Twenty Years of ruckus

July 17, 2026

What's in a Name?‍

There's a word hiding inside our name.

Not the obvious one — not the disruption, the beautiful productive chaos that the word ruckus conjures. The other one. The quiet one.‍

u.‍

It’s always been there. And after 20 years, I finally understand that it was always the point.

ruckus was never just about what we made. It’s about who we made it with, who we made it for and who we became in the making. The u came first — the clients who believed before we had much to show them, the partners who grew alongside us, the community that claimed us as its own. The us came after: the accumulated body of people whose particular gifts, assembled over two decades, made ruckus more itself with every contribution.

Twenty years is a long time to do anything. It’s an especially long time to run an independent — or as I’ve come to think of it, an interdependent — agency in the volatile, beautiful, unforgiving world of marketing and communications. Many don’t make it. The ones that do rarely arrive at the two-decade mark unchanged.

We are not unchanged. We are better for all the change.

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This is not a celebration of survival. It’s a reflection on what resilience actually means when you’ve lived inside it long enough to see it clearly — and a genuine act of gratitude for every person, organization and relationship that made ruckus not just sustainable, but significant.

Relentless Resilience

I have been thinking about the word resilience lately, specifically about how misunderstood it can be.

We tend to treat resilience as a form of endurance.The ability to absorb punishment and return to where you started. Bounce back. Hold the line. But 20 years of running ruckus has taught me something different: resilience is not about returning. It is about becoming. Every difficulty absorbed, every crisis navigated, every reinvention forced upon us by circumstance, none of it left us where we began. It left us further along. Changed. Expanded. More capable than we were before.

Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal, whose research on resilience has shaped my thinking recently, calls this “bouncing forward.” I recognize it immediately; it’s exactly what ruckus has done.

Early on, there was a cardboard box that taught us this.

Our client, Nemours (Reading)BrightStart!, a program dedicated to identifying and supporting young learners with dyslexia, dropped it at our door with a request and a timeline. Inside: pipe cleaners, laminated pages, a set of books and lesson plans and tactile learning tools that teachers had made and were already using with children who were working twice as hard as their peers just to learn to read. The ask was to design a formal version of the curriculum and prepare it for licensing to a nearly learning educational resource company. We had a couple of months.

What followed was one of the most complete expressions of what ruckus is that I have ever witnessed. Every member of the team was drawn in — project management, copywriting, design, illustration, production, proofing, kitting. Everyone brought not just their professional skills but their personal selves: their aesthetic sensibilities, their memories of learning to read, their instincts about what a child would actually reach for, what felt safe, and what parents and educators would actually use. We did not divide the labor and hand it off. We made it together.

What we delivered exceeded the client’s expectations. The curriculum was licensed. It still sells today. Somewhere, right now, a child who struggles to decode the written word is learning to read with something that was built in our little shop from a cardboard box and the full force of a team that cared.

That’s resilience. Not endurance, but investment. The willingness to bring everything you have to something that matters, because you understand — even when no one has said it aloud — that this is exactly what you are here to do.

It wasn’t the only time we’d need that understanding. We would need it when the world stopped.

In March of 2020, ruckus was nearly 14years in. We had built something solid: growing steadily, serving clients we believed in, operating from a foundation of relationships that had compounded over more than a decade. We were, by every reasonable measure, on our way.

And then everyone went home.

We took a few days to hold our breath, track our receivables and payables for the next month, and reckon honestly with what the next quarter might look like. Or the next year. Or longer. No one knew. I sent the team home to work and then we did what ruckus has always done: we figured it out together. New processes. New rhythms. New ways to stay connected to each other and to work that suddenly had to happen across kitchen tables and makeshift home offices and the particular loneliness of a screen.

For me, personally, that year carried a weight that went beyond the professional. I had spent the six years prior caring for my dad — every weekend I could manage, as much time as possible alongside the work — after he suffered a massive stroke in 2014. He was, in every meaningful sense, my hero. He had owned a small business of his own for nearly 40 years. He was my motivator, my accountability partner, and through the long years of his recovery, my closest friend. When the pandemic closed the nursing home doors in late March, we were reduced to window visits and once-weekly FaceTime calls. The distance was its own kind of grief, layered on top of everything else.

He passed at the end of 2020.

In the weeks that followed, I went quiet in a way I rarely allow myself. And in that quiet, I asked myself the most honest question I have ever had to answer: Was I working this hard to prove something to him? Or was this drive — this relentlessness — mine all along?

It took a few weeks. But the answer came.

It was mine. It had always been mine. He had simply been one of the first people to see it clearly and hand it back to me.

My dad was a private man. He would not want much said here. But I will say this: before there was a team to curate, someone curated me. My parents gave me every tool I would eventually need — work ethic, accountability, belief that small businesses are not small things, and the understanding that how you treat people is the only legacy that actually lasts.

I turned that clarity into fuel. Not for myself alone— for all of us.

What emerged from that season was ruckus's first-ever strategic plan. Not a document handed down from the top, but a process that engaged every member of the team in discovery, in priority-setting, in claiming ownership of where we were going together. Three strategic pillars emerged: Operational Excellence, Talent Development and Brand Clarity. And within each, team members became Champions — not implementers of someone else's vision, but architects of their own.

Our shared motivation became this: to go from good to great together. To make ruckus less about me and more about we.

We did. And we continue to.

The five years since have been the strongest in ruckus’s history — not despite the difficulty that preceded them, but because of what that difficulty required us to become.

That is what resilience looks like from the inside. Not a return. A becoming.‍

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Relentless Relationship

We used to say — perhaps a little too proudly — that we never had to chase business.

No cold calls. No RFP chasing. No outbound prospecting campaigns. For most of ruckus’s 20 years, the work came to us because the relationships brought it. A client referred a colleague. A community partnership opened a door. A conversation at a board meeting became a decade-long engagement. The business grew the way trust grows: slowly, invisibly and then suddenly all at once.

I do not say this to boast. I say it because it is the most honest proof I have for what I believe to be true: relationship is not a strategy, it is a practice. And like all practices, it requires relentlessness.

ruckus has always operated in what I think of as the “quality-of-life” verticals — health, education, arts and culture, and the built environment. These are not random categories. They are, at their core, the systems through which human beings experience dignity, belonging and possibility.

Working at these intersections for 20years has taught us that our clients are not our clients in any transactional sense. They are our collaborators in a larger project that has real and lasting impact. And the relationships that have endured — that have grown, evolved, deepened — are the ones where that understanding was mutual.

Nemours Children’s Health has been a client since day one. What we have built together over two decades is not a body of work. It’s a body of trust — accumulated through hundreds of decisions, difficult conversations, creative risks, and the particular intimacy of knowing each other’s ways of thinking well enough to anticipate what the other needs. GreenPointe has been another such relationship for more than a decade — one built on shared vision and the willingness to think together rather than simply transact.

There were early believers, too, whose faith in us before we had much history to offer remains one of the most meaningful gifts we have received. Baptist Health. Christ Episcopal Church.Community Hospice & Palliative Care, whose connections have continued to flow through every subsequent evolution. River Garden. Donahoo & McMenemy. Healthy Jacksonville. Guardian Catholic School. The First Tee. Northeast Florida Healthy Start. Mitchell Learning Academy.United Way of Northeast Florida. Each of these relationships seeded others. Each one is part of a living network that compounds, invisibly, in ways we are still discovering.

You know who you are. And you know what we made together. This essay can exist, in no small part, because you believed first.‍

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‍Interdependence

I’ve spent 20 years calling ruckus an independent agency.

Now, I’m not sure that was quite right.

Independent implies self-sufficiency. It suggests that the value originates here and flows outward — that we bring the expertise and the client receives it. But that’s not how it has ever actually worked. The best work we’ve done was always made, not delivered. Made in the space between us and the people weserve. Made from the friction and generosity of genuine collaboration. Made possible only because both parties were willing to need each other.

Interdependent is the truer word.

And it’s not just how we work with clients. It’s how we are constituted as a team. It’s how the verticals we serve relate to one another. It is (what I’ve come to believe) the secret architecture of anything that lasts.

ruckus has been built from gifts. Specific, particular, irreplaceable human gifts that no job description could have anticipated and no org chart could fully contain.

There were the original three: sitting in one room, passing a cordless phone between us, surrounded by hand-me-downfurniture, figuring out what we were. There was Brian, who gave us 15 years of patience and precision and a soundtrack that made the work feel like something worth showing up for. Steve, whose boundless energy and sensitivity to the world elevated everything he touched for 15 years. Lee, who brought fiscal peace and the kind of grounding wisdom — with a healthy dose of Patricia’s bonus “momming” — that keeps an organization honest with itself.

There was Kathy, a friend always there when needed — part-time, one-time, some-time, full-time — and never without the sillies that remind you why the work is supposed to be joyful. Rick, a stalwart in every sense: willing to write, research, meet for breakfast, or simply be present in whatever form the moment required. Chris, who brought our records into the century we were actually living in and gave us the operational foundation to grow into. And Meghan and Logan who pioneered capabilities we did not previously have and expanded what ruckus could offer the world.

And before all of them, behind all of them: my 6 Ms. The advisory board that kept me grounded, challenged and honest— Mom, Margaret, Mary, Marty, Maggie and Melanie. Women whose wisdom I sought out because I knew, from the beginning, that what I did not know was at least as important as what I did.

To Ali, Esther, Sam, Carol, Jacqui — rest in heaven — Kelly #1, Amy, Charlie, Melissa, Emily #1, and every project and client manager who treated people the way they wanted to be treated: you shaped ruckus’s culture as much as anyone. You are in the work. You are in the relationships. You are in the 20 years.

Today, our team’s gifts (and GIFs) are shared through Dan (over a decade in!), Lisa, Finn, Sarah, Alex, Elliot, Lauren, Kelly #2, Alexandra, Aaron, Emily #2, Reese, Eryn and Hannah. Each of them part of the story that happens when the right people find each other — whether by intention, by fortune, or by something that feels, in retrospect, like it could only have been both — and choose to build something together that none of them could have built alone.

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‍What Comes Next

Twenty years is not a destination. It’s a vantage point.

From here, I can see clearly what I could not have seen at the beginning: that the resilience was always relational, and the relationships were always what made us resilient.

And the interdependence (of our team, our clients, our community, and the very sectors we serve) is not a constraint.It’s our greatest strength. It’s the thing that makes ruckus matter beyond any individual project or campaign or deliverable — or frankly person. We are woven into something larger than ourselves.