Small Business Development Center Helps Entrepreneur LaunchBusiness
Twitter. Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. It’s hard to keep up with it all. It’s especially difficult to know just how your business can harness this ever changing digital media marketing world. That’s where John Holcomb and Outrigger3 come in. Holcomb has made it his business to help businesses understand and utilize the emerging media marketing realm. “We help companies understand the madness out there. It’s exciting, but it’s overwhelming for them” says Holcomb. “Much of what we do at the beginning is help our clients get their head around this dynamic and quickly evolving world.”

But Holcomb and his business partner, Nivas Durairaj, don’t stop there. In addition to on-site training and workshops covering trends in digital marketing, Outrigger 3 helps businesses and organizations create digital campaigns and tailor their marketing strategy to maximize opportunities in this changing landscape.

Early Success and Plans for Employees
In business for less than a year, this Madison-based startup provides services throughout the Midwest and the nation for a range of businesses and organizations. Outrigger3 has experienced steady growth and plans to hire three to five employees by the end of the summer.
“I give the SBDC all the credit for where I am now.”
Holcomb started his business by attending the UW-Madison Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Entrepreneurial Training Program. He learned the basics of business, how to write a business plan and received one-on-one assistance from SBDC business counselor Linda Davis. “I give the SBDC all the credit for where I am now,” Holcomb concludes.

John is a classic example of an entrepreneur who started with one idea and ended up with something quite different. Holcomb started with an idea for a crowdsourcing platform for non-profits.  "Then one morning he received a call inquiring if monitoring social media was possible.  John immediately reached out to his old UW-Madison friend Durairaj and suddenly they were off building software to trap social media buzz."

“So we built this application for Famous Dave’s,” explains Holcomb. “At that point I realized that the more I talked about emerging media trends, the more I realized that people didn’t really understand this world, but were fascinated by it and wanted to know more. The next thing I knew, we were up and running as a company.”

With a successful business underway, Holcomb continues to utilize services of the SBDC.
“There are so many resources that people are unaware of. They have consultants that can help you out. Through SBDC I met with Vicky Jones, who helped on marketing, and of course there’s the ongoing consulting with Linda Davis on my business plan,” says Holcomb.

He also uses the SBDC Business AnswerLine, a resource he considers something more businesses should know about.

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