‘Today will be your last day …’'

It was the first time I’d ever heard those words. COVID-19, souring economic conditions, doesn’t really matter what the reasons were because I knew that for the last 5 years, I’d done exactly what I wanted to be doing - helping clients reach the next level of maturity in marketing. I got to buckle into the front seats of the quest for the ‘one ring to rule them all’ - the all-powerful, all-knowing marketing cloud of marketing clouds. I made countless new friends at work and got to work with earnest, hard-working, well-intentioned clients who are working daily to improve their customers’ experiences.

So, for now, Radical United has my undivided attention.

The idea of Radical United had been percolating for a little while already. I’d read Bob Buford’s Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance a few years ago and it propelled me to get as far as creating a name for the agency I’d wanted to build for a long time. I set up the business entity and even starting doing a little work as a side hustle to pay off the startup costs.

My first inspiration to have an agency of my own probably started with my parents. For as long as I’ve been alive (over 40 years … no, you’ll have to guess my age from there), they have been running their own travel business. Working (and living!) with my parents straight out of college for 8 years in the middle of the dot com boom and bust taught me so many lessons about the ups and downs of business, the need to persevere and the art of learning how to wear lots of hats, not because you wanted to, but because you had to. It also made a very ineligible bachelor, but I know now God was saving me for the right person to marry in 2001.

When I moved to Atlanta in 2006, I didn’t have a job yet and was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades generalist that was mostly self-taught in graphic design, desktop publishing, Filemaker Pro database and app development, web design, direct mail and an early taste of email marketing. I landed my first job at Spunlogic where I think the next entrepreneurial seed was planted. I remember Jeff Hilimire telling me the story of how he and Raj Choudhury had started the business in the basement of his parents’ house. Humble beginnings paired with grit, bumbling, stumbling, hustling kind of work and the right partners (shout out to Raghu Kakarala and Danny Davis) led to the agency being acquired and launched into an even bigger agency, Engauge.

There are more chapters and experiences that I’ll share about later that served as additional inspiration but I think the reason why I needed to mention those two chapters in particular is that I wanted to express how grateful I am for how they inspired me to take this next step with Radical United.

As I gaze into the vast unknown ahead of me, my near term goals are pretty simple: land enough work to pay my bills. But ultimately, as the business grows, I covet the chance to build a team of people who love working, playing and learning together AND that love helping and serving each other, our communities and our clients.

I expect and hope that the body of work we do is going to be a unique tapestry that builds upon a string of small victories in improving how marketing is done, so that we can have earned the trust and the right to speak to some fundamental changes we think are necessary to truly unify the customer experience across channels, departments and resources.

For the time being, I hope you’ll take a spin around the rest of the site, see the kind of work we’re wanting to do and maybe consider sharing a story.

But in the meantime, thanks for your interest in Radical United!