Dave Koch
By Robert L. Flott
Managing Editor
Dave Koch believes in working outside of the box.
As a marketing consultant, Koch (pronounced “Cook”), worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years and in Hollywood for 12 years. Now, located in Indianapolis, Koch’s DTK Enterprises utilizes his expertise in marketing and his flair for creative thinking to enable business owners to break free of traditional business models and realize growth. “We started about six years ago,” Koch said. “I wanted to get away from the big corporate environment where I had been working. “I got tired of generating all this income and only seeing a small percentage of it,” Koch said. “We moved to Indiana with the idea of giving ourselves a fresh start. I wanted a place halfway between Hollywood and New York because that’s where I imagined my clients would be coming from.”
Like all innovated ideas, Koch’s business is rooted in computers and marketing. “Basically, we’re a technology and interactive marketing company,” he said. “All of my background is in marketing and video game production, internet production.”
When the economy began to change for the worse, Koch used a bit of creative thinking to find new ways to use his expertise, with surprising results.
“The economy is moving what I’m doing into a different direction, and that’s helping people get hired,” Koch said. “It’s really amazing. For as many talented, well-qualified people there are out there, it’s amazing how many people can’t put something together as simple as a resume.” Koch began applying marketing techniques to help professionals and business people find jobs. “When there are eight hundred people applying for a job, how do I stand out?” In one instance, Koch used a singing telegram service to deliver a resume to, of all things, a law firm.
“He got the job,” Koch said with a big grin.
The secret is to complete the move to a new business model. “The old model was Monster.com,” Koch said. Today, business professionals are turning to sites such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter to find work. The entire system needs overhauled, he adds. “A lot of it is that the employers don’t know what their looking for,” Koch said. “ The American business model is you’re losing money so you start cutting personnel, which shows the short-sightedness of the American Business model.” The Asian model takes a more long-range approach. “You look at Asian companies and they’ve got a five, ten, twenty year line set up,” Koch said. “You look at American companies and it’s the quarter. If they can’t get business up over a quarter, they panic. So they bring people in, and they burn them up, but they’ve got fifteen to twenty people standing behind them waiting to come in. It’s not a very secure model.”
Koch’s method involves seeking employment before the need is apparent to the employer. “What I’m looking at is finding a company where you are interested in working then learning all you can about that company and its needs. Then you go after that employer before they even know they need that position. “By the time the bosses started looking for someone like a VP of marketing, they’re already looking inside the box. Maybe what they’re really looking for is a way to increase their visibility, which might be marketing, but it might be operations. So how do you work with a company to identify a need that they don’t even know they have themselves?” “That’s a much more successful road toward keeping yourself employed.” The current or older model—the one used by most companies—is to center profits around the sales force. “Is there anyway to add marketing to that mix? Is there anyway for human resources to add anything to profitability?”
The benefits to thinking outside the box can mean generating more than just revenue. The benefits can mean finding new potential personnel. “This is where corporations of the future are going. It seems strange to have your human resources department generate income by teaching resume writing, but if your HR department can devote one individual to this, for the purposes of say, outsourcing, you may be able to generate revenue, increase profitability, and perhaps locate employees you couldn’t have using traditional methods.” Koch notes that about half of his business is in the profit-making industry and the other half in non-profit industry.
“One of my largest clients is AFIM [the Association for Family Interactive Media], What we do is work as a think-tank for businesses that want to keep up on the latest trends in internet development,” Koch said. “But also we do a series of seminars for teachers and parents and churches on the nature of what are video games. A lot of parents are confused on that issue. You know, should you let your kids play ‘Grand Theft Auto.’”
Koch uses his knowledge of the technology and of marketing to bring parents up to speed. “We try to educate parents on the nature of texting, social networking, what is ‘sexting’ and what’s going on there.
“It’s perhaps a scarier environment today than it was twenty years ago,” Koch added. Businesses need to be aware of advances and on-going changes in communications technology. “We’re sort of faced with this world of instant communication.”
Koch points to the recent race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to see who could get to 1,000,000 followers on the social networking site, Twitter. Kutcher won. Oprah signed up on her show and generated 40,000 followers within minutes. “The nature of the technology is that we’re now sending and receiving messages in multiple directions at the same time, Koch said. “Kids are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their parents.” The differences are amazing, and frightening. “It’s perhaps a scarier environment today than it was twenty years ago,” Koch said, “The nature of it is quite interesting. The generation before this was more introspective, sticking their headphones on and being solo individuals. We’re moving back toward socialization, but they’re not socializing with people across the table. They’re socializing with people thousands of miles away.”
Dave Koch
DTK Enterprises Inc.
jdavidkoch@comcast.net
(317) 250-4433
