I wanted to bring premium ROI driven white glove services to the masses for website design, graphic design, inbound marketing and banner ad design services.

Established in 2004, Custom Creatives is a full service graphic design and internet marketing company. We can help build your brand by putting together virtually every piece of an integrated digital media puzzle. Our promise is to provide products and services that are innovative, intuitive, intelligent, interactive, inspiring and most importantly, impactful.

Our expertise includes creating solutions that convert visitors to customers for you through compelling graphic/web design and development coupled with a large menu of internet marketing services from search engine optimization to social media. Our capacity is limitless as we’re constantly innovating to stay true to our creative roots and come up with fresh ideas. Our portfolio of clients includes small and midsize companies to large corporations.

With proven processes, years of experience and a team of energetic, enthusiastic people invested in your success, we’ve got a well-oiled machine ready as soon as you say go. We’re also flexible and capable of handling a huge volume — you can work with us as your back-end design team, we can partner with you to help service your roster of clients or you can hire a programmer for specific projects — tell us what you need and we’ll make it happen.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What inspired you to launch your business?

Rahul Alim: I wanted to bring premium ROI driven white glove services to the masses for website design, graphic design, inbound marketing and banner ad design services. I had to rely on friends and freelancers to fulfill for my clients. The deadlines were missed, the quality was rushed and at times they disappeared with no response for months or never at all. The medium and larger companies were too expensive and billed hourly rates like attorneys. My customers were spending hard earned money for mediocre work and needed a cost effective ROI driven solution. I decided this was my calling. I ventured into starting a design studio called SMS, Inc which then in turn blossomed into Custom Creatives – a full service digital marketing agency for any size business.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What issue does your core product help solve and how so?

Rahul Alim: We solve the problem most companies face; driving traffic to their website and storefronts through creative website design, branded designs and internet marketing solutions. Businesses are not templates and there’s no straight arrow to success, so by creating a plan, executing, reporting and refining we are able to help our clients’ scale and reach their goals.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What has been your biggest challenge as a business owner and how have you met that challenge?

Rahul Alim: The biggest challenge is scaling a service while offering a premium offering for an affordable price for any size business – public to start up.

We have implemented SOP’s to follow so all our projects follow a specific process. Since we co-create with our clients, we make it easy for them to give us information we need to create websites, banner ads, digital marketing campaigns and content to help grow their business online, stay ahead of competition and stay up to date on technology shifts or marketing trends we can monetize.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for you/your Company?

Rahul Alim: The most exciting thing upcoming for Custom Creatives is our Partner Channel offering. We have whitelabeled our services to offer to anyone who needs us and wants resell our services. It allows for a company to scale with no overhead and stay lean and agile. Our job is to hire, train and retain great people in a great and exciting environment. We’ve worked on some of the largest name brands in the world through our Partner Channel. This is truly for any size business. From freelancers to multi-national agencies to publishers and anything in between.

We look to scale and grow with our partners as a team.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Have you had any mentors or role models that have influenced you? Describe the impact.

Rahul Alim: Yes, it sounds cliché, but my family has had the most impact and continues to influence me and my entire to team to always do better. That’s our goal each and every day. Our success is a direct correlation of our clients success. They pay us to make them money and we have been very successful in doing so.

If it were not for my family offering ideas, advice, encouragement, and at times help general work then I am not sure where Custom Creatives would be today.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Do you consider yourself successful and by what means do you measure success?

Rahul Alim: I don’t look at myself as being successful today. I am sure others may while others may not. I will look back in a few years and decide. My goal is to offer a better service and an affordable cost to our clients, but most important generate our customers tangible and trackable ROI directly as a result of our service and hiring Custom Creatives. When our customers call to thank us, open more locations, call to ask for advice, initiate increases in our budgets, we all look back and smile and high five each other.

BusinessInterviews.com:  How do your competitors view you?

Rahul Alim: I would guess as threat since we offer a great service and we get a lot of new business from existing customers that are very happy with our designs, web development and digital marketing services. I look at competitors as our allies. I know we can work together in some capacity. Our partner channel is about working on co-creating with our competitors.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs and business owners? What do you wish someone told you?

Rahul Alim: Get a mentor, hire the right people, it will help you scale. If you cannot afford people at the start, align yourself with reliable contractors or companies. Create a plan for sales and workflow.

For example in sales: When we first started, we focused on design work in 2004. Most notably banner ad designs, flash banners, logo design services for branding and custom landing pages. We kept things simple for sales since we knew banner ads had been widely accepted and it’s the driving revenue source of many publishers. After we created demand, we moved into Website Design, SEO, PPC, Display Advertising and other areas of lead generation.

For example in workflow: We created a way to intake client information and ideas by creating an intake form. Then we had a CRM that could track the stage and status of our projects. This allowed us to keep things very efficient for fulfillment and final delivery. Without the right system in place we would have not been able to grow and likely fail or limit our success.