OSWEGO — This time last year, Isca Design Studio of Oswego, a graphic design company, was coming off a productive year that saw its revenue jump 147 percent, primarily because of a single new contract with an insurance company.
Amy Isca, the graphic-design studio’s owner and founder, says she cannot reveal the company that hired her firm three years ago for contractual reasons. She could say, though, that it’s a Fortune-100 health-insurance provider.
How Isca’s small (five employees, including herself), relatively isolated design studio, located at 7239 State Route 104 West in Oswego, came to the attention of a company so large is every networking guru’s dream.
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When Isca, 38, founded her graphic-design company from her home in 2004, she tapped into women’s networking groups to find clients. “That was very valuable and really kept me in business for eight years,” she says.
One of her contacts from those early days, with whom Isca had worked from time to time over the years, ended up working for the Fortune-100 company. She reached out to Isca with the opportunity.
Isca Design Studio just renewed the contract for a third year.
How she landed the contract seems simple enough — if not a bit lucky — but that’s not how most of Isca’s clients find her studio.
“Honestly, we have never advertised, so I’m always amazed that we have the client base that we do. It’s always been word of mouth all these years. Just building good relationships, having a good work ethic and a good product,” Isca says.
The focus of her studio has been on branding design, mostly for small businesses but also for events, including public speakers. The studio designs logos, websites, advertising signage, and company stationery, to name a few services. Isca describes her studio as a “design department for those who don’t have their own.”
How it all started
It was never her plan, Isca says, to be a business owner. The large health-care contract her studio signed may be the dream of many small-business owners, but the reason Isca went into business for herself in the first place was more of a nightmare.
“I was a graphic designer for Aspen Dental in their in-house design department. In 2004, they brought in a new marketing director who decided to outsource everything to California.” Aspen Dental Management, Inc. is a Syracuse–based, national dental-care provider.
Isca would be out of work in a few months. The same week she learned of this, she also discovered she was pregnant — with twins.
“I went on some [job] interviews, and it was just very quickly apparent that it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Isca says, because she was late in her pregnancy at that point and figured it was unlikely any company would want to hire someone whom it would quickly lose for an extended time.
“Knowing that I was going to have a few more mouths to feed, I knew I had to make some quick decisions, and that was the sort of ‘A-ha!’ moment.”
She opened her own studio and began scraping together clients, and after a couple of difficult years she got her feet under her.
The business slowly grew. “It was very much a lifestyle business. I never took more work than I could handle myself,” Isca says. Big growth wasn’t her plan.
Her boys Aidan and Logan, both 10, and her daughter Sydney, six, also grew. “It was getting to a point that I couldn’t handle it by myself anymore . . . and I had to move it out of the house.”
In December 2011, Isca rented a 900-square-foot former yoga studio on West 1st Street in the city of Oswego.
Barely two years later, she moved the company back to her old house, on Route 104 in the town of Oswego, where the business first started.
Isca doesn’t reside at the house anymore. The building’s first floor was converted into about 1,500 square feet of office space.
Now she has five employees, and a couple of independent contractors she brings in as needed.
Woman-owned business
Isca says her company is a certified Women Owned Small Business (or WOSB) and New York State Minority and Women Business Enterprise (or NYS MWBE), and is waiting to be certified by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (or WBENC).
“It’s huge for a business for those certifications,” she says. “It continues to move you closer and closer to these big opportunities.”
Isca also recently attended the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, an 11-week course hosted by Babson College outside Boston, designed to help small businesses. Enrollees spend about two weeks at the campus, and the other nine weeks of instruction take place online.
The program helped her become a better business person, Isca contends. She plans to focus on getting the clients she wants, instead of just the ones that show up at her door.
The company will remain health-care industry focused but not exclusive, Isca says, not wanting to lose the good niche market in women’s organizations she has gathered. She says her studio has worked for Syracuse–based Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship (or WISE), and Professional BusinessWomen of California among others.
Apart from the unnamed insurance provider, other health-care companies Isca says she has worked with include the imaging department of St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse and Long Island–based Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund, Inc.
Now, Isca has her eye on more growth, but she likes it controlled. “I’m more comfortable with incremental growth,” says Isca, so she can reassess her company’s situation, settle in, and then go back out and grow again.
“We have no intention of borrowing money at this point,” she says. “Actually, we are looking to reduce our debt.” She wants to improve some of the company’s business practices so that it is ready for more growth in the future.