Lawton businesswoman Kelly Edwards recently shared a bit of advice for anyone wanting to start their own business: Do it!
“If you have an idea on your heart, go for it,” the CEO of Lawton Marketing Group said. “Failure and mistakes are part of the journey. Don’t be afraid.”
LMG was launched from the Edwards’ kitchen table in 2012 and just marked a milestone 10-year anniversary in June. Along with her husband Coby, who serves as COO, the full-service marketing and branding agency employees 15 full-time team members. The award-winning group specializes in services for the financial and insurance industries.
Headquartered at a new facility in east Lawton on Bishop Road, LMG works with clients from across the nation and Canada, which include large brokers to independent agents and everything in between. Services include strategy development, website design and optimization, social media marketing, search engine optimization, graphic design, and corporate branding.
“Getting information about a business in front of the right people and inspiring them to take action is what it’s all about,” Edwards said. “Although we do work for other industries and other sectors, probably 90% of our business is in the financial industry. It’s a highly specialized marketing niche and we have a lot of expertise in it. It’s an opportunity that came to us.”
Edwards grew up in Plano, Texas, and a marketing class she took in middle school inspired her eventual career. She went on to graduate from the University of North Texas, earning a bachelor’s degree in advertising and marketing in 2002. Edwards was also named Advertising Student of the Year.
“Just after 9/11, I graduated into a recession with a tough job market,” she said. “Fortunately, I got a job with Slingshot [in Dallas, Texas]. They were the first all-digital agency in the nation.”
Edwards’ said her first client was Jack Daniel’s Whiskey. She also worked on other accounts including Lenox China, Tia Rosa Tortillas and several other well-known brands in her early career, but venturing out on her own was something Edwards had dreamt about for years. Tired of the rat race in Dallas, she and Coby, a native Lawtonian, brought their kids to southwest Oklahoma in 2012 to be closer to family and launch LMG.
Working from their kitchen table, they soon grew to the point that they needed to hire staff, so they moved into a small business incubator at Cameron University. With continued growth, they moved the business into office space in downtown Lawton until they built a facility in east Lawton.
“From day one our company has grown 100% by word-of-mouth referrals,” Edwards said. “We’ve never had to do any kind of marketing or advertising to get clients, which is a blessing. There are not very many companies that have the unique expertise that we do in marketing for financial advisors. It’s a very regulated industry due to FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) and the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission) so a lot of marketers don’t want to have anything to do with it. We love the challenge of doing great marketing despite the restrictions, though.”
Receiving national, international and local recognition, LMG has brought home 15 awards for their work. The agency has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, they were named Small Businesspeople of the Year by the Lawton-Fort Sill Chamber of Commerce and received the Regents Excellence Partnership Excellence Award by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education for its partnership with Cameron University.
The Edwards family also has a heart for helping in their local community any way they can. In the past, Edwards served on multiple local boards and was a founding board member of Lawton Young Professionals.
“We lend our support to Lawton Public School Foundation, United Way of Southwest Oklahoma, Hearts That Care Medical Clinic, Hungry Hearts Feeding Ministry, Lawton Farmers Market and several others.”
With LMG in full operation, Edwards decided to pursue another lifelong goal of becoming a published author. In May 2021, her book “The Referral Magnet: Growing Your Financial Practice Through The People You Already Know” was published by Lioncrest Publishing. “It’s all about growing your business by generating more referrals without asking for them,” she said.
Edwards is positive about southwest Oklahoma and is “encouraged by where we are and where we’re headed. There’s a lot of potential to grow if we embrace who we are, and I see a lot of great momentum in that direction,” she said. “We need that positivity and that drive because we have a lot of talented people with great ideas. We have people who know we have to invest in our community because this is a great place to stay and a great place to raise our families.”