New York, November 26th, 2020

Based in New York, Micah Freedman is a business development expert with a successful professional career in several agencies such as Venuing and Saberpoint.

Now, he’s the Director of Business Development at Ruckus, a position he has held for over three years, helping his team open and close agreements.

In an interview with TIA, Freedman describes what it means to be a business developer and listed the tasks he carries out on a daily basis.

He explained the necessary elements to create successful digital experiences and mentioned the challenges experienced by the agency, especially due its consistent growth over the years.

To kick things off please can you describe to us a little bit about your city and why it is a great place to work?

I work in New York City, the greatest city on Earth (which anyone from NYC will say). NYC is a phenomenal city to work in for a multitude of reasons.
From a professional standpoint, NYC offers the unique opportunity of near-limitless resources. The pool of talented professionals is huge and innovation is rampant, which is fantastic for someone looking to build a successful company. The speed at which people think, move, and act here is unparalleled, and the fact that you can easily visit and meet with clients and partners (pre-COVID) is fantastic.

From a personal perspective, NYC offers an ever-growing melting pot of diversity. Whether its food options or attractions, NYC offers the potential of doing just about whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it.

Tell us about your personal journey, how did you get started in the industry?

I started my career at an enterprise technology solutions provider. Our main goal was to provide turnkey ERP, analytics, and other solutions to companies across numerous industries while partnering with companies such as SAP and Salesforce. My role at the company began as a marketing associate, which quickly grew into an outbound BD and marketing resource for the company.

While this opportunity offered me a tremendous amount of experience in client, partner, and leadership-centric roles, my goal was to always end up at a creative agency. Fortunately, I reached this goal several years into my career as I landed a role at Ruckus.

What exactly does a business development director do at Ruckus?

An oversimplification of my role at Ruckus is to grow the business year over year. The longer answer explores a series of the following duties. My main role is to facilitate and support my team in opening and closing new business.

In order for my team to focus on driving new business for Ruckus and carrying prospective clients through the sales funnel, I must ensure that our marketing activity and strategy are firing correctly and constantly growing.

Additionally, I get involved towards the final stages of a close to ensure we enable a smooth onboarding experience and healthy partnership. When I’m not overseeing our sales activity and actively selling, my role leans towards account management, company-wide marketing strategies, and more.

In addition to ensuring we drive as much new business as possible, it’s also my responsibility to ensure that our current clients are staying as satisfied as possible as our engagements progress.

Do you focus more on problem-solving or opportunity creation?

While the account management component of my day-to-day carries the need for some problem solving, my main focus is creating opportunity. As the head of new business, my goal is to constantly develop opportunities around where we can drive value for our clients.

Being that Ruckus is a full-service agency, we can support a wide variety of projects, concepts, and campaign ideas surrounding branding, platform, and content development needs.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

We’re currently facing a phenomenal challenge in that we’re growing extremely quickly. While this is not something that is exclusive to my team, I’m constantly on the lookout for talented associates, designers, and more to grow our team.

You speak to your clients and potential customers every week. In your opinion, what’s the most important factor that leads companies to create successful digital experiences?

I think that there are two extremely important components to a successful digital identity and experience – consistency and depth. While the specifics of a successful digital (or even traditional/non-digital) experience widely depends on the business, the product, the service, etc., maintaining a consistent and thorough campaign strategy will inevitably drive value.

Consistency stems from the basis on which the brand is built upon. Brands should provide a foundation for strong loyalty, equity, and more through their identity and values (RTBs). These components of a brand should be amplified through digital activities in order to continue bolstering brand strength, value, and in the case of newer brands, legitimacy.

Depth is also extremely important in deploying successful digital experiences. Being thorough with a strategy, from concept to the activation, will allow for the campaign to compound on itself. Examples of this are leveraging core digital assets across numerous campaign touchpoints such as an Instagram post, retargeting display ads, YouTube pre-roll, and more. Each of these deployed assets will build on top of each other, staying top of mind in the customers’ minds and building equity within the market.

Ruckus won an impressive first Emmy® award at the 2020 Emmy® award ceremony last September. How did you feel when they called your names?

While Ruckus has won numerous awards over the years, this year’s Emmy win was a really special one for us. It not only acted as a reward for our teams’ constant hard work and beautiful production, but also signified our place as a bonafide player in the mainstream marketing space.

How do you keep up-to-date with the latest trends and driving forces?

We keep our ears to ground with platforms like Winmo, Crunchbase, and more. Different outlets provide information depending on the industry, company sizes, and more – all of which provide a holistic snapshot of what’s going on in the space.

Working with the right agency can be a valuable partnership. What attributes do you want people to associate Ruckus with?

The agency world is both highly competitive and fragmented. It’s made up of generalists, specialists, independents, spin-offs and more, and can be overwhelming to navigate for clients.

While there are attributes like quality, award-winning, best-in-class, and more that anyone can associate Ruckus with, we feel that Expertise rises to the top here. Something we make very clear from before we even speak with clients is that we are experts. Experts in growth, experts in client advisory, and experts in disruption. Our numerous awards, growing client portfolio, and team are results of our expertise. We invite anyone to have a conversation with us and see for themselves.

Three things I wish I knew when I left school

You’re more effective when you’re relaxed.
Grades don’t exist in the workforce.
You won’t be able to drink without getting a hangover in 5 years.

What’s the one thing you can’t live without?

My respiratory system

If you suddenly gained the ability to time travel, what’s the first thing you’d do?

I would go back in time and stash a lifetime supply of Dunkaroos in an underground bunker for future consumption.

Thanks Micah!

Learn more about Ruckus

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