About Tenato Strategy
A Personal Approach to Your Business
Success is not just about how much you spend. It's about the personal impact that you make on your customers and community.
At Tenato, we take a personal approach; we talk to you, your customers and take a top-to-bottom look at your business to find opportunity.
What does opportunity look like? It's different for every business. It could be a new kind of customer, a different way to do business, the way you price, or even training your sales staff– so people remember you for the right reasons.
With honest feedback from your customers on every aspect, we'll find what needs to be done, and help you make it happen.
Table of Contents
Why offer market research, strategy and marketing services under one roof?
You need clear market research in order to make a good strategic plan, i.e. who should you target, what should you offer, how should you price it and more. And of course, you need a clear plan before you should ever start spending money on marketing, to ensure consistency, clarity and focus. But without helping you to execute your plan, how will we know whether it did its job? That's why it's so important to do research, planning and execution support under one roof.
We'll admit that it's taken decades years to build reliable resources, and there are a few areas we contract out, such as social media execution, photography and videos. Regardless, from research to strategy to execution, our team has an amazing track records. We also work closely with you, as our client, to get your team involved, providing training or guidance to keep costs as efficient as possible.
Mission
Too often, legitimately good, worthwhile companies fail because they do not understand their full value, don't have a clear strategic direction, or waste money on ineffective marketing.
Tenato's Approach
The Team
History
Jacqueline Drew founded the company in 1996, shortly after she became a new mother. She knew that starting a company would be difficult, so to inspire herself and other entrepreneurs, she branded the business START Marketing, intending to focus on helping startup companies.
The company added services as the industry evolved, from websites to online marketing to social media. We hired our first employee in 2000, and moved into our beautiful Calgary location in Inglewood in 2005.
Growth was steady until around the year 2010. Then 2008-09 recession had really taken its toll in Calgary; companies were cutting back, and much of the marketing work was going website building and social media specialty. Leads were smaller and budgets were tighter. It was time to make some changes.
Seeking out new skill sets resulted in a chain reaction that helped the company evolve. One colleague recommended rebranding to get the company into new territory, away from the impression (given by the name START) that we might only work with startup companies.
We realized that after the first 15 years in business, it wasn’t so much about starting as it was about sticking with it, i.e. tenacity.
So, in 2011, the company rebranded to Tenato Strategy Inc. Soon after, when key staff moved into BC and Ontario, we opened satellite offices to serve clients in these areas as well.
Since then, we have been honoured to work with an enormous range of clients, from award-winning tech start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, and non-profits such as universities, government organizations and charitable causes.
In 2016, Jacqueline's husband Gary, who had always worked in the background, joined the company full time. As an database expert and application engineer, Tenato has been able to greatly improve processes and take on larger volumes of work.
Their daughter Elizabeth, a mechatronics engineer, has also joined Tenato on a consulting basis as our Innovation Strategist. She has been extremely helpful in navigating new technologies such as AI. That said, Tenato's team is as hands-on as always, using good information to help companies make good decisions.