About Mirex Marketing

Some early Mirex LLC inventory, an original Xbox with games and accessories.

The two names, Mike and Rex, were combined to create a made-up word, Mirex, and that’s about as far as that business got. However Rex did spend a great deal of time over the following 10 years learning various aspects of internet marketing such as building websites, ecommerce, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, info products, affiliate marketing, and creating content (content is king).

People sometimes speculate what the word “Mirex” means. If you look it up on Wikipedia it’s a banned pesticide. All kinds of meanings could have been made up for it. One possibility was that it’s meant to say “My Rex”, as in all marketing managers who are part of the company could be nick-named a “Rex”, and clients of Mirex Marketing can look at their marketing manager and consider him or her to be one of their own, with a vested interest in making sure their business succeeds. The use of “i” instead “y” simply follows modern branding trends when using made-up words, such as “Wii” instead of “we” or “lyft” instead of “lift”. The “i” in Apple products (specifically the iMac) originally stood for “internet”, so that’s appropriate, right? Another possibility was breaking it up into M-I-Rex which could stand for Marketing Internet King (since “Rex” means king in Latin). However, the word is just a made-up word, combining the names Mike and Rex, and when Rex was ready to start a digital marketing agency, he simply used the LLC that was already in place.

Yet, being a made-up word was useful to ensure that things like the desired domain name and social media handles were available, which is why a lot of modern brands use made up names and alternate spellings. Having an “x” in the name is also supposed to be beneficial or exciting for a brand, though it’s usually at the beginning of the brand name – Xbox, X Games, Xtreme, etc. It was also beneficial that it started with an “M” because combining it with “Marketing” made it an alliteration, which is one of the tricks of making a brand more memorable. (Stan Lee would have been proud).

After finishing college and a graduate program in 2013, Rex was out of work (which was a hard knox life lesson – simply having a degree does not equal marketability in the workplace). One day he needed his car fixed and Google Maps took him to a car shop that was permanently closed. He was getting worried about driving the car anywhere else. Across the parking lot was another repair shop with two technicians inside. They were the owners of Crawford’s Auto Repair. “They were as nice and welcoming as any business I had ever interacted with, and I should have known to expect that from a small business compared to a franchise or corporation.”

“It was a very lucky accident (I consider it a blessing) to find them because not only were they excellent technicians with fantastic skills, they were willing to trade for digital marketing services and their business was practically non-existent online. They had only been in business for a couple of months so it could have been understandable, but knowing them now, I’m guessing it would have taken them a while to figure out how important digital marketing is verses traditional marketing. Like many business owners their forte was the service they were providing, not marketing and certainly not the ‘interweb’. On the other hand, I had spent 10 years learning internet marketing, so it was a very equitable trade.

“I got to work building them a new website and helping them generate positive reviews. I worked with one of them to create better content than what most other auto repair shops have, even today over 10 years later, which is mostly due to other shops using the cookie cutter programs provided by their shop management software, instead of putting the effort into creating custom, branded content. It’s also the same mistake a lot businesses are making and will make with AI). I also did some SEO and social media for them. Within 6 months their business had tripled and the two of them were working at capacity. One of them had owned a small shop before and said that he didn’t intend to be that busy for another three years. They soon decided to hire another technician, so one of them came to me one day and said, ‘here’s $1,000, keep building our workflow enough to keep another technician busy’. No one had ever handed me $1,000 before and said here’s the goal you take care of it. I didn’t know how little that was for a business to spend at the time, but it was a lot of money to me, and I felt honored to have earned that kind of trust. I used it as an initial budget for a Google Adwords campaign and we didn’t have any problem getting the additional work for the new technician.

The first “location” for Mirex Marketing – a desk at Crawford’s Auto Repair.

Here are some other highlight’s in the history of the business and it’s founder. These are just some fun an interesting things that have helped shape the business.

In 2013, prior to starting Mirex Marketing, Rex hired an overseas company to build a website for another business venture. “At the time I didn’t know it, but they charged way more for a project of this scope than they should have. They didn’t understand the scope to begin with and made promises they didn’t keep with regards to how the site was to be built. They were never on schedule with the project. And they never honored their money-back guarantee.” This helped shape a lot of the policies of Mirex Marketing even before it began as a business. It also helps to have experience from both sides of these types of projects, as a customer and as a service provider.

Rex was a member of the Superstition Springs Networking group with the Mesa Chamber of Commerce from the inception of Mirex Marketing in 2014 to December 2024 (when the chamber closed the group to combine and restructure all their networking groups). He has also participated in multiple other networking groups through the years. “The first 6 months in business, networking with other business owners taught me more about business and the real world than all years of undergraduate and graduate school combined. There are things you just can’t learn in a textbook, especially when it comes to building professional relationships.”

In 2015, Rex provided a guest lecture to a marketing class at ASU after the professor of the class became a customer at Crawford’s Auto Repair and saw the success we were having.

In 2018 Mirex Marketing was given the Spirit of The Fight Award from the Mesa Chamber of Commerce. This is one of the more unique awards that Mirex Marketing has won or earned over the years.

For about two years, Rex was on the board of a nonprofit organization that made efforts to teach business skills to youth in middle school and high school. Rex provided some input for the marketing portion of the curriculum, yet the experience of learning some nonprofit operations was also invaluable. The organization attempted to get Dawn Wells, best known for her role as Mary Ann in the old TV show Gilligan’s Island, to be their spokesperson. Some members of the board traveled to Hollywood to have dinner with her and make the pitch. She did not end up becoming the spokesperson, but she was supportive of our efforts. “This was one of my more favorite professional memories; she was a very sweet person. RIP Dawn Wells”.

For about two and half years Rex was a member of a real estate investor training organization. The subject matter was akin to Rich Dad, Poor Dad and other real estate investor training programs, though it was much less corporate and operated only locally. The program was an opportunity to observe and create marketing campaigns of various types, both online and offline, some related to real estate itself, some related to targeting investors. It included a wide range of strategies, from gorilla marketing tactics such as placing bandit signs, to much more advanced marketing such as TV advertising. It also had significant sales training, which a lot of business owners must understand is different from marketing. Sales and marketing should be synergistic, but one does not replace the other.

In 2019 Rex created a nonprofit organization, NPO Musketeers. Part of the purpose of it was to offer free management of the Google Ad Grant to other nonprofit organziations. NPO Musketeers is not currently an active nonprofit, though Mirex Marketing will still provide this specific service to qualifying nonprofits for free with a limited capacity. (Anyone interested in joining a nonprofit whose mission is to help the local economy by supporting other nonprofits, startup businesses, and individuals who need training to improve their marketability in the workplace should contact Rex).

In late 2020 (the year of COVID), Rex became a business broker with Associated Business Brokers and moved in to his new partner’s office in San Tan Marketplace. Being a business broker for about two and half years was a great experience for learning various aspects of business operations in multiple industries and valuing a business to sell it for a fair asking price. Yet, in addition to that, it was also a period of growth for Mirex Marketing since it offered a more professional environment to consult clients. This is still the current location for Mirex Marketing, even though the business brokerage is currently not in operation.

In Feb 2024 Mirex Marketing had it’s 10-year anniversary.

In early 2025, Rex partnered with Scott Taylor, one of the best networking professionals in the Phoenix area, to create ProREAL Networking, a business networking organization comprised of exclusive networking groups.

Behold

The Mirex Marketing Logo

While the “Mirex” name is simply a made-up word that happens to follow some beneficial branding tactics mentioned above, there was a lot more thought and symbolism that was put into the logo of Mirex Marketing. Clients who come to us for branding and logo design can have the same effort put into their brands as well. Simple, yet symbolic is suggested.

Mirex Marketing is truly a boutique marketing agency with a team of professionals who are ready to serve you, each in their area of expertise. While Mirex Marketing has an actual location where clients are welcome to come and discuss their marketing, most work is done by video conference, and Rex is the only one who works at that location. All other team members work remotely, some domestic, and some foreign. Some have been with Mirex Marketing for years while others might be recently hired, though they are each vetted. While each photo accurately represents a real person, Rex’s name is the only one that is accurate. The nature of the business demands this to avoid employee poaching. Yet, here it is sufficient to say that each individual is well-trained and all services are quality controlled by your account manager.