* The advertising and marketing firm courts small and mid-sized companies that the bigger, fancier agencies don't pursue.

Keith Alper believes his ideas could revolutionize advertising and marketing for small to mid-sized businesses.

Alper, 38, is the founder and chief executive of CreativWorks, a St. Louis-based business offering one-stop advertising and marketing services through retail storefronts or the Internet.

By maintaining a reasonable overhead and removing the expensive practice of client courtship, Alper hopes to attract what he says is an underserved client base that larger ad agencies have no interest in pursuing.

"We've cut out a lot of the dancing and schmoozing," says Alper from his Richmond Heights storefront, adjacent to the Esquire Theatre. "We don't take people to baseball games. We don't buy people bottles of wine."

"Advertising and marketing is usually so mysterious," Alper said. "We want to say we have the tools and we don't care if you're a one-person company or a 500-person company, we can help you succeed."

Alper said his prices are competitive with larger ad agencies. CreativWorks offers service packages, but about 70 percent of its work is billed on an hourly basis. CreativWorks' gross billings started at about $300,000 in 1998 and the agency projects almost $800,000 in billings for this year.

CreativWorks has done work for large clients like the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Verizon. They have also done work for Harrisonville Telephone Co., a small business based in Waterloo, Ill., and several one-person companies. CreativWorks estimated there are about 24 million small- to mid-sized businesses in the United States with annual sales under $20 million.

One-third of CreativWorks' business comes from walk-ins, one-third comes from repeat business and referrals, and the remainder comes from people who found the company in the Yellow Pages, Alper said.

Brian Till, a marketing professor at St. Louis University's School of Business, believes CreativWorks' concept could offer smaller clients professional services that perhaps they would not have had otherwise.

He predicted the concept wouldn't threaten larger ad agencies that stress strategic counsel and ongoing relationships with clients. "They offer different things to different types of people ...," he said of Alper's company.

Mano Haim, a business professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis, believes CreativWorks may revolutionize the marketing and advertising business "if they provide good quality and do their job properly. Their biggest advantage is probably cost," he said.

"People ask us how much they should be spending on marketing," says Alper, "and it's sort of like asking how much you should spend for a house. How many bedrooms and bathrooms do you want? We tell them there are a lot of variables."

CreativWorks has a franchised agency in Indianapolis, and has agreemen ts in the works to open agencies in San Francisco, Boston and San Antonio.

Locally CreativWorks employs 12 marketing and advertising professionals who wear several hats, says Alper.

The company's operations are divided between its Richmond Heights lo cation and an office on Washington Avenue. Alper hopes to grow CreativWorks in its next round of funding to set up corporate headquarters in downtown St. Louis, hire approximately 100 people and build a "marketing-creative factory and call it CreativWorks Studios."

Alper says that if he is successful in bringing CreativWorks Studios to fruition, much of the creative work would be done there, while the agency's storefront would be focused more on meeting with clients and strategy development. He also hopes to add several more retail storefront locations in the St. Louis area.

Alper wants to make St. Louis the CreativWorks hub, and envisions as many as 300 locations throughout the United States within the next five years. His long-term vision is to have 1,000 locations in the United States and Canada.

Alper, who has served as international president for the Young Entrepreneurs Organization and helped found the local chapter, says he spent a lot of time asking other businesspeople what their problems and concerns were.

After spending almost two years developing his concept for CreativWorks with co-founder and President Steve Leek, Alper, Leek and CreativWorks co-founder Kevin Carlie raised $1 million from private investors to open the business.

Before launching CreativWorks, Alper co-founded Creative Producers Group Inc., a corporate communications and marketing agency. He still remains as CPG's chairman.

"What we don't want to do is grow too fast," says Alper. We're going to make mistakes, but we don't want to make mistakes on our customers' dollar. What we want to be known for is helping small businesses grow. We're not trying to be all things to all people. We want to provide the services that our clients need."

The challenge ahead for CreativWorks may be in how much they can grow with their small to mid-sized clients, observed Paddy Padmanabhan, professor of marketing for Washington University's Olin School of Business. "As their clients grow, they will need an expanded portfolio of services to fit them."