He Went Up Against Goliath... and Won.

Ian Ashland's job is to walk into the rooms where the other side has more money.

As head of business development for Acadia Marketing of Maine, the Portland agency that builds websites, search campaigns and lead systems for local businesses, Ashland competes for clients against national agencies with national budgets and sales teams many times Acadia's size. He keeps winning.

He does it while running a company of his own.

A publisher's eye

Ashland owns Electron Publishing LLC, a Portland company registered with the Maine Secretary of State as a creative consulting firm specializing in storytelling and branding. It operates as a marketing and publishing house, and its work has included website development alongside Acadia.

A storyteller's instinct carries straight into his work for Acadia.

The door-opener

Ashland pioneered the way Acadia finds and wins new clients. The agency leads with something useful: owners are offered a free Website Report Card, which grades how their site performs, and a Local Search Volume Report, which shows how many people in their area are searching for what they sell.

The tone is deliberately unhurried.

"I simply enjoy meeting other business owners, learning what they're building, and seeing if there are opportunities to help," Ashland wrote in an outreach letter this summer. "Sometimes there are. Sometimes there aren't. Either way, I always enjoy the conversation."

From there the process is plain and written down. There is a discovery call, then a proposal, then a recap that sets out a 90-day plan, the pricing and the onboarding steps, from where to drop the company's photos to which accounts Acadia needs access to.

Fighting the good fight

How does a small Portland agency win business against national firms? Ashland's answer is to make the work simple for the owner.

"Our job is to make the digital side cleaner, easier to navigate, easier to find, easier to manage, and ultimately better at turning the people looking for those services into actual customers," he wrote to one prospective client this month.

The track record

The approach is working. New clients signed on in September, including a DJ and audiovisual company that hired Acadia to research, redesign and optimize its online presence, and more proposals are out this fall.

What he brings to the table

Goliath still has the bigger budget. What Ashland brings to the table is harder to buy: a publisher's sense of story and a salesman's patience.

For the Maine owners who sit down across the table from him, that has turned out to matter more.