The same hire it picked up when it opened an office at the beach has led a longtime Richmond ad firm to expand once again.
The King Agency has opened an office in Atlanta, marking its first expansion outside Virginia after establishing a presence in Virginia Beach five years ago.
Founder Dave King said the move was prompted by the relocation of the agency’s vice president, Meggan Adams, who moved to Atlanta when her husband’s job took them there in 2021 and has been working remotely since.
It was Adams whom King hired when the agency expanded to the beach after picking up a client there, First Team Auto Group. Adams, who started as an account executive and now serves as director of client services, had been working in the dealership group’s offices until the agency’s outpost opened at Virginia Beach’s Town Center.
King said Adams’ move to Atlanta presented an opportunity for the 11-person agency to grow.
“We thought that would be a good move for us as well, that we could get ourselves into a bigger market and see what we can do down there,” King said.
He said he’s hired a second employee to work with Adams in the Atlanta office at The Battery Atlanta shopping complex. He said one employee remains at the Virginia Beach office, while the rest of the agency’s staff is based at its Richmond headquarters at 3 N. Lombardy St.
King said the agency is aiming to grow the Atlanta office as they’d started to do with the Virginia Beach outpost before the pandemic slowed that effort.
“Ideally we’re trying to get it to where it’s self-sustaining,” he said of the Atlanta office. “Right now, we’ve got all the creative services up here in Richmond and account services down there. We’re going to try to grow it to where we can grow our headcount down there and have the two offices work together.”
King said the Atlanta office will be shaped by the business it picks up and is running a campaign in that market. He said the agency is targeting the automotive, healthcare and mechanical sectors, as well as residential services such as HVAC, window siding and home repairs.
“We’ll see what the needs are and where we have to put people with different strengths,” he said. “These days it’s so much easier to work from a distance than it was even five years ago. It’s been going very well the past few years from a distance, so we decided it was really time to make a run at it.”
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