Focused on a turnaround - Weston designer shifts strategies to rebuild her company’s revenues
By BOB CHUVALA

Alisa Hill really, really hated the commute from her Westport home to her job in Manhattan. “It was a nightmare beyond belief,” she said. “I was developing emotional commuting trauma. I loved my job but loved living in the suburbs, too.”

The senior creative director at Sony Music was on the go day and night. “There was the wear and tear of my job, but then I had to go to shows in the evenings, to concerts, blah, blah, blah to familiarize myself with the artists and groups I was dealing with,” Hill said. “I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and I thought that maybe I needed to stay in the city a couple of nights.”

She wound up on a therapist’s couch to help sort through her conflicting options. “They call it commuter fatigue or something.” Whatever it’s called, she had it, good. “I decided my health was more important,” so she quit her job and devoted herself full time to a home-based business she had been cultivating on and off for several years. “I had been planning it for some time. I can’t stand working for other people. I’m very antsy. I don’t like consistency, the mundane. I think that’s why my clients like me.”

About the same time she gave up on Manhattan, she moved to Weston, where her home-based WestEnd Entertainment Design Inc. still resides with her. “We’re a virtual graphic design firm focusing primarily on interactive design encompassing Web sites, interactive CD-ROMs and DVDs for promotional purposes, and a lot of marketing and advertising management.

“We not only do design, but we maintain ad schedules and purchase ad space. I really don’t like to say it’s an advertising firm because that puts us in a different category. But we do take on some of the work of advertising firms.”

No drab approach

Hill left her Manhattan job in 1995 just in time to catch the tail end of the dot.com bubble. Her annual revenues were, “oh, gosh, pretty high, in the $400,000 and $500,000 range,” she said, but then crashed when the dot.com bubble burst. “It was really rough,” she said. “I’m talking rough, rough, rough.” But she didn’t give up, even when revenues dipped to about $90,000 before beginning to recover. “The last two years were kind of slumpy, but this year we may exceed $285,000.”

Part of that turnaround is based on a new focus for WestEnd forged after the dot.com bust. Some of her clients had been large corporations, but “I don’t do any of that stuff for GE or IBM or General Motors any more,” she said. “They really pay the bills, but the main focus of my company is to bring creativity back into design.

“I think creativity gets lost in corporate design.” Corporate Web sites, she said, are created “without any understanding of the inner workings of a company and what they need from the Web site.” And even if a company is successful in creating its site’s content, “they’ve lost creativity” and produce “a drab approach” to the visual content. “People like to see pleasing and artistic approaches.”

That’s where WestEnd comes in -- and Hill’s background in design. She graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a degree in graphic design, then moved through a series of jobs, including doing graphic design work for a Westchester County, N.Y., printing company, and a stint as associate art director for the World Wrestling Federation in Stamford. Then she freelanced for a few years until she was hired as senior art director at Sony Music in 1987.

Creating a brand

Today, Hill and her three virtual employees -- one lives in the Bronx, another in Yonkers, N.Y., the third in town of Fairfield -- are focusing WestEnd on local small businesses that want to become midsized businesses, and on mid-sized businesses that want to create a brand name for themselves. “I’m also concentrating on certain industries in the mid-size range, like entertainment companies like Sony. They have a lot of different companies, smaller entities within them” where the competition for small design firms like WestEnd isn’t as fierce as at the corporate level.

Competition has become more intense among design firms, she said, as larger firms move into areas that had been dominated by smaller firms such as local retailers. “Business has become a bit more competitive with large design companies, so I’m looking for different niches and segmented industries such as architects and interior designers” the bigger firms haven’t discovered yet.

“I’ve refocused and restructured the company, focusing on helping small clients become mid-sized businesses and helping them maintain the brand identity we’ve created for them,” she said. “People recognize a brand, like Kleenex.” What Hill does is create local brands, like Specs of Wilton, a three-store optical shop, or bebop, a Westport children’s European fashion store.

Her goal, she said, is to rebuild WestEnd revenues to the 1995 levels, although “the economy isn’t that great, despite what anybody says. People don’t want to spend money on advertising and design, and think they can do it themselves. But the results are amateurish. If you want to attract the type of client your mid-sized company deserves, you have to hire someone” to design a total advertising and graphic package.

Still, Hill is pretty certain she can double this year’s revenues in the future. So certain, in fact, that she’s toying with the idea of giving up her Westport railroad station parking permit. But “letting go of that railroad parking pass is a big thing,” she said. “People have been on the Westport waiting list for 20 years.”

In fact, she seldom uses the parking permit. “I don’t go into the city that often, and if I do, I drive. I really don’t like the train.”