Hip, Interactive Company Poised Well for Future Growth

Sitting down over coffee, Noodlehead Studios CEO Jason Montoya – a.k.a. the Noodlehead – recalled a story he’d overheard on a podcast about a company he seemed to admire, Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A.

The tale tells a lot about the young man behind the downtown Norcross-based interactive marketing firm that specializes in graphic design, Web design, video production and new media marketing.

Montoya explained that years before they’d become what they are today, Chick-fil-A was really in a tight battle with Boston Market for control of the fast-food chicken market. Boston Market was spending a bunch of money to open a plethora of new stores and everyone at Chick-fil-A was concerned they should be following suit.

“Everyone was sitting around a room discussing what needs to be done and Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy says, ‘You have it all wrong. We need to stop trying to get bigger and start trying to get better. If we get better, our clients and customers will demand that we get bigger.’”

Montoya paused for a second and looked out onto the horizon before he uttered his next thought.

“I took that at heart,” he said. “It really made me think how can I make Noodlehead better? How can I improve what we do and provide a total quality experience?”

That’s what Montoya said he ultimately wants for his small company, Noodlehead Studios, composed of nine individuals and three interns. He wants them to provide the businesses they serve with a total quality experience. That’s how you build the Noodlehead marketing brand, he said.

“You find out what the company’s goal is, what their intent is, what do they want to accomplish,” he said. “And then what are the appropriate tools to put in place to help them accomplish those goals.”

It’s this sort of thinking that has propelled Noodlehead Studios into a position of steady growth for years to come. It’s the classic American dream story, really: Boy graduates high school, gets married, moves across country from Arizona to pursue opening his dream business, starts business out of house, runs business while attending college (Montoya earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Media Arts & Animation degree from the Art Institute of Atlanta in June 2008), graduates to bigger space and succeeds.

And the vision and path to success has clearly come from Montoya, the original Noodlehead, a name he called others and then eventually himself towards the end of high school, because of his long curly hair.

“It’s catchy. It’s fun. It kind of represents who we are,” he said. “We’re fun and exciting and silly, but we also are professional and do a good job and what needs to be done to make a project work successfully.”

Noodlehead Studios, and Montoya in particular, have worked on visual graphics projects for a feature documentary film "An Inconvenient Tax" and for various television projects.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and a PBS-produced series entitled Astronomy: Observations and Theories, which won two Emmy awards, are a couple of the latter.

In doing web design and interactive business marketing work, Noodlehead Marketing has also found a niche working with small and medium-sized businesses in the home services market and the equine industry.

That’s how Montoya came to know Beth Coetzee, Noodlehead’s current VP of Operations and a former client. Coetzee graduated from Wesleyan ‘s charter class as a salutatorian and also went to Norcross High School, Pinckneyville Middle and Peachtree Elementary (School).

“When first I met Jason, I was running the marketing for Builder Specialties, a builder distributor of appliances, fireplaces, garage doors and home insulation, with corporate offices (located) in Norcross."

Burdened by a depressed housing market, Builder Specialties' leadership recognized they would need to shift their nearly 90 percent new construction business model to one with a higher focus on the replacement business and retail.

"Everything needed addressing, from the way we processed orders to the way we reached our customers,” Coetzee said. “Our Web site at the time was dated and we knew that was something needing addressing.

"We started down the redesign path slowly, guardedly. We didn't have much money to spend and we wanted to be sure we selected the right partner to walk that path with us," she continued.

“Jason was so young, but such a presence, though! He asked thoughtful and probing questions about our situation, what we were trying to accomplish and the resources at our disposal. He asked not only about our budget, but also about our technological aptitudes and workloads," she said.

“Noodlehead Marketing’s mission is to help company’s grow their revenues and their brands by doing intentional web sites, powerful videos and by running effective, smart SEO campaigns,” Montoya said. 

He paused and looked out on the horizon again.

“The cool thing about where I’ve been is I’m defining these things as I think they should be and not on a stereotype about how they should be as defined by the industry or others….We make sure everything we do meets or exceeds the industry’s standards, but we don’t stop there, we go above it. We’re always trying to make sure we do that.”