» Client Experiences

Embracing the green space in today’s eco-friendly world has proven to be an overwhelming success for my client and friend, Shawn Burst of Jeriko House.  Every bit of this story is like a marketing fairy tale.  Hug a tree, test the waters and find yourself in a forest of greenies lining up at your door for what could be the next, most revolutionary home to hit the housing market.

It all begins in the wake of hurricane Katrina when Shawn had just lost his family’s dream home.  Determined to build a new home and not willing to wait years, he set out on a mission to find a new high-end housing alternative overseas.  After visiting engineering firms in Germany and exotic finishing manufacturers in Bali, Shawn came home with the most incredible vision which he named Jeriko House.  He called BOALT to design and develop a new alternative home brand literally from scratch.

After investing a significant budget in developing his website, he left faith and one press release to do the rest.  It was only a matter of days before the website started to received hundreds of visitors a day from blogs such as InHabitat, TreeHugger, JetsonGreen, Luxist and Architect Magazine to name a few.  Some reviews better than others but you know what they say, all press is good press.
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Yesterday, I had the pleasure to meet with Mike Subelsky over a cup of coffee in Dupont Circle.  Mike, who goes by “Hacker & Improvisor” in his email signature, has has been involved in quite a few interesting start ups including OtherInbox.com, Subelsky.com, IgniteBaltimore.com and BigImprov.org. The purpose of our meeting was just to kickback and discuss different entrepreneur stories and strategies.  After the meeting, I felt real good about some of my contributions to the conversation and thought I should share them.

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Sexy creative is not enough to generate leads and orders through the web.  There are many different attributes that can ultimately affect your bottom line. The concept is not too hard to understand but most of our clients don’t want to spend money on multivariate or A/B testing.

Take a look at our startup, RushMyPassport.com.  We average approximately 100 orders a day and a redesign of our homepage increased our sales by almost $4k per day. Yep, that’s right, over $100k a month.

So, what’s the secret formula.  It’s not rocket science, the trick is get over yourself, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what the masses want. Once you understand this, you’ll attain more than desirable results.

Last month, Boalt launched a new website for Palmdale Oil Company.  Palmdale Oil, which is family-owned and operated, is one of South Florida’s oldest fuel distributors.

Palmdale Oil’s main objectives were to strengthen their overall brand online and achieve better natural placement within the search engines.  BOALT was able execute their objectives rapidly which allowed Palmdale Oil to see a quick return on investment.

I’ve been asked on several occasions to recount my most memorable experience in interactive advertising.  Since the start of my career in 1997, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things happen, however, nothing tops the experience I had just shortly after Hurricane Katrina.  My client and good friend now, Shawn Burst, asked me to help out a friend of his, Dolph Frederico.  When I called Dolph, he told me about this crazy t-shirt idea he had regarding Ray Nagin subsequent to his speech on rebuilding New Orleans.

In case you don’t remember he wanted to rebuild a “chocolate New Orleans” and said, “you can’t have New Orleans no other way.”  As you can imagine, it caused a public uproar.
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This summer we celebrated our 1st year anniversary for RushMyPassport.com.  RushMyPassport.com was BOALT’s first startup and we are extremely excited with the year-end financials.  We set, what I thought, was a pretty ambitious sales goal of $5 mil in our first year and we reached it with a few days left in the fiscal year.

After being featured on the home page of Forbes, MSNBC and CNN as “the passport pros”, we’ve quickly become a disrupter in our industry.  In the past year, I’ve also been interviewed by two talk radio stations.

We’ve helped over 25k people in 1 year receive their passport in 24 hours and we work with over 400 of the Fortune 500 companies. 

Stay tuned, we have a lot in store for our 2nd fiscal year.