One company, thirty years

The plan was written at night in a Tokyo Starbucks in the mid-nineties. Back in Canada it became a real company, and the first client was a coffee shop — a Second Cup on the University of Alberta campus. From that one location the account grew to thirty-three Second Cups across Edmonton, on community investment and marketing that had not been tried there before.

Atlanta came next: media, community outreach, web, video, education. The business cards from that era already carried eventvault.com and SantaBarbarians.com on the back — two of the things we are building now are twenty-year-old ideas whose time finally came.

Today the same company operates from Santa Barbara, doing the same thing it has always done: community-first marketing, for clients and for ourselves.

Not everything has been a neighborhood association. Over the years the work has included Second Cup, Direct Energy, New York Life, and the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech athletic departments — football, basketball, swimming and gymnastics — through their marketing rights holder, ISP Sports. Along with a practice of orthopedic and cardiac surgeons, which is its own kind of marketing problem.

None of it is on offer as a logo wall. It is here because it is the honest answer to a fair question: has this been done at a size bigger than mine.

[PLACEHOLDER — Ben: confirm which of these you are comfortable naming in print. Work done through a rights holder is normally fine to cite; the surgeons stay unnamed regardless. Approximate years would help — a date makes it history rather than a claim.]

[PLACEHOLDER — founder bio. The brand brief flags this as needing Ben's sign-off on exact wording before it goes live. Two or three paragraphs, personal rather than corporate: the site is founder-forward by nature because the story is his.]