The Full OOTBI Story
Out of the Box Innovations Ltd. serves you as a project management team with its own wealth of specialists around the world. We specialise in web design, marketing and digital marketing for the energy sector, but also have clients in the areas of coaching, events and Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) training. Whether you’re looking for the absolute best, regardless of price, or extremely competitive pricing for quality work, OOTBI can impress.
Some businesspeople try to create a website and get traction in their spare time; the vast majority fail and keep failing. The ‘make money online’ niche is synonymous with the ‘network marketing’ niche – full of bad advice, wasted money and broken dreams.
At some point, every businessperson realises why they have a gardener to do the garden, a plumber to fix broken pipes, and a mechanic to take care of their car. They realise that the massive learning curve in learning to build an online brand is a full-time job in itself.
The cost of their time while doing a bad job, is more expensive than paying an expert to do it quickly and efficiently – and far
less stressful!
The start of Out of the Box Innovations Ltd. (OOTBI) was not planned. The business was set to become a holding company for Jason Lavis’ legacy online marketing website portfolio. At the time, Jason, OOTBI’s owner and managing director, was considering the manufacture of some customised white label products in China to sell on Amazon.
That was when long-term friend and neighbour, Steve Hauxwell, suggested he and Jason team up together. Steve had 30 years of oil and gas experience and was a seasoned geologist and drilling engineer. Together, they created the world’s first oil and gas recruitment agency that verified its candidates’ details carefully and created a searchable database of them. NatResPro was set up in the spring of 2015, right at the beginning of the worst oil and gas industry crash since the 80s.
Companies were laying off workers in the hundreds of thousands. Every industry person had plenty of experienced, quality candidates that were known to them and looking for work. Why bother with recruiters?
Two or three times in a row, when trying to sell the recruiting services, Jason and Steve got the same response. Words to the effect of:
‘We aren’t hiring, but I love your website. It is so clean and professional, who created it?’
In those few words, a company was born.
At the time of updating this page, (2021), the oil industry has enjoyed another upswing, followed by a pandemic related crash. Jason and Steve have parted entrepreneurial ways, but NatResPro is profitable and in the process of adding a new rig database and online community. OOTBI has stayed busy with a small but happy client base throughout the past six years.
We’ve learned a few lessons:
It’s much easier to offer new messages to the same audience than to provide a new message to a new audience. We are building a network of high calibre industry professionals from all over the world. They know that we’re involved in web design, online marketing, energy, recruitment, coaching, events and SHE training. There is enough of a crossover that we have received referrals from one business to the other.
It takes a while to become immersed in a business, to understand the people and players involved – the chances of success multiply the narrower your niche and area of expertise.
People like to deal with other people in the same industry, with the same network and inherent trust. Internet marketers and recruiters without industry knowledge get regarded with suspicion, as an alien species. OOTBI has done as much as we can to learn the industry itself.
Example of early signs that we knew that we were on the right track:
In September of 2016, Jason Lavis got awarded the position of moderator on the now-defunct Oilpro. They based the decision on his regular and selfless contributions on the forum there. His original fear was that he wouldn’t fit into a specialised community or would come across as clueless. That wasn’t the case. We can learn anything if sufficient effort is put in.
In 2017, OOTBI was invited to rebuild drillers.com, the oldest oil and gas jobs site in the world. Not only has the site been vastly improved, but Jason stayed on as webmaster and founding partner of a new oilfield services company, Drillers Partners.
In 2018, we started to publish our content on authority websites in both the energy and the digital marketing industries. We know that success in most businesses involves a merging of competencies and experience.
To be truly successful, we need to keep up with our peers in the oil, gas and solar industries, and the marketing industry, too. In May 2019, we’re proud to say that our work has gotten accepted into some of the top-tiered online marketing publications. Take a look at our trophy cabinet, in online marketing, SEO and PR circles mentions on high authority websites are the equivalent of winners medals.
Meet the Core Team
Jason Lavis
Jason has 30 years of sales and marketing experience, starting in telesales at 16 years old. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he is a non-famous university drop-out. He didn’t see any benefit in continuing his degree when his part-time work and side projects took off.
After excelling at job roles ranging from a sales representative to the marketing director, he decided that selling to millions instead of one customer at a time should be easy. This is when he discovered internet marketing – and fell flat on his face.
He spent two years before making any money, and a further two years before he could speak with confidence and pride in what he was doing. He learned all the moving parts involved in the marketing of products and services online, from social media marketing to SEO to content creation in a variety of industries. The learning curve was huge and continues to grow. What worked a few years ago (or even a few months ago) doesn’t necessarily work anymore.
Jason joined Dave Taylor of Relentless Pursuit of Perfection Ltd and is a partner in drillers.com, one of the oldest online oil and gas resource websites (Est 1996).
Peter Merrigan
Peter has been in the marketing industry since 2002, around the same time as the advent of Big Data. He specialises in digital marketing for a connected world. He tries to keep at the forefront of digital trends and is self-taught in web design, e-marketing, graphic design and social media management. He enjoys learning new technologies and studying new paths.
He has worked in a variety of sectors, both B2B and B2C, and helps clients enrich their workflows and marketing strategies with modern technology and specialist data analytics.
In more recent years, his client base has ranged from the UK to the US, and from Israel to Japan, as the world has become a global city. He is a published author and, in 2020, he became a dad for the first time when he and his fiancé adopted a neurotic collie called Hollie.
It’s not just about us
If this page has been a bit ‘me, me, me’, we apologise. The way that we work is that when you join as a client, Jason will work with you as a project manager. When we agree to a working spec, he’ll outsource many of the more straightforward but time-consuming tasks to a network of remote workers all around the world. We hire remote working writers, developers, designers and SEO experts. Many of these people are friends and have worked with Jason way before he entered the oil business.
The benefit to you is that you get the outsourcing cost benefits but have no risk of picking sub-par workers. You get an agency that can work as fast or as slow as you like and pay for work done. Many larger agencies charge substantial monthly fees and contracts just to get started. Not with OOTBI. We can handle, and welcome deals of any size. As long as the arrangement is win/win, then we will be glad to work with you.
