Marketing and media firm Craft&Crew revamps business model, rebrands as RDEL Group

Marketing and web development firm Craft&Crew Corp. is rebranding for the second time in five years to reflect a new focus that includes helping clients harness the power of AI to make their businesses more efficient.

The Ottawa-based company, which launched in 2010 as Soshal Group and adopted its current name in early 2021, will now be known as RDEL Group, founder and CEO Dave Hale announced this week.

Hale, who chose the new name in honour of his late mother Elizabeth Ardell Hale, told OBJ the change in branding coincides with a shift in direction for his company, which celebrated its 15th anniversary on Monday.

Originally launched to manage Twitter and Facebook accounts for small local businesses, Hale’s venture gradually evolved into a website development firm that worked with hundreds of clients, including household names like Google and TD Canada Trust. 

Since 2021, the company has further expanded its service offerings through a series of acquisitions, including web development and maintenance agency Fenix Solutions, media buying and planning brokerage Media Propulsion Laboratory, and video production agency Simple Story Videos. Those offerings have now been folded into RDEL Group’s Agency Production division.

The buying spree has paid off. Annual revenues at the 35-person company have risen to $12 million, up from $3 million in 2022.

“The last few years have been quite interesting,” Hale says, explaining that integrating the newly acquired organizations into Craft&Crew Corp.’s existing operations “took a lot of focus and energy.”

Over the past 12 months, however, Hale and his team have been channeling their efforts into changing the way the company does business.

While Craft&Crew operated as a traditional agency that provided services to clients in exchange for a fee, Hale explains, RDEL Group is designed to be more like a professional consulting firm, leaning into its growing expertise in AI and other technologies to offer “strategic insights” into how clients can run their businesses better and help them implement those strategies.

Hale, who readily concedes he thrives on the “day-to-day chaos” of being an entrepreneur, is all in on the new approach.

“I’ve really spent the last year quite heads down, just focused on making sure we nail the model,” he says.

RDEL Group’s four-step process starts with a thorough review of a client’s business, Hale explains. The firm’s staffers will sometimes spend months examining every aspect of an operation, from marketing to IT, with a fine-toothed comb in an effort to weed out waste and redundancies, including things as seemingly obvious as cancelling outdated software subscriptions.

Describing his industry as “notorious for collecting fees that are not always directed toward tangible outcomes,” Hale isn’t afraid to put his money where his mouth is. 

No upfront fees

RDEL Group charges no upfront fees during the review phase. Instead, it presents clients with a “tangible” step-by-step plan for making their business more efficient, then takes a percentage of the projected first-year savings once the customer signs off on the blueprint. 

Hales says sales, marketing and IT departments are “run very inefficiently” at many companies, noting his own organization can’t escape blame.

When RDEL Group put itself under the microscope, Hale notes, his staffers discovered the firm was spending $166,000 more than it should have been every year. 

“Many of the companies we work with are hundred-million-dollar, multibillion-dollar companies,” he adds. “When we talk about the scale of what we’re able to find in savings with our model, it is quite significant.”    

Hale says the new approach hits home with businesses that are looking for ways to reduce spending in an uncertain economy.

“It is not about cutting people, it is just about making sure that the organization is operating more efficiently,” he says. “What we’re kind of proving is that if we can go in and save that organization $250,000 a year and then turn around and say, ‘You need to invest that $250,000 in the thing you actually called us for’, we’re getting buy-in. Clients are excited.”

With platforms like ChatGPT upending every aspect of business, Hale says the next two steps are vital to RDEL Group’s approach: helping customers use artificial intelligence tools to make their day-to-day operations more efficient, and training employees to get the most out of AI and other emerging technologies. 

Hale says his firm already has a track record when it comes to providing educational services, citing its partnership with the University of Ottawa to create the digital marketing certificate program at the Telfer School of Business.

“We know how to train and upskill people,” he says. “We really see that as a key part of the model.”

The firm then works with clients to craft a long-term plan to reinvest those savings into growing their businesses. It’s been testing the approach for the past year with several enterprise clients and smaller local organizations that are now “in the thick of executing” on their plans, Hale says. 

“Clients need to do more with less, but they shouldn’t have to feel that way,” he adds. “I think that they have more (resources) available and they are just not operationally structured to capitalize on what is actually available to them.” 

While the past few years have been good to Hale’s company, he believes that with fresh branding and a revamped mission, it’s poised for an even brighter future. 

“What we’re saying is, we are really good at digital transformation. That is what we’ve been doing for companies for a long, long time. It is just the evolution of digital transformation work with new systems and processes.”