A new marketing communications company is looking to make contact with clients in the food and farming industries.
Len Kahn, who has nearly 30 years of marketing experience, launched Kahntact in Guelph, Ont. on Thursday. The agency focuses on businesses in Canada that work in agri-food, life sciences and animal health. It also services the regional B2B and B2C sector.
Kahn said his agency is different from others serving this $30 billion sector because it operates more like a law firm than a typical agency; it considers its offerings either services (i.e. account and project management services) or practices (i.e. creative and concept development, copy writing, web site development, strategic planning).
Kahntact will work with external partners that specialize in fields outside its own expertise to help guide clients in areas such as social media, database-driven demand creation and digital marketing. Its current partners include Zero In (a social/digital shop) and Technekes (which works in demand creation).
“Unlike many conventional agencies, we do not believe we need to have all the expertise in house,” said Kahn.
Kahn said that he has found from his own agency background that “overhead [costs] end up being a huge risk to agencies’ ability to produce consistently outstanding work, and stay financially viable.”
With that in mind, all of Kahntact’s eight “staff members” are actually contractors running their own businesses. “Our key staff dedicate the majority of their time to Kahntact, but not having them as [full time] employees keeps the work sharp and our overhead low.” This model will allow the company to scale up or down quickly and cost-effectively, he added.
Some of the new company’s clients include DuPont Crop Protection (Canada), for which Kahntact is doing PR and project work, the University of Guelph’s department of Food, Agriculture and Resource Economics, as well as the Canadian Dairy Expo and Mobile Truck Services.
Most recently, Kahn was a partner at McCormick Global Communications, a group with which he will keep connected to help serve its North American agri-food and animal health clients.
This is Kahn’s second start-up under the name Kahntact. He owned a similarly named agency from 1994 to 2002 before selling it to AdFarm, where he then served as a partner.
