Marketing Main Street exists because of a bar in Stuart.
Most agencies learned marketing from a textbook. We learned it standing behind a bar for ten years, making every mistake a small business can make, and paying for each one at cost.
The bar.
I bought Ruby's Pub in 2007. The bar had been Ruby's since before anyone in Stuart can remember; Jim and Ruby Waltz opened it as the Waltz Inn back in the 1940s, but everyone in town just called it Ruby's, and I grew up never knowing it as anything else. For ten years I poured drinks, booked bands, ran burger nights, and did what every small business owner does: everything, all at once, with no manual.
Late in my run we added a kitchen. Full menu, real food, the whole thing. Two years in, customers I had known for a decade were still walking in and saying they had no idea we served food.
Jim and Ruby Waltz. Officially the Waltz Inn; everyone in town just called it Ruby's. The town won.The bar years. Ruby's hoodie, questionable sunglasses, zero regrets.The kitchen we added. The one everybody already knew about.
"Everybody already knows" is the most expensive assumption in small business.
Nobody already knows. Not about your new menu, your new service, your extended hours, or the award you won. The businesses that win are not the ones doing the best work. They are the ones people actually hear about. I learned that the hard way so our clients do not have to.
The agency years.
After selling Ruby's in 2017, I went to work in sales and marketing for a Des Moines agency. Good people, good work. But I watched small businesses, Main Street businesses, the exact people I had been a few years earlier, pay four and five times what the work actually cost. They were not paying for results. They were paying for the office, the departments, the payroll, whether any of it added value to their account or not.
Clients were choosing between a website and inventory. Between marketing and rent. That never sat right with me.
Marketing Main Street started in September 2021 to be the other option: same work, same data, same results, at a price that does not make you choose between marketing and making payroll. There is no overhead here to subsidize. There is a person in Stuart, Iowa who has been exactly where you are, and a set of tools we built ourselves because the enterprise ones were priced for enterprises.
10 yrs
Behind the bar at Ruby's Pub in Stuart. Every small business lesson, learned at retail price.
50
Iowa businesses we have worked with, from Stuart to the Des Moines metro.
Home base: Stuart, Iowa. Chamber of Commerce President, Main Street address, deep roots.
What that means for you.
When we tell you a post needs to go out before the season starts, it is because we watched a bar full of regulars miss a kitchen for two years. When we tell you your Google listing matters more than your brochure, it is because we have the data from every client we serve, and it says so. When we say we will tell you straight whether we can help, that is not a sales line. Straight answers are the only kind worth giving in a town where you will run into your customers at the grocery store.
Community Connection Night. Chamber President duties.On the radio, talking small town marketing.Toastmasters. Practicing what we preach about showing up.
The work is the same work the big agencies sell. The difference is who you are buying it from, what it costs, and whether the person on the other end of the phone has ever had to make payroll on a slow February.
Come say hi.
Tell us what your business needs and we will tell you where we would start. The first conversation is free and useful either way. Call or text (515) 422-6208.
