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Charlotte Business Journal - by Rich Thomaselli Staff writer

At first glance, there’s a paradoxical element of dancing with the devil or sleeping with the enemy here that seems almost surreal.

PRstore Inc. — a Charlotte-based national company that provides professional public-relations, advertising and marketing services to small businesses — needs, well, professional public-relations, advertising and marketing services for itself.

Strange, right?

Not really. What started as a small retail operation on North Tryon Street six years ago has grown into 34 nationwide franchises. Now, with plans to expand to 350 franchises in the next five years, PRstore has reached out to Concentric Marketing to develop a comprehensive, national ad campaign to begin late this year or early 2008.

Concentric was scheduled to pitch its final ideas for the campaign today to PRstore Chief Executive Dan Fragen and company founders Kathy and Michael Butler. The campaign will be across the board, including television, print and in-store promotions.

Concentric President Bob Shaw has already conducted much of the research, which included discussions with franchisees and customers.

“First of all, even before we became involved with PRstore, I thought it was a brilliant concept,” Shaw says. “What it narrows down to is, small business is a big space. One of my charges was to understand who to go after.”

“PRstore was built on a need for small business to have access to the same kind of marketing services that big business has,” Fragen says.

The Butlers started PRstore in August 2001, putting a storefront in uptown right between the headquarters of Bank of America Corp. and Wachovia Corp. If location, location, location is the first mantra for every small business, this was like putting the first jeans store in communist Russia.

PRstore began attracting people who were in town to do business with the banks and stopped in the store, intrigued by the concept of one-stop shopping for marketing services without having to pay big-agency fees. Within two years, PRstore franchised into Grand Rapids, Mich. Since the start of 2006, PRstore has been opening franchises across the country at the rate of one a month.

Sitting in a conference room at PRstore headquarters in Ballantyne, Fragen talks about providing agency-level services to small business and doing it in a retail environment — ironically, the same kind of services PRstore now needs from Concentric.

“We wanted an outside opinion and somebody who had more experience doing national branding than we do,” Fragen says. “Our clients are not typically national companies looking for national branding.”

But there was some confusion about what kind of client PRstore was attracting. PRstore doesn’t have the capacity to handle businesses with a $1 million or more annual ad budget, but its services aren’t for the entrepreneur looking to spend $500 over 12 months, either.

But Fragen says PRstore’s current advertising attracts the $500 client, “and we need figure out a way to filter that out.”

Each PRstore franchise spends $3,000 to $5,000 per month on advertising and marketing, making this a potential $1.6 million account for Concentric. Fragen says PRstore’s ad spending will stay at that level, but the ads will be more consumer-focused.

Says Shaw: “There’s going to be a level of fine-tuning the message and then going forward.”
QUICKINFO

PRSTORE

Principals: CEO Dan Fragen, founders Kathy and Michael Butler

Founded: 2001

Franchises: 34, with plans to expand to 350 within five years

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