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Bryan Phelps, CEO of Big Leap in Lehi, poses in the front lobby Dec. 6, 2017.

Karissa Neely Daily Herald

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Big Leap in Lehi was a finalist in the Utah Business Magazine's Best Small Companies to Work For Dec. 7, 2017.

Courtesy Big Leap

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Bryan Phelps, CEO of Big Leap in Lehi, poses in his office Dec. 6, 2017.

Karissa Neely Daily Herald

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Big Leap, a Lehi-based internet marketing company, really enjoys working with Utah companies.

“We work with more than 150 companies, and a lot of them are Utah tech companies,” said Bryan Phelps, Big Leap CEO, on Wednesday. “We love the face-to-face interaction with Utah businesses. And we’ve worked for many of them for years.”

Dan Posner, Big Leap’s vice president of business development, said the reason Big Leap has long-term relationships with area companies is because Big Leap executives and employees focus on building trust.

“We have a no B.S. policy when it comes to our interactions with our clients and partners. As a culture we tell people the reality of their potential or current campaigns, and the realistic heights that they could reach rather than blowing smoke or saying whatever needs to be said to get people to sign a deal with us. As such, we have created an atmosphere where the number one thing that our clients say about us is that they trust us,” Posner said in an email. “We work hard to earn that trust, and then we continue to earn it every day by doing things the right way and sharing that through honest communication.”

Big Leap was featured on the Inc. 5000 list for the past two years, and Phelps said he expects the company will be on the list next year as well. Big Leap joins a solid crowd of other Silicon Slopes company on the Inc. list, but for a company with only about 45 employees, this is a big deal.

Big Leap was also one of the local companies awarded Thursday by Utah Business magazine for being a “Best Company to Work For.” Phelps said of all the honors Big Leap has earned, this last one is his favorite because the judging was based, in part, on surveys from actual employees.

Phelps founded Big Leap in 2008, working as the company’s sole employee for the first five years. He concentrated on helping businesses with their organic search engine optimization presence, also known as SEO. Phelps said Big Leap has many competitors in the digital marketing space, but they try to differentiate themselves through being very hands on and offering customization in their services. SEO has changed since he first started, Phelps said, and Big Leap adapted.

“SEO now is a combination of a lot of different content areas – marketing, content creation, promotion, web development and technical,” he added.

For small companies, Big Leap coordinates some or all of these things. For big companies, like Big Leap’s client Domo, they coordinate with the company’s internal marketing and branding, its public relations arm, and its web team to make sure the “all the different parts are optimized.”

“[T]here is a general lack of trust in the SEO industry as a whole,” Posner said. “We have to try and overcome this through showing as much transparency as we can in reporting, and tie our results back to specific metrics and key performance indicators.”