Three Five Two is an innovation and growth company based in Gainesville. They help companies find, build and grow their next big thing. They do that through innovation services, digital development, and growth marketing.
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Did You Know: Three Five Two’s largest client is Nationwide Insurance. Nationwide has a goal of creating billions of dollars in new revenue by spinning up new businesses within the company, particularly digital products like apps and websites that would offer customers new services. With more than ten employees who work exclusively for Nationwide, Three Five Two acts as their team to find, build, and grow these new business concepts.
Geoff Wilson, the president and founder of Three Five Two, is a serial entrepreneur. “I love starting and growing businesses,” he says. He’s started a number of different startups and been involved in coaching and mentoring other startups. One of the companies he started, out of a fraternity house room at the University of Florida back in 1997, was Three Five Two, which began by designing simple websites for small businesses in Florida.
Over the years Three Five Two grew to work on increasingly large, complex digital projects, such as apps and functionality-heavy websites. They then expanded into providing digital marketing services to help their clients grow what Three Five Two built for them, and innovation services to help their clients find new ideas and revenue opportunities.
“Our team helps clients find what’s next,” says Wilson. “So we work with clients in the early stage to help them discover their next big product idea or service or business model.” Wilson explains that in addition to digital development and marketing, Three Five Two provides services like idea generation, user and market research, prototyping, and market validation.
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Wilson explains that big companies need innovation services because in the current environment, many larger companies are getting disrupted by startups. This is because it’s easy for a startup to grow, because they have nothing to lose. “They don’t have an existing brand,” says Wilson. “They don’t have an existing customer base or partnerships or distributor relationships they have to worry about—all these things that can end up causing red tape and complications when it comes to doing something totally new.”
Where startups have complete flexibility, big companies don’t. This is because as a company grows, the general inertia of the company protects the company’s core business, but by doing that, the company also stymies innovation. “They need to protect their brand, protect their relationships, protect their core product lines. They have things to worry about like security and infrastructure and compliance and regulations, and so as a result they typically find it really difficult to innovate.”
“With the speed of innovation increasing at a dramatic pace, a lot of well established companies struggle to innovate,” says Wilson. “So our innovation services are built to give them the boost and agility they need.”
Three Five Two is particularly proud of working with the Webby Awards— the internet’s largest and most prestigious awards program—that, in 2016, chose Three Five Two to redevelop all their technology and rethink every part of their business process, from how people enter their awards, to how judges judge the awards, to how the awards are chosen, and how the awards are voted on and announced.
“Over the last three years,” says Wilson, “we’ve built them a cutting-edge digital platform to support their awards and their growth.”
The quality of Three Five Two’s improvement is shown nowhere more clearly than during voting period itself. In the ten years prior to working with Three Five Two, every single year during this period, the Webby Awards website crashed from the millions of voting visitors. “Since working with us,” says Wilson, “it hasn’t crashed once during voting.”
Wilson credits Gainesville itself with a good deal of its success. “Time and again we’ve found smart, driven talent coming out of both the University of Florida and Santa Fe College,” says Wilson. “And we’ve been able to mentor them into being true professionals in their field.”
Having grown tremendously in the last 22 years, including expansions into Tampa and Atlanta, Wilson sees no end of growth, due to the everincreasing need for companies to innovate. In Wilson’s words, “the sky’s the limit.”
For more information, visit threefivetwo.com.
