Dave Imre and the Business of Wanting to Show Up

By the time Dave Imre was employing 40 people, his business had already outrun his imagination. There were two offices. There were $6.5 million in billings for 2005. There was, presumably, quite a bit more to arrange than when the whole enterprise consisted of himself. Asked about its size in 2006, he sounded pleasantly startled: “I’m shocked and thrilled.”

It is a useful place to begin a founder’s story. The usual retrospective turns every modest beginning into a launchpad. The basement becomes the first stage of an inevitable ascent. Imre’s surprise makes the beginning feel more like a real decision, taken by someone who could see a better way to work without knowing exactly how many colleagues it would eventually require.

He founded the agency in 1993. It carried his surname, which is a fairly direct way of accepting responsibility. Over the following decades, that name would belong to a much larger collection of people, capabilities and ambitions. The question became how much of the original working atmosphere could travel with it.

Forty people were already a surprise

Before setting up on his own, Imre had worked on the client side and at a midsize Baltimore advertising agency. He had a bachelor’s degree from James Madison University and a master’s from Ohio University. His professional education therefore included both the classroom and the experience of being inside other people’s organizations.

His own began in a basement, serving Baltimore-area clients with marketing and public relations advice. The domestic address is memorable, but the motive matters more. He wanted the freedom to build an agency according to his own judgment about clients, people and the work.

That makes the early scale worth pausing over. Forty employees meant the business had become a workplace for many people who had never made the founder’s original bargain with himself. They had their own expectations. They needed colleagues, managers and reasons to stay. A company large enough to surprise its owner was also large enough to require more than the owner’s preferences.

There is something disarming about his response to that stage. He did not retrospectively claim that 40 people had always been the target. He admitted that the business had exceeded his plans. Ambition, in this version of events, could develop after the company had already begun.

The name on the door needed other people

An agency bearing one person’s name can make everyone else disappear in the telling. Imre’s expansion requires a wider cast. Mark Eber, Crystalyn Stuart and Jeff Smokler were among the partners helping run the business. By 2019, its reported revenue for the previous year had reached $22 million.

Imre connected the next stage to hiring. The agency needed people whose different experiences would help it become the firm it wanted to be. That is a more demanding proposition than simply adding desks. A new colleague can change what an organization knows how to do, and sometimes what it thinks it ought to do.

The business also grew through acquisition. In 2018, Joseph Molina’s Los Angeles-area agency, JMPR, joined Imre. Molina and Imre had been introduced through a mutual business associate. Their conversation uncovered compatible business philosophies, an encouraging beginning for a transaction that would involve people who had spent years working together.

Molina stayed on as a president, and the Woodland Hills office remained. Imre explained that he did not want to disturb the team during its busy fourth-quarter events calendar. His stated intention was to add to what was there. For employees contemplating a new owner, restraint could be a more useful welcome gift than a freshly printed set of values.

By early 2020, the agency was adding creative and digital talent and opening a fourth office, in Philadelphia. Clients were asking for ideas and the means to put them to work. The original public relations consultancy had acquired more ways to answer.

A hometown comes with obligations

Baltimore remained part of Imre’s account of himself as the business expanded. In a public defense of the city, he described it as his hometown and said that he and his husband owned a home downtown. They volunteered on boards and donated to local causes.

He acknowledged that the city had work to do. His objection was to the impulse to disparage it from a national political platform. His response placed the responsibility closer to home: participate in improving the place you live. It was a civic argument delivered with the instincts of someone professionally attentive to what language does.

His volunteering included serving as president of the Maryland SPCA board from 2017 to 2020. His public record also includes co-founding the Maryland LGBT Chamber of Commerce and serving with the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Those commitments put his business experience to use outside his own firm.

The domestic details provide a welcome change of scale. In the NGLCC interview, Imre described a small farmette north of Baltimore shared with his husband, goats, chickens and two dogs. The accompanying photograph shows him holding the dogs, who contribute expressions of admirable seriousness.

He also described the satisfaction of being himself as an LGBT business owner. Certification had become a business differentiator, but the personal significance mattered too. The portrait contains both the executive and the person who went home to animals. Neither requires much embellishment.

The founder goes back to school

In a January 2021 conversation with interviewer Doug Simon, Imre offered communicators advice that applied rather neatly to his own career: keep learning, and be willing to reinvent yourself.

He described an industry in which changes that might once have taken years could arrive in months. His proposed response left room for experiment. People needed time to try something, learn from it and adjust. The ability to change direction was part of the work.

There was room in that outlook for familiar tools. Imre still valued television’s combination of pictures and words. A growing interest in digital channels did not oblige him to discard everything he already understood about telling a brand’s story. Judgment involved deciding what remained useful as well as learning what was new.

“In order to survive, you need to learn new things constantly.”

Dave Imre · 2021

Inside the agency, listening had practical consequences. Employee group conversations and individual meetings helped leadership understand what people needed. The firm expanded its inclusion efforts, including paid internships for people from underrepresented backgrounds and broader relationships with historically Black colleges and universities.

These were ways of making a stated preference visible in recruitment and management. An organization can praise different perspectives indefinitely. Interview pools, internships and partnerships are places where that preference starts to affect who gets through the door.

Imre’s idea of success also retained a surprisingly ordinary test: being pleased to see your colleagues each day. It is easy to imagine the approving nods that such a sentiment receives. The harder part begins the next morning, when calendars are full and someone has a difficult conversation to have.

Twenty-eight years before outside money

In 2021, the agency announced an investment from RLH Equity Partners. It had 220 people and offices in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. Its capabilities extended through strategy, creative, digital marketing, social media, public relations and analytics. Its consumer clients included John Deere, Infiniti and Dickies.

The investment brought resources for further expansion. Imre’s stated ambitions included attracting talent, supporting innovation and improving clients’ experiences while preserving the company’s culture. The challenge was recognizable from earlier chapters, now with another set of people invested in the answer.

His personal announcement supplied the history behind the transaction. This was the first outside investment in the company’s 28 years. He thanked colleagues, alumni, clients, friends and family. Then he remembered the Home Depot executive whose business he had pursued until the retailer became the agency’s first national client.

He jokingly described that pursuit as stalking and addressed the executive as John S. The recollection makes the announcement less abstract. Outside capital had arrived at a business assembled through years of individual decisions to trust it. He was still thinking about one of the early yeses.

Making room for the next CEO

In 2022, Imre’s responsibilities changed again. The agency named Neera Chaudhary CEO, and he became executive chairman. His announced role would include supporting her and the leadership team through culture and talent mentorship.

He spoke about being comfortable passing the baton because she understood the company’s culture and had begun building relationships with its people. After nearly three decades, the founder was describing how someone else could lead the business that bore his name.

The recognition arriving around that period was substantial and local. AAF Baltimore presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. PRSA Maryland followed with its own lifetime achievement honor in 2022. The city where the agency began had watched enough of the career to celebrate it.

The company has continued to change. It now lists Nadine Lafond as CEO. Its account of its values still begins with Dave Imre. In a June 2025 Pride essay, chief creative officer Christian Bauman also returned to the founder while reaffirming the agency’s commitment to inclusion and authenticity.

That is where the story becomes interesting again. A founder can choose the language at the beginning. Eventually, other people must decide what to keep doing. Imre started with a wish to work differently, found himself surprised by 40 colleagues, and helped build an organization that could appoint another CEO. His name stayed on the business. The working day became something other people would help define.