Speaker: Krista Guagenti, Owner
My name is Krista Guagenti. My company is called Budget Blinds of Worthington and Upper Arlington. It’s a franchise. We do custom window treatments. We opened in 2011 and we have been advertising with Valpak since my very first day. I decided to advertise with Valpak because the other franchisees in the area said, “You have to advertise with Valpak,” so I was thinking, “How could print advertising possibly work? Who uses print anymore? Everyone uses the web and social media. But they were experienced and I had no experience, so I followed their advice and started to advertise right away with Valpak and was amazed at the results that we were seeing right out of the door.
I mean, our business started truly with Valpak. In 2015, we had grown 350% over 2011 and I can absolutely attribute that to our advertising with Valpak. We very diligently track all of our lead sources and all of our advertising and the ROI on those and up until about two years ago, when repeat customers and referrals became our top lead source, Valpak was by far our number one lead source. Believe me, we look at all of our advertising definitely on a yearly basis, sometimes on a monthly basis and I would love to be able to cut expenses, but it just doesn’t make sense. The ROI that we get from advertising with Valpak is too big.
