How to win a big contract

It's not like Sandy Cohen's Sarasota ad agency and communications firm was floundering in 2015.

Founded in 1992, Cohen had built the seven-employee firm, Design Marketing Group, into a MacGyver-like company that survived two recessions. Clients asked, and often relied, on DMG to do things that went far beyond collateral and media kits. That includes designing, setting up and taking down trade show booths for companies worldwide — an unusual niche. “We do so many things,” says Cohen. “I want to be the company where people call and say, 'We can't figure it out, so we want you guys to figure it out.'”

But then in 2015, he got another kind of call: An executive with FedEx, the person in charge of the Memphis-based shipping giant's Corporate Event Solutions department (trade shows and job fairs) heard Cohen and his team were good at setting up trade shows. The executive had previously chatted with a company DMG bought trade show equipment from in Oregon, North American Display, and had mentioned FedEx wasn't satisfied with its trade show vendor. North American suggested Cohen and DMG.