In the Beginning
I was a Tuesday morning in the marketing offices of Hewlett-Packard in 2003 when Kristen Maes realized that she was effectively barred from being promoted because she had a degree in marketing and not engineering. The economy had the “Asian Flu” and all businesses were struggling with sales.
There was much talk about the new economy, but very few people could define it. Kristen realized one thing for sure, that smaller, faster more nibble organizations were going to survive and giant corporate dinosaurs were going to be eaten.
Snow on the ground, Kristen walked out of HP determined to find away to propel smaller businesses in such way as to compete with and eventual replace the corporate giants. Kristen envisioned a marketing department for hire, that could satisfy the needs of smaller business, without placing the burden of having a full time staff member.