
After 22 years in ad agency marketing, Brian Rudisill stepped off into the void, tethered to an idea.
A former northwest Arkansas office president for CJRW, the Little Rock ad firm, Rudisill founded Zipline Studio in 2018, building a network of marketing freelancers mostly working from home.
A zipline, he said, is a simple, fast and exciting way from point A to point B. And after two years on his own, Rudisill is enjoying the ride, capitalizing on a trend of employees working remotely.
“I had a history of running offices, working for J. Walter Thompson and CJRW, and after following that path for years, I thought, why not go out on my own, a scary thought at the time, but I had to give it a shot,” Rudisill said.
But he thought about the overhead required by big agencies. “This leads to big hourly fees. I wanted to streamline things, take advantage of great professionals out working on their own, and pass on the efficiencies to my clients.”
So Zipline applied a freelance model. Rudisill drums up business and doles out work to 15 or so specialists in design, social media marketing and video production, not to mention digital strategy.
“I bring in people specific to the client’s needs,” Rudisill said. “Whatever category of business, I can look in my portfolio to find people who have worked with that kind of business. There’s a lot of strategic talent in northwest Arkansas.”
A Pine Bluff boy who went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville — where he met his wife and hung around after graduation — Rudisill knows the local talent pool and uses it to “custom-fit” marketing projects for clients. So far, business from Legacy National Bank, Cameron Smith & Associates, Professional Business Systems, Nelson Berna Funeral Homes and Hunt Ventures has sustained the model. Revenue at Zipline doubled from 2018 to 2019, Rudisill said, and he expects double-digit growth this year.
The number of Americans working remotely has surged 159% since 2005, Rudisill said, citing Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by Global Workplace Analytics. (That number will soar in coming weeks as precautions against coronavirus accelerate.)
“We can tap into these excellent professionals while letting them work from home, a coffee shop or even a park bench,” Rudisill said.
And the name, Zipline?
“A zipline gets you where you’re going faster, in an efficient and fun way,” Rudisill said. “That’s what it’s all about. In any given month, I’m cutting checks to eight or 10 freelancers doing work for me.”
The result for clients can be a 30% savings in marketing costs compared with a higher-overhead firm, Rudisill said. “I’m working out of my house and I have been for two years. Clients understand and benefit when they see the invoice.”
The start was rocky, he admits. “The first six months after starting Zipline were the hardest hours I’ve worked in my career, sometimes working through the night, nonstop hustling and meeting people, making business pitches.
“But then about the first-year mark I had a good foundation of clients and was comfortable knowing I could pay the bills,” Rudisill added. “Then my phone started ringing, and it was a thing of beauty to hear.”