Kristi Kirkland

Sometimes you can find yourself in your own business quite accidentally, as is the case with Kristi Kirkland, owner of Answer Marketing. It wasn’t that she wanted to grow up to be the person who runs a company that helps businesses refine their processes, create happier customers, and put more on the bottom line. But she ended up doing just that because they begged her to do for them what she was doing for her employers. “Can you show me how to do that? I need employees as you have,” they kept saying. She took a long look at how she was making companies thrive and saw that she had a very unique and successful system to help businesses. So, she started Answer Marketing to fill a real need in her community, one that she also got great enjoyment out of. Her company includes a variety of business training programs, full-service business solutions as well as professional teams.

In 2012, Kirkland took the elements that worked out of every networking group that she had been a member of and combined it into one group. She then added to that her knowledge and expertise of social media for an improved type of power connection group. She refers to this group as a “For-Profit Group.” It is a group with a lot of accountability, but it is not made for everybody. If a person is looking for a group that focuses on just making friends and is a way to escape the office for a couple of hours, this is not the group for them. It is a very aggressive professional group.

Ms. Kirkland stated, “I really did my research, selectively picked out what adds value, removed the broken elements, and threw on top my own special ingredients to build groups and programs that really work.” They are so successful that she refers to them as their “For-Profit Groups” and her “Eyes Wide Open” programs, not “networking groups.”

It takes a talented person to zoom in and narrow the field of vision right down to the very things that are holding a company back from success. It does take a person who is gifted in a way to find such issues or even to know what to look for in an operation. Answer Marketing has those people in Ms. Kirkland and her team of business experts. She has been saying for years, “If you cannot be part of the solution then you are part of the problem. Some problems can be fixed. The rest needs to be removed to make way for positive growth.”