When he arrived in 1977 in Rocky Mount to take a job in radio, Skip Carney fell in love with the city.

He decided to make it his home.

Today, he owns a full-service marketing and communications agency, Carney & Co., whose tagline is, “Bold ideas for growing companies.”

He’s adopted a “visioneering” process in which he sits down with clients to develop a creative problem-solving profile known as the “Basadur Simplex.” The brainstorming sessions create outside-the-box ideas that are adopted into advertising and marketing plans, he said.

When he moved to Rocky Mount in his 20s, he took a job at WRMT, a local radio station. He soon worked his way up to assistant manager, program director, music director, morning announcer and salesman.

His radio career prepared him well for his business, which he founded in 1980, he said.

“You have to work tight deadlines and juggle a lot of things at one time (in radio), which is what we do all the time,” he said. “Plus, you have to do it with style when people are watching. Even though my degree is in radio, TV and motion pictures, I took a number of business courses in college that were in advertising. In radio, part of it is show business, but there is the business part of it, too.”

Q: What products or services do you provide?

A: We are a full-service marketing and communications agency, which is broader than an advertising agency. We do advertising, but we also do public relations, websites, package design, trade show booths.

But beyond that, we help our clients get more strategic so that we help them decide how we need to market, and how we need to go to market and what to market.

We even help them with product development. That is part of this visioneering process that we developed last fall. Visioneering is a problem-solving tool. Every business has problems. At least half the time, those are marketing-related problems, so we help them identify the problem. About 80 percent of the time businesses are working on the wrong problem, so we help them figure out the problem we should really be working on, develop creative solutions to that, and then implement from there. We call that “marketing innovation.”

Q: Who are your key leaders?

A: President Skip Carney, senior graphic designer Mike Frye and project manager Crystal Whitlark.

Q: How many people do you employ?

A: Seven.

Q: When were you established?

A: Jan. 1, 1980. I’ve been in this job more than half my life.

Q: What’s your business philosophy?

A: We absolutely, positively want to help our clients grow. It is 100 percent about that because if they make money, they grow. They do better, then we’ll do better.

Q: What makes your business unique?

A: Our marketing and innovation approach. Every other advertising agency is still all about how to do ads. We are higher level, more strategic.

Q: What changes do you expect for your company in coming years?

A: Our industry has been changing for 15 years. It is constant. I expect it to continue to evolve and to become more strategic and driven more by innovation and problem-solving.

Q: Why did you pick Rocky Mount as a place to do business?

A: I liked the town. I liked the people. It was, and I think it still is, a good place for entrepreneurial development. There is a lot of history of entrepreneurship in this town that people don’t recognize, and even now there is still a lot of it going on. It is a good place to do business. I like the location, too. I like where we live. I think it’s close enough to the water. It’s close enough to the city. It’s not a big city, but it’s a good city.

Q: How has your company grown in the last several years?

A: We’ve grown organically. We help our clients grow and that helps us grow. We get good referrals from people. People understand when they need help that we are a good company to call for that.