to expand its workforce further.
JDR Group, based in Stephenson’s Way, close to the Wyvern Centre, brought its 40 staff together earlier this month to mark the occasion, with a party and a specially commissioned cake.
The company was one of the first specialist business coaching firms operating in the UK when it was founded by former work colleagues David Roberts, Leanne Mordue and Will Williamson in October 2004.
Their first office was in Friar Gate – where Will and Leanne spent their first day building their desks – but the company relocated to a number of different addresses around the city as the business grew, moving in to its current premises earlier this year.
In 2007, releasing the impact the internet was starting to have on the future of business marketing, Dave suggested a change in company direction, into digital marketing on behalf of the clients they were currently advising.
Five years later, it started using HubSpot for its own marketing needs and this enabled the firm to use content marketing and email marketing to attract traffic to its own website.
Impressed by the results, it began offering the same service for clients and has worked with HubSpot ever since.
It now enjoys Elite partner status, putting it in the company of just a handful of similar HubSpot firms across the world, and currently handles SEO, social media, email marketing and content marketing to hundreds of small and medium enterprises across the UK.
Will said: “We were so excited when we started out and we set huge ambitions for ourselves to be the best in the industry.
“We still have those ambitions, but so much else has changed over the past 20 years. I can still remember us having dial-up internet and having to unplug the phones at 4.30pm and plug in our modem to see if we’d had an email.
“It was a very different world and we didn’t foresee everything in the digital world that would happen. We just knew that it was growing and it was going to be big, but we didn’t realise just how much we would be a part of it.”
South African-born Leanne, who moved to the UK at the age of 21, added: “Starting the business was exciting and nerve-racking at the same time, but I had a very strong sense of whatever we did, we were going to make it work.
“Marketing in general was a strong focus during our business coaching years so it was a natural advancement for us to move into the industry.
“After we started using Hubspot and could attest to its power, it was natural for us to pass that onto our clients as well.”
All three founders have different roles in the organisation with Dave, whose father ran businesses in Birmingham and Nottingham, taking the role of managing director.
“He said: “My experience working in other businesses led me to want to help other business owners to run their own companies better, so I moved into mentoring and JDR Business Coaches was formed.
“A lot has changed in 20 years, especially our company direction, which came about when we realised how business owners were struggling with marketing themselves at a time when digital marketing was taking off.
“We’ve expanded ever since, and we want to grow the company even further.”
JDR Group has built more than 1,000 websites for its clients in its time and has also analysed and audited the marketing operation of more than 250 businesses.
To find out more www.jdrgroup.co.uk
