By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
“Life moves at the speed of relationships,” a speaker said recently.
Human interactions and connections are so important to life and to business. Today we’ll meet a Kansas rural-preneur who has found relationships to be fundamental as his business has grown.
Tim Strathman is founder and owner of the marketing agency 6S Creative. Strathman grew up in Bern near his grandparents’ farm.
Strathman came from a truly rural school. “I had 10 in my graduating class,” Strathman said. “In our small school, teachers had to cover a lot of different subjects.”
Strathman took an introductory web design class and found that he really enjoyed the technology.
“Is there an advanced level to this?” he asked at school. The teacher convinced the principal to have Strathman help teach the class the next year.
By Strathman’s senior year, he was building websites for local businesses. He studied software development at Manhattan Tech before marrying his wife and moving to Centralia.
Strathman worked as a web developer for a local manufacturing company. One day the owner came in and said: “You know how to fly a drone, right?” Strathman said yes, to which the owner responded, “I need you to fly to Oklahoma and shoot aerial footage of our product in the field.”
Strathman did so and found he really enjoyed it.
By 2017, he was working for a Kansas City technology start-up company but didn’t enjoy commuting to the city. He decided to approach the company about doing the marketing for them on his own.
“I told my wife, ‘I’ll either not have a job or I’ll have a client,’” Strathman said.
In the end, he got a client. Company leaders agreed to have him do their marketing for them on his own. In 2022, he went full-time with his own marketing agency.
Why name it 6S Creative? “Our initial is S and my wife and I have four kids so there are six in our family,” Strathman said. “Besides, if you say 6S fast, it sounds like ‘success’ and that’s what we want for our clients.”
“It took off faster than I ever would have thought,” he said.
Today, 6S Creative is a full-service marketing agency, offering branding, web design, content creation, digital strategy, video production, and more. The company also does photography and graphic design. “It’s been really exciting,” Strathman said. “I enjoy it more than anything else I’ve done.”
While 6S Creative works will many industries, the company’s sweet spot appears to be small companies in agriculture, which Strathman loves. “Ninety-five percent of our work is in the ag industry,” Strathman said.
“Companies will tell us, ‘We worked with an agency out of Chicago or Dallas; they were great creative people, but they didn’t know agriculture. You people (at 6S Creative) understand agriculture and manufacturing.’”
His work takes him across the nation. “I’ve been in a different state every week since the first of April,” Strathman said.
Testimonials include;
- “The team at 6S Creative is unmatched in their understanding of the ag industry, design skills, and genuine service.”
- “Tim and his team are absolutely fantastic!”
Strathman hopes to share more stories of agriculture. “I’d like to do podcasts and videos that share these fascinating stories and build connections with the public,” he said.
One of his videos featured a Kansas rancher with a frozen mustache, tending his cattle on a brutally cold day. “The rancher said, ‘We work too hard for people to put ketchup on their steaks,’” Strathman said. “That video has gotten 2 million views.”
As 6S Creative has built relationships with clients, other companies have come to them. That’s good to see in a rural community such as Centralia, population 485 people. Now, that’s rural.
For more information, see www.6screative.com.
“Ag is a relationship business,” Strathman said.
We commend Tim Strathman and all those involved with 6S Creative for making a difference with their creativity in marketing, while authentically connecting with clients. After all, life moves at the speed of relationships.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at https://www.huckboydinstitute.org/kansas-profiles/. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
