PMG Worldwide

Fast-growing Fort Worth digital media firm, into its third expansion, matches wide-open spaces to collaborative culture.

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PMG Worldwide started modestly - and, perhaps, without foretelling its future success as a digital advertising and marketing agency that would make the Inc. 5000 ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing companies - in a little 900-square-foot office in Fort Worth’s West 7th development.

Three expansions later, including a 7,000-square-foot expansion that PMG and founder George Popstefanov cut the ribbon on this summer, the Fort Worth company is sitting in a 13,000-square-foot space in the same building, One West 7th.

“We have another 18,000 square feet behind us that is available,” Popstefanov says, and he expects to need that soon.

“Nine months to a year, maybe less,” he said in an interview this summer.

PMG continues its rapid growth. The company, a full-service digital agency that does everything from social media to search engine optimization for clients like Apple, J. Crew, Travelocity and OpenTable, made the 2014 Inc. 5000 at $5.8 million in sales for the previous year, up 5,000 percent over three years.

Popstefanov, 33, a Macedonian who emigrated to the United States as a high school exchange student in Wisconsin and then later made his way to college in Oklahoma City and, finally, TCU, where he earned a degree in e-business and marketing in 2005, projects $15-$20 million in revenue this year. PMG has more than 70 employees today, and “the pace we’re on, it could be 100” next year, he said.

The company recently opened offices in New York and Los Angeles to be closer to clients and provide opportunities for employees who wanted to work in those cities and is considering other satellite offices, Popstefanov said.

PMG, working with VLK Architects, has developed a wide-open office space that - together with the various pieces of the company’s culture - fosters entrepreneurial collaboration, Popstefanov said.

A bar in the center of the room is typically covered with snacks. Whiteboard walls, lounges, couches and what Popstefanov calls “funky chairs” foster teamwork and idea generation, he says. A loft allows employees to move off by themselves. The latest expansion allowed PMG to take over the second-floor sky deck facing West 7th that belonged to Lucky Strikes, a bowling alley that closed in the building this year. It’s also dotted by cozy vignettes.

“We’ve seen a lot more cooperation; we see results for clients,” Popstefanov said.

PMG allows liberal opportunities for employees to attend conferences (“everybody can go to a conference,” Popstefanov says) and offers incentives for innovation, running an employee contest this year seeking best mobile idea for any of the company’s clients. Teams present their ideas after the holidays, and the winning team gets an all-expenses-paid, seven-day trip to a conference in Barcelona.

The company sponsors a running club; pays for employee fitness memberships; and offers weekly yoga and monthly massages, Happy Hour, and movie outings to the Movie Tavern in the West 7th development. In a nod to their philanthropic aspirations, employees are allowed to spend 10-15 hours per week “on something else” that isn’t work-related, Popstefanov says, although they often spend that time around the office.

And then there are those Beer Fridays.

“At 2 or 3 o’clock (on Friday afternoons), we get up, have a beer, and talk about the week, then we go home,” Popstefanov says.

The company’s health benefits include 12 weeks paid maternity leave - half of employees are women - and two weeks off for new dads.

Popstefanov, who started his career working for another agency before going off on his own, says he’d like to see Fort Worth turn into a technology center and idea incubator.

“I don’t necessarily have to be a pioneer, but if I end up helping Fort Worth to become that, I would like that,” says Popstefanov, who lives in Southlake and whose wife is a physician.

Noting Facebook’s recent announcement that it will build a data center in the Alliance Corridor, Popstefanov says he’d like to see something like that move closer into the city,

When he was in college, “we were debating whether people were going to buy food or shoes online,” he says. “So things have changed.”