Zimmerman Agency:
Transcending the Rat Race
When successful adman Curtis Zimmerman moved his family from Atlanta to Tallahassee in the mid-eighties, he was embracing a “small is beautiful” philosophy. “The idea was we’d downsize and set up a quaint little ad shop,” he recalls. “Maybe one day we’d end up with four or five employees, and we’d just sail off into the sunset. But” — he smiles as he surveys the sea of desks that swarm around him — “obviously things turned out a little bit differently.”
Today, the Zimmerman Agency has over 100 employees and handles projects around the world for an enviably diverse list of clients, including Citi, Club Med, Costa Del Mar Sunglasses, and the British Virgin Islands. The company’s revenues have grown at an average rate of 20 percent per year, with current yearly billings of 85 million dollars. They run the entire business — creative, production, administrative, and IT — exclusively on Mac computers.
Master the Process, Muster the Talent
Zimmerman is quick to credit Mac with empowering his agency to evolve into a larger organization — without the normal growing pains. “Thanks to Mac,” he says, “we’ve always had a competitive advantage over other agencies — and quite frankly, agencies much larger than we are. Not just because we have such a phenomenal technology platform, but because it’s helped us attract phenomenal people. People who come from top agencies in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami. People like us, who want to do national-quality work, but also want the quality of life that Tallahassee has to offer.
“The simple fact is, if Mac wasn’t a core part of our strategy, if Apple’s vision of technology wasn’t crucial to our culture, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Ahead of the Game
Zimmerman’s strategy involves not only creating, collaborating, and communicating with Mac, but also “consistently staying on the cutting edge of Apple technology,” says Mike McHargue, the agency’s primary IT guy. “These days, that means taking full advantage of the new features in Mac OS X Tiger. Managing huge amounts of documents and resources on our Xserve and Xserve RAID. Giving our people free access to those resources, no matter where they are, with iBook, PowerBook, and AirPort Extreme. And enabling close, creative collaboration with iSight and iChat.
“The simple fact is, if Mac wasn’t a core part of our strategy, if Apple’s vision of technology wasn’t crucial to our culture, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
“We quickly realized that the sooner we adopted whatever innovations Apple had conjured, the better we could serve our clients, the more efficiently we could run all aspects of our business — and the earlier we could go home in the evenings,” McHargue continues. “Every investment we’ve ever made in new Apple technology has had a long-term positive impact on growth and profits.”
Depending on Apple Remote Desktop
To keep every Mac up to date — and every Zimmerman employee working at the top of his or her game — “Apple Remote Desktop is my magic bullet,” says McHargue. “This is a large site for a single administrator, especially when you factor in our significant server infrastructure. In the days prior to Apple Remote Desktop, I spent a huge amount of time roaming from office to office, solving problems. Now I can resolve help desk issues without playing musical chairs. It’s a dramatic benefit.
“With Apple Remote Desktop, I deploy new software and software updates across the entire organization with a single click. And it really starts to shine when I need to reconfigure workstations on a departmental or even company-wide basis. I just load UNIX shell scripts and AppleScripts onto workstations, and execute them remotely with ease.
“The result is simple. By every standard metric, our 100-person organization should need three people to handle basic IT needs. With Apple Remote Desktop, we only need one — me. And I still find plenty of time to contemplate big-picture issues that ultimately keep the agency nimble.”
