The Ottawa-based company, which launched in 2010 as Sochal Group and adopted its current name in early 2021, will now be known as RDEL Group, founder and CEO Dave Hale announced this week.
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Marketing and web development firm Craft&Crew Corp. is rebranding for the second time in five years to reflect a new focus that includes helping clients harness the power of AI to make their businesses more efficient.
The Ottawa-based company, which launched in 2010 as Soshal Group and adopted its current name in early 2021, will now be known as RDEL Group, founder and CEO Dave Hale announced this week.
Hale, who chose the new name in honour of his late mother Elizabeth Ardell Hale, told OBJ the change in branding coincides with a shift in direction for his company, which celebrated its 15th anniversary on Monday.
Originally launched to manage Twitter and Facebook accounts for small local businesses, Hale’s venture gradually evolved into a website development firm that worked with hundreds of clients, including household names like Google and TD Canada Trust.
Since 2021, the company has further expanded its service offerings through a series of acquisitions, including web development and maintenance agency Fenix Solutions, media buying and planning brokerage Media Propulsion Laboratory, and video production agency Simple Story Videos. Those offerings have now been folded into RDEL Group's Agency Production division.
The buying spree has paid off. Annual revenues at the 35-person company have risen to $12 million, up from $3 million in 2022.
“The last few years have been quite interesting,” Hale says, explaining that integrating the newly acquired organizations into Craft&Crew Corp.’s existing operations “took a lot of focus and energy.”
Over the past 12 months, however, Hale and his team have been channeling their efforts into changing the way the company does business.
While Craft&Crew operated as a traditional agency that provided services to clients in exchange for a fee, Hale explains, RDEL Group is designed to be more like a professional consulting firm, leaning into its growing expertise in AI and other technologies to offer “strategic insights” into how clients can run their businesses better and help them implement those strategies.
Hale, who readily concedes he thrives on the “day-to-day chaos” of being an entrepreneur, is all in on the new approach.
“I’ve really spent the last year quite heads down, just focused on making sure we nail the model,” he says.
RDEL Group’s four-step process starts with a thorough review of a client’s business, Hale explains. The firm’s staffers will sometimes spend months examining every aspect of an operation, from marketing to IT, with a fine-toothed comb in an effort to weed out waste and redundancies, including things as seemingly obvious as cancelling outdated software subscriptions.
Describing his industry as “notorious for collecting fees that are not always directed toward tangible outcomes,” Hale isn’t afraid to put his money where his mouth is.
