The Story of our company name

This is the story of how our company got its name and value number one. 

You may wonder why we named our digital marketing consultancy Balanced Growth Boutique – BGB, as we often call it with the acronym. Our name might sound weird or controversial in the light of many companies in the industry (digital marketing and advertising) highlighting their ability to help clients to generate rapid growth.

As our name indicates, we believe that at the end of the day, in digital marketing and advertising, systematic growth through well-managed campaigns will become more and more critical in the years to come. We believe that well-managed campaigns are led by marketing professionals who can lead their growth with balance.

Our name also highlights the number one value for us: balanced growth. We aim to consider this value in everyday decision-making on both organizational and individual levels.

In this article, I’ll revisit the process of inventing the name for our digital marketing consultancy.

Blog About Work-Life Balance + Roadtrip + Newspaper Reading + 5 Days Hike in Finnish Lapland = Balanced Growth Boutique

In July 2020, Mirka Tallus drove a rental car near Iisalmi towards the north. I was reading a paper version of the Finnish newspaper Savon Sanomat, which I had picked up somewhere in Kuopio.

Just a month earlier, Mirka had started working as a growth marketing freelancer helping a few clients run their marketing campaigns. Before that, she had been laid off due to the covid-19 pandemic. you can read more about Mirka’s steps toward this point in her career in this blog article. This article is published on a blog about the work-life balance, which we also started together with Mirka less than a year before starting BGB. 

Back to the car where I was reading Savon Sanomat’s article. The article was about the reported “burnout numbers in Finland.” One of the details highlighted in the article was that, according to the statistics, young professionals in the media and marketing feel more overwhelmed by their work than their peers in other industries and jobs.

Mirka had just started working as an entrepreneur in this field, and we had even started a blog about work-life balance topics, so we found that article in Savon Sanomat especially interesting. Why do people in marketing and media industry jobs get more stressed? How could we avoid this when working with digital marketing? How could we help other marketing professionals not be part of this statistic?

Did you know that WHO (World Health Organization) recognizes workplace burnout as an occupational phenomenon?

Mirka and I had a fruitful discussion on these topics based on the Savon Sanomat article. But then we let these topics be. We shifted our focus toward our planned 5-day hike in the UKK national park. We had promised ourselves not to talk about work-related stuff during our vacation. With our hiking experience, this was relatively easy as we needed to focus on navigating, carrying our relatively heavy backpacks, preparing our meals, and counting how many chocolate candy bars we still had with us!

Our hike was a success. After the hike, we spent two nights in a hotel in Saariselkä and explored the nearby surroundings. On our way back from Inari to Helsinki, we came up with Balanced Growth Boutique as a name for our newborn digital marketing consultancy.

The world needs more “balanced growth” thinking – and action.

A few days before writing this blog article you are now reading, humanity overshot earth’s resource budget for 2022. We Finns already used our budgeted natural resources by the 31st of March this year.

In our opinion, already this is a good enough reason to include the concept of balanced growth in the name of our company. And we understand that the name of our company doesn’t automatically create any positive impact regarding this calculated overconsumption of earth’s resources. But it is there to remind our different stakeholders and ourselves about this. We believe that having it top-of-mind can positively impact our surroundings.

We included “balanced growth” in our company name to remind our stakeholders about the importance of this type of thinking for the world we are living in.

The concept of “balanced growth” is quite abstract without explaining how we experience it. We plan to share some of our learnings and thinking on this blog.

“Balanced growth” is our value number one.

Naturally, the concept of balanced growth is our value number one. Frankly, it is currently our only documented value. But we don’t have a company value slide deck anywhere. For now, it is enough to have it in our name and logotype. Of course, we also keep telling this story as we meet people.

Mikko Rindell