Editor’s note: This story was written by Cassandra Sepp.
Two-hundred and fifty-four dollars, a phone, computer, and printer are all that Michael Grego needed to start his own digital marketing company. Grego is a co-owner of Provare Digital Marketing in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and was the PR/Business club’s first guest virtual speaker of the year.
Grego attended Morningside University in Iowa and graduated with a degree in Mass Communications. After graduation he worked a wide variety of jobs. His first job was at Winona Radio. Following Winona Radio, he got into the sports marketing field. He started off doing sales and advertising for the semi pro football team, the Mississippi RoughRiders. Grego also did some advertising and sports management work at this time for professional arena football. In 2018, Grego started working for a company called Fairway, a billboard company in La Crosse, doing their online advertising. Grego said that 2018 was the year internet ads started to take off and become affordable for businesses and he saw it as the future of advertising. Grego worked at Fairway for six months before it got sold and his position was cut.
Grego didn’t let this setback in his career stop him. He took his clients and decided to go off on his own. He had started Provare in 2010 as a side job and began pursuing it full time. Provare took off so much that Grego had to find a business partner to help handle all the business. In the last year and a half, they have had three quarters of a million dollars in revenue.
“The beauty of online is you don’t need a lot to get going, you just need the confidence to go on your own,” Grego stated during the Zoom presentation. Grego explained to students that if they are interested in getting involved in digital marketing, they need to have a plan and a specific target. Grego also said that if you want to succeed you need to do more than what you are getting paid to do and you need to prove that you know what you are doing.
Grego also talked about the positives of pursuing a career in digital marketing right now. Two of the things he said were, “Online marketing is the most targeted marketing you can do right now,” and that there is “no other medium that can give you the tracking that digital can.”
Grego gave lots of advice and encouraged students interested in learning more or with questions to reach out to him. The PR/Business club plans on having more speakers in the future.