Business Spotlight: Winged Promotions

Owners: Amanda and Brian Hoyle

Founded: June 2005

Address: 111 S. Commercial St.,

Seymour, MO 65746

Phone: (417) 935-9464

Fax: (417) 935-1277

Web: www.wingedpromotions.com

Services/products: Embroidery, screen printing, signs, banners and car graphics

2006 Revenues: $150,000

Employees: 2

Amanda and Brian Hoyle literally began their business on a wing and a prayer.

Winged Promotions – offering embroidery, screen printing, signs, banners, car graphics and promotional items – grew out of a ministry serving the sport of winged sprint-kart racing.

Amanda Hoyle’s cousin, Dr. Shane Cook, developed a passion for the sport in 2002 while battling melanoma, the deadly skin cancer that would take his life 17 months later. Cook encouraged the Hoyles, while Brian was attending pastoral school, to join him on the racing circuit and start a ministry.

The couple caught Cook’s enthusiasm as they prayed with the drivers and talked with them about the sport they loved. Amanda Hoyle, whose background is in sales and marketing, began helping the group promote itself, in part through T-shirts and embroidered sportswear.

When Cook died of cancer in 2004 at the age of 33, the Hoyles wanted to continue promoting the sport he loved.

Winged Promotions began as a home-based business focused on promoting the Southern Missouri Outlaw Winged Karts drivers club. But by spring 2005, the business was taking over the Hoyles’ Rogersville home.

At that time, Brian Hoyle was working at the post office. Amanda Hoyle had spent the last 11 years raising twins Andreu and Ahnna, but they were becoming more independent, and Hoyle wondered if she should take the home-based business to the next level.

She sought the answer in prayer.

“We said, ‘OK Lord, where do you want us to go? What do you want us to do?’” she recalls. “The next thing I knew, the guy that did my screen printing said ‘Mandy, I’m retiring. Would you like to learn how to do it, because I’ll teach you.’”

So she took him up on it. Then her embroiderer encouraged her to learn that aspect of the business as well. The Hoyles went to St. Louis and bought an embroidery machine.

“We just felt like God was opening the doors,” Amanda Hoyle says.

When they heard about a property on the square in Seymour, Amanda Hoyle went to check it out. “It was a disaster,” she recalls. “It was falling apart.” But, “I knew the minute I opened that door and walked in, this was where I was supposed to be.”

With the help of Hoyle’s parents, Carl and Jane Harris, the building was purchased for $25,000 in October 2005. The whole family pitched in on the renovation.

“When the plaster needed to be knocked off, we had the sledgehammers,” Hoyle says. “When the floor needed to be laid, we laid it.”

“They’ve done a beautiful job on it,” says Kirk Penner, president of The Seymour Bank, which financed the construction. “It’s not what you think of when you think of an embroidery shop.”

Hoyle’s mother, Jane Harris, a veteran of retail management, decorated the storefront, and the mellow glow of antique wood and glass give it the ambiance of an upscale boutique.

The renovation was challenging in more ways than one. The couple had invested nearly $60,000 in equipment, but it sat boxed up for six months until they had space to operate it. “We bought the building in October and printed our first job in February,” Hoyle remembers.

With each new piece of equipment they’ve added, there’s been new software, new procedures and a new learning curve. Personally, Amanda Hoyle says she finds the administrative side of business a challenge. “I’m not a paper person,” she notes. “I’m not a sit-at-your-desk-and-be-the-office person.” But she’s adjusting.

“If you like what you do and you’re blessed to get to do it every day, it makes learning a whole lot easier,” she says.

Active in the Seymour Chamber of Commerce – Brian Hoyle is chamber president – Winged Promotions generates much of its business through word of mouth. Its local clients include Seymour School District, The Seymour Bank, MoDOT, the Missouri State University Equestrian Team and Mansfield School District. The company also has served customers from as far away as California and Nebraska.

But Winged Promotions biggest coup to date is a contract with Kansas Speedway. “In September, for the NASCAR race, we did shirts and hats for them, and then signs. That was our first big deal for signs,” Amanda Hoyle says.

Winged Promotions is now bidding on work for the 2008 NASCAR season, and Hoyle says she would like to see that business develop.

“In the next five years, we want to be all-out with NASCAR,” she says. “My goal now is to get my feet wet, to know what I’m doing and what they expect out of me, and then I want to go after five or six tracks instead of just one.”

Winged Sprint Karts

These machines, described by Winged Promotions as “go-karts on steroids,” are racing karts equipped with driver cages and “wings” designed to protect the driver in case of a flip. [[In-content Ad]]