Andy Thoms once made a stadium out of the stairs in his parents’ house. His younger brother David remembered waking to a repeated thumping, then discovering that Andy was running up and down them to train for football. There were also peculiar training shoes, which David thought looked like moon shoes. The equipment was memorable. So was the determination behind it.
A staircase has certain advantages over a grand plan. It is already there. You can start today. It also has the disadvantage of announcing your ambition to everyone trying to sleep. In David’s account, Andy wanted to play college football and treated preparation as something he could arrange himself, one trip up the steps at a time.
Years later, the same brother watched Andy and his wife Brittany build See.Spark.Go from their living room. His assessment emphasized practice, reinvestment and commitment. These were family observations, affectionate and close to the action. They offer an unusually domestic beginning for a business story: before the offices and the client meetings, there was someone making use of the stairs.
Today, Andy is co-founder and CEO of the public relations and marketing agency in Athens, Georgia. His work centers on strategy, business development and relationships. Those responsibilities sound tidy on a biography. The more interesting question is how a person who spent so much effort getting himself ready came to spend a career helping other people get ready, too.
A third person in the living room
Andy and Brittany launched the agency in July 2007. Their starting team had three members: the two founders and an intern. A student was part of the operation before there was much operation to speak of. That detail deserves its place alongside the founding date. An internship can be an addition to a mature company; here, it belonged to the original arrangement.
The partnership brought together different backgrounds. Andy graduated from the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences in 2002. Brittany, a 2004 Grady College graduate, had worked in national-brand public relations. They had met in Athens and wanted to return. The city was part of the reason to build the business, rather than merely the address where it happened.
In a 2021 reflection, Brittany described how much communications had changed since her first agency job: a flip phone, a desktop computer, the worry that an important email might arrive during a coffee run. By then, clients operated in a world of continuous news, social platforms and influencers. A firm founded in 2007 would have to keep learning while the tools around it changed.
The founders’ complementary interests help explain the shape of the partnership. Storytelling needed an organization capable of supporting it. Entrepreneurship needed something worthwhile to sell. Neither task ends when a business opens its doors. Both recur with every hire, every new client and every promise made on the firm’s behalf.
The invitation to the big meeting
Former employee Cameron Cortman remembers conversations with Andy about how to conduct himself at work and become someone colleagues would bring into an important meeting. He credits both founders with helping establish the direction of his marketing career. The relationship continued beyond that first job. For a business that sells communication, this is a telling kind of instruction to leave behind.
There is a great deal packed into that invitation. Someone has decided you will be useful in the room. They trust your judgment and expect you to represent the work well. A junior colleague can be technically capable and still need help understanding how that confidence is earned. Cortman’s recollection suggests Andy took time to discuss that quieter part of professional life.
The lesson is practical. A career develops through assignments, but also through access to situations where decisions are made. Learning to listen, prepare and speak with care can change which situations become available. A mentor who explains those habits gives a younger colleague a way to act on ambition instead of simply admiring it.
This is where the staircase story becomes useful again. Preparation has a visible portion and a less visible one. The finished presentation is visible. The repeated effort that makes someone dependable is harder to photograph. Andy’s early training and Cortman’s later recollections sit years apart, but both concern the work that happens before the consequential moment.
“What better time to start dreaming than during your time as a university student?”Andy Thoms, 2019
A student gets a real assignment
By January 2019, See.Spark.Go had employed more than 100 University of Georgia interns since its founding. The agency then had 24 full-time employees. Kaci Pollack was one example of a student who became an employee. Interns also heard guest speakers on budgeting and résumé development, subjects that acknowledged the person behind the prospective professional.
Andy described the exchange as beneficial to both sides: students could observe agency operations, while the firm gained their knowledge of emerging trends. His explanation avoided treating youth as a charitable project. Students brought something the business could use. That makes a different sort of welcome possible, one based on contribution as well as instruction.
The current internship program still asks applicants to demonstrate communication through a personal pitch. A video, slideshow, podcast or other format can serve. The work itself includes media lists, press materials, editorial calendars, campaign ideas and analytics. These are ordinary agency tasks, which is precisely their value. An assignment with an actual audience gives classroom skills somewhere to land.
For a student, the first media list may look less glamorous than the finished campaign. Lists do not usually get applause. Yet accurate names, careful writing and sound reporting make the more visible work possible. The program’s emphasis on doing puts that relationship within reach: craft is made of specific responsibilities, completed well enough that someone else can rely on them.
The owner on the other side of the counter
Andy’s entrepreneurial life has extended beyond the communications agency. In April 2017, he appeared on CEO Exclusive Radio alongside uBreakiFix co-founder Justin Wetherill. Andy was introduced as a store owner. A 2019 franchise disclosure document also listed Andy and Brittany among owner contacts for Georgia locations. The distinction matters: Wetherill co-founded the repair brand; Andy operated within its franchise network.
A store counter and an agency account bring different daily demands. The connection worth considering is responsibility to a customer who expects a result. An owner has to make the advertised promise work in practice. That perspective gives business development a concrete question to ask: what does the person paying for the service actually need to happen?
The radio appearance adds dimension to Andy’s role at See.Spark.Go. He has participated in a business where the service is tangible enough to carry through the door. Communications work has to make its own results understandable. The two settings suggest useful territory for an entrepreneur interested in relationships, operations and growth, without making every venture into the same story.
Growing without losing the room
See.Spark.Go now lists Athens, Atlanta and Nashville as its three regional locations. Its published company overview reports 45 full-time team members and a 98 percent client-retention rate. Those are the agency’s figures. They describe the organization Andy helps lead, rather than a personal scorecard or an independently audited measure of his contribution.
The business presents its method as three steps: identify a story, develop the strategy and measure the growth. PR, content, creative work and performance marketing share that framework. For a CEO concerned with organizational development, the challenge is to make those disciplines work together while preserving accountability for the outcome.
The agency’s growth announcement also describes a ten-year plan that includes building expertise, investing in people and developing substantial service areas. Andy has publicly shared recruitment posts, including one from Brittany that expressed an ambition to double revenue over four to five years. An ambition is a destination on a planning document. The daily route still runs through finding and developing people who can deliver the work.
That creates a revealing tension for any founder. Early culture travels by proximity: people hear how you handle a conversation and see which details you care about. Across offices, proximity becomes harder to provide. Training, clear responsibilities and experienced colleagues have to carry more of the message. The small company’s habits need a larger means of transmission.
Brittany’s recollection of an early employee who dressed for “sassy Thursday” offers a lighter reminder of what can be lost in solemn descriptions of culture. The colleague wore cheetah print and pink lipstick to energize her pitching day. Workplaces acquire their character through such particulars. A spreadsheet can count employees; it has less to say about what makes them eager to begin.
A ballpark-sized idea of success
Andy also serves on the stewardship team at Athens Church, whose remit covers finances and personnel. That role places organizational responsibility in a community setting. It fits the broader interest in helping people develop that appears throughout his public career, while remaining a distinct commitment from his work as an agency executive.
There is another setting where preparation continues: sports with his sons, Carson and Callan. Andy coaches, follows Georgia football and describes weekends at the lake or a ballpark. The family details bring the biography back to a recognizable scale. An agency can work across the country while its founder’s weekend still revolves around a game.
The preferred phrase on his biography is brief: “Fired up!” It belongs comfortably beside a football interest and a coaching role. As advice he values puts it, “Fear is normal. Success is an option. Courage is developed. Trust is earned.” Enthusiasm may start a conversation. Developed courage and earned trust imply something that takes longer.
His career’s most persuasive evidence is found in the people who remember being helped before they were established. The first intern. A student who became a colleague. A former employee who remembers how to get invited into the room. These are specific relationships, and they make his stated interest in other people’s potential easier to understand.
The family staircase was a place to practice for a future opportunity. In Athens, Andy and Brittany built a company where practice could become paid work, and where an early professional conversation could stay with someone years later. The scale changed. The question remains pleasantly concrete: when the next opportunity arrives, who will be ready to take it?