Rise Above Creative is a husband and wife creative team serving small businesses and independent musicians in the Nashville area with quality interactive services. Recently, Rise Above discovered LightCMS, and quickly integrated it into its growing business model.

We asked Brian Hadaway, founder of Rise Above Creative, a few questions about how LightCMS has helped his business grow.

Me: How does LightCMS help your agency better meet its clients' needs?

Brian: LightCMS helps us better meet our clients’ needs by letting us focus on what we are good at. When I started Rise Above, I was faced with the reality that I was now responsible for every aspect of my business – advertising, sales, marketing, bookkeeping, hr, designing, developing – the list seemed endless. I realized that the part of the work that I enjoyed was getting squeezed into smaller and smaller blocks of time. I really needed to find a way to free up some time.

It was at that point that I discovered LightCMS. Instead of having to hire a developer or spend my time learning about poorly-documented open source CMS systems, I’ve been able to focus on the front-end design, and front-end design is what attracts most of my clients in the first place. This has opened the door to bigger projects and has allowed me to yield a higher quality of design with better back-end functionality.

Me: What are the biggest selling points of LightCMS in your opinion?

Brian: LightCMS’s biggest selling point for us is the ease with which clients can make updates. Virtually anyone can learn how to make updates to their sites. Even some of our clients who struggle with checking their web-based email are regularly updating their sites and blogging with ease.

The search-engine-friendliness of LightCMS sites is also a huge selling point. We’ve always had the knowledge to get good search engine rankings but we always struggled putting our ideas into practice on open source CMS products.

We also like the fact that when we have questions about LightCMS that people who seem to care about finding an answer respond to us in a timely manner.

Me: Would you recommend LightCMS to other agencies or designers?

Brian: We would definitely recommend LightCMS to other agencies. However, if said agencies targeted small businesses and independent musicians in the Nashville area, we would probably deny the existence of LightCMS. We can’t give up our competitive advantage that easily.

Me: Tell us about your business.

Brian: I started Rise Above in September 2006 after five years of being held creatively captive at a Nashville record label. My wife, Crystal, helped out occasionally part-time while she continued to work full-time for soulless corporations. In June 2007, she left her job to join Rise Above full time. At the moment, it’s just the two of us, but when necessary we use some of our very talented friends when we we need help with video editing, audio recording, etc.

Our goal is to equip small businesses, organizations and independent musicians with online identities that allow them to thrive in their areas of expertise. We accomplish this goal by providing web design, content management, flash design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and email marketing services. In the past 15 months, we’ve worked with about 50 clients (some of them on repeat projects). The fact that word-of-mouth advertising (which is our only form of advertising at this point) has kept us busy is a testament to our customers’ satisfaction with our work.