About

Black Lab Advisory enhances your staff by providing business strategy and communications support.  Have a new project looking to get off on the right foot by strengthening a business plan? Want to build a social media strategy to engage customers? Is it time to refresh your marketing communications? Need a strategy to stay ahead of a changing competitive environment?  Contact Black Lab for a complimentary consultation to see how we can partner for creative solutions.

* Honored as 2009′s Business Volunteer of the Year by CHAMPS, Capitol Hill’s Chamber of Commerce *

Black Lab has been busy on a variety of projects the past few months.  Here are some examples of what we’ve been up to:

Marketing Communications / Branding

Prompted by a website redesign, sugarB studio wanted a simple but comprehensive message to describe its philosophy.  Working with the company’s owner, Kari, Black Lab created a meaningful branding message for the homepage.  When sugarB added an About page, Black Lab sat down with Kari to understand her career path and motivations so we could create the story of sugarB in a voice that would connect with her clients.

Graphic design isn’t Kari’s only creative outlet.  When she decided to extend the sugarB brand to a line of hand-knit baby hats, Black Lab was again part of the creative process. We gathered the story behind sugarB baby over the course of several conversations with Kari and, from those experiences, we crafted the lovely message you see on the Order page.

Web Content

Website templates are inexpensive, user-friendly ways for small business owners to have a professional-looking presence on the web.  Using a template, though, does not mean being limited by its boundaries. When Dr. Stella Oh, a prosthodontist, opened her own practice, she worked with Black Lab to customize the content on her website template.  We changed the homepage message, created a new bio and made the technical information more accessible.  This met Dr. Oh’s goal of maintaining her own site on a platform she felt comfortable with, while also ensuring the content was maximized to effectively differentiate her practice in the marketplace and personalize it for her patients.

Strategic Planning

A local businesses association was interested in redefining itself after seeing a major evolution in its membership and program offerings over the course of more than 25 years serving the business community.  Black Lab was engaged to facilitate the annual board retreat where they wanted to create a brand new strategic plan that would reflect the organization’s new vision.  Working with the association’s executive committee, Black Lab created a matrix of key issues and developed a comprehensive scan of the competitive environment to update the board on its opportunities and challenges.  We then designed an agenda that ensured a strong plan for moving forward at the conclusion of the meeting.

Following this project, Black Lab was engaged by the association to implement what the board decided were key strategic and operational priorities as outcomes of the strategic planning process.  Black Lab again worked with the executive committee as well as committee chairs to create new operational structures that revived the committee structure.  We then helped complete a major analysis and rewrite of all the organization’s processes and procedures.

Repeat business is the best indicator of customer satisfaction.  We are proud to say that Black Lab was engaged by this client, once again, to design and facilitate their annual board retreat the following year.