When 40-year-old Joshua Swanson, CEO of GTMA (www.GTMA.agency), talks about why he recently decided to relocate his digital marketing company to Vancouver from California, he said it really came down to needing more financial flexibility.
“California doesn’t set up small businesses for success, it sets up big businesses for success,” Swanson said. “Ours (GTMA) is a small business, it’s all self-funded, and there’s just such a high cost of doing business there (in California).”
In addition to that financial flexibility, Swanson said that another huge factor in deciding to move the headquarters of the company to Vancouver was the quality of life for his employees.
“If you look at the median price of a home in LA, it’s around $620,000,” Swanson said. “Here, it’s about $285,000. Here, the schools are better, there’s less traffic, my office even costs less. Culturally, we have a lot of creatives, employees who want to be in a more creative environment. Portland was overwhelmingly the closest city to LA for that creative environment. We sent out a survey when we realized we need to expand and we put a lot of different places on it. Overwhelmingly, Portland came back as the number one choice.”
GTMA, a full-service marketing and branding firm specializing in real estate and hospitality, just recently opened the doors of its new headquarters at the Columbia Tech Center in Vancouver. With clients across the country, GTMA offers a comprehensive package of services, including design, web development, social advertising, lead generation, SEO, photography and video production.
Swanson also cited the fact that he wants his company to invest in its people and in its local economy as a reason why Clark County is such a great fit for GTMA.
“All we hear about (in LA) are these tech companies that ‘go big,’” Swanson said. “But 99.9 percent of people, myself included, probably aren’t smart enough to work at places like Google. The rest of us are just trying to create awesome businesses with a little profit, feed into our local economies and our people. Coming up here (to Vancouver), I’ve seen during just the first couple of weeks of interviews that people are excited to have us here. They’re excited about the kinds of jobs that we’re bringing to this market. We’ve been completely embraced by the community so far.”
Swanson first started GTMA at the very end of 2010/early 2011. He said he was the kind of person who always had a business on the side, even going back to his early days as a paper boy when he had two paper routes. His first business out of college was a pool cleaning business, appropriately named LA Pool Guys. The business did well and he sold it to his business partner in 2003.
“Most of my client base for that business was apartment communities, so I knew how to sell to that culture,” Swanson said. “I went off and did some entertainment stuff for a while, I ended up hosting a show about social media. I started thinking, ‘social media is going to be huge, the apartment/real estate world is going to need someone to tell their story. When GTMA launched, it started as just social media and video, and then grew into a full-service agency.”
Although the focus of GTMA has mostly always been multi-family, Swanson said they are now getting more involved with senior housing, student housing and more.
Swanson said that having the company’s headquarters in Vancouver is going to allow them to make some additional profit, which will enable them to reinvest even more money into the business and into the community.
“We’re about our people, our team and we are about giving back to our community,” Swanson said. “That’s been built into my DNA since very early on. GTMA is here and we’re excited about being here. We’re planning on contributing not only jobs, but also giving back to the community. Since we market housing, we’ll be looking into how we can help those who don’t have housing.”
“And, don’t hold it against us that we’re from California,” Swanson said, laughing. “We’re bad drivers, but we’re also nice people.”
