15th Anniversary of Slice Communications
On this 15th anniversary of Slice Communications, there are a few things that have occurred to me to share with you, our community of stakeholders, supporters, and friends.
We’ve seen it all.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve seen the Great Recession, COVID, and everything in between. We’ve sold a majority stake in the business and bought it back. We’ve gone through two other asset purchase agreements, and the most recent one with GillespieHall has come with an incredible team of people who are now part of the Slice Squad. Our team has navigated the reinvention of the media landscape, the introduction of TikTok, all the changes at Twitter, the elimination of the open rate of emails thanks to Apple, and more software updates than I can remember. Though change is constant in our industry, our team has managed it with incredible grace and professionalism.
We’re stable and growing.
As much as we’ve experienced change every year since our founding, we are incredibly stable today. We have systems and processes, best practices, and documentation, all of which make us a company that can offer predictability to our team members and our clients. We’ve recently restructured our business to ensure we’re delivering our best to our clients because each of our team members is in the right seat. Speaking of team members, we have more of them today than we ever have. The GillespieHall acquisition increased our business by about 40 percent. We were ready for the exponential growth because of our stability and are excited by the future opportunities that are already becoming current opportunities.
We have more services than ever.
One of the reasons Slice was founded was that we saw early on that social media was going to be an expansion of PR as a new way companies communicate with people. I’m an old-school PR person and media relations continues to be my personal sweet spot. But social media opened up many new channels and opportunities to communicate, so we were there early. Over time, we added email marketing and content development as natural expansions of our service line. With the addition of GillespieHall, we now offer design services, crisis communications, executive branding and communications, multimedia creation, and community relations. All of these are just ways we’re better serving our clients in achieving their goals.
We are dedicated to lifelong learning.
Internally, we are entering the second year of Slice University, our continuing education program that thoughtfully explores new communications and business topics with internal and external experts. Externally, we’ve written and published two books to help marketers and executives more thoughtfully and effectively market their businesses. This year, we’re expanding our educational offerings through an online course and a podcast. We will continue to support Social Media Day PHL, the nonprofit organization we founded to provide professional development and networking opportunities to digital communicators. Learning to improve ourselves and our community has driven us for the past 15 years, and we’re only going to expand those efforts in the future.
We are excited about innovation.
As a team, we’ve always been interested in new tools, technologies, and techniques. We are the first agency to create an innovative Diversity Advisory Council, which we founded in 2020. This group of external consultants helps us be inclusive and consider all different perspectives in the work we do for our clients. We are excited about AI, automation, and predictive analytics. We believe these new tools will do for us what the electronic calculator did for mathematics, computer science, and accounting. We will use them to better focus our efforts on strategic thinking and relationship development. They will free us to better serve our clients and our community, and we’re already seeing the benefits of them when used thoughtfully.
We made it this far because of you. Over the past 15 years, we have been helped and supported by an incredible number of people – far too many to name here. If you’re reading this, know that we appreciate you. That we care about you. And that you have changed the lives of everyone who has worked at this company. Our strength is our network, and that will never change.
Thank you to all the clients, team members, referral sources, partners, family members, friends, and others who have made the last 15 years possible. Just wait to see what we do with the next 15!
