David Anderson and the Art of Leaving the Room

On October 1, 1998, David Anderson knocked on Roger Hurni’s door. A small brick house was the setting for the first day of Off Madison Ave. Their wives knew about the venture. Most of the world had yet to receive the memo. For a business devoted to getting attention, it was a remarkably quiet entrance.

Hurni’s recollection of that morning gives the partnership a pleasingly ordinary beginning. Before the acquisitions and the larger client roster, there were two people in a garage. The agency name had emerged from dinner with their wives. Years later, Anderson still declined to settle the question of which of the four deserved naming rights.

Anderson had already worked around one of the most conspicuous offices on earth. Presidential advance taught him how to arrange an event so that somebody else could command the room. Entrepreneurship would eventually ask him to do something similar with his own company. The second assignment turned out to require considerably more practice.

Before Arizona, a lesson in attention

Anderson was born in Arizona, spent part of his childhood in New Jersey after his father’s work took the family east, and returned to attend Arizona State University. He describes his younger self as someone who preferred to fly under the radar. His father’s rise from warehouse work to senior corporate management gave him an example of sustained effort.

ASU records identify him as a 1988 finance graduate. He also served as president of his college fraternity. Finance and fraternity leadership are an intriguing preparation for agency ownership: one teaches the importance of the numbers; the other offers early exposure to people who may have quite different ideas about how an evening should proceed.

Washington followed. In presidential advance, Anderson helped plan logistics and strategy for events and international visits. He worked for George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. The assignment included considering the image an event would produce and the message audiences would receive. He traces part of his entry into marketing to that work.

The president’s question was about people

An advance representative arrives before the principal. The job brings contact with ambassadors, local officials, journalists and the people responsible for making the visit happen. Anderson recalls that the presidents he served would ask those people how the advance team had treated them. Courtesy, in that setting, was part of representing the office.

He admired leaders who welcomed people capable of challenging them. He has repeatedly emphasized choosing the people around a leader carefully. A team able to debate a decision and then act together became a recurring concern in his business life. Agreement was useful after the discussion; automatic agreement during it could conceal a problem.

His later leadership writing returns to this question of conduct. A person can carry an impressive title into a meeting and still make very little useful happen there. Conversely, a colleague without a grand designation can influence the room because others trust that person’s judgment. The business card supplies remarkably little evidence either way.

“Leadership is all about the people you put around you.”David Anderson

Two signatures, different final decisions

In the early agency days, Anderson and Hurni divided authority. Anderson had the final decision on business and financial matters. Hurni had it on creative and client matters. They could disagree vigorously, but they knew which partner would decide. Equal ownership did not require two people to hold the same steering wheel.

The arrangement becomes more revealing beside Anderson’s account of a publishing venture that failed. He and Hurni brought in another partner without establishing the same understanding. They had also underestimated the homework a new industry required. Success at the agency had made the next business look easier than it was.

He describes the agency’s early financing with the joke “Visa cards.” That detail is a useful antidote to the tidy founder biography. The partnership involved actual exposure, and the experience did not confer permanent entrepreneurial immunity. His own account includes failed ventures alongside the company that endured.

A name with a map folded inside it

Off Madison Ave made geography part of its identity. Arizona was a considerable distance from the street most associated with American advertising. The name let the founders make that distance a conversational opening. The agency’s stated ambition was to create collaborative relationships with clients and an environment where good ideas could come from anywhere.

Anderson’s business remained rooted in Greater Phoenix as it reached beyond Arizona. In 2015, the agency announced offices in Los Angeles and Boulder. The expansion gave staff and clients access to new markets, with Anderson, Hurni and Mike Horne overseeing the three locations from Phoenix. It was a dated step in the company’s development, rather than a claim about its office map today.

The contemporary agency describes Anderson as its CEO and co-founder and credits him with five multimillion-dollar acquisitions. His partner’s work supplies another part of the picture: Hurni’s emphasis on behavioral strategy. One founder’s creative and strategic expertise sits beside the other’s attention to growth, people and the business itself.

The audience has to do something

Anderson’s marketing explanations tend to end with an action. In an interview about Arizona Game and Fish, he described donation receipts moving from roughly $13,000-$14,000 to close to $1 million. Those were his reported figures at the time of the conversation. He connected the additional resources with programs including water provision for wildlife during Arizona’s hot months.

He also described a less photogenic obstacle: executive teams that could not agree on their own brand’s message. An agency could ask a few questions and then spend hours listening while the client’s leaders debated what they meant. The work began inside the organization before anybody bought an advertisement.

Behavior design gives that concern a practical structure. Off Madison Ave describes motivation, ability and prompts as three variables to consider when trying to influence an audience. The question for the marketing team becomes concrete: what makes somebody want to act, what makes acting possible, and what invites the next step?

Barbie takes a trip; the business follows

The resulting work can be playful. In a 2025 conversation, Anderson discussed an Arizona Office of Tourism social campaign featuring Barbie dolls. A familiar character supplied a way into a destination story. His account of the agency’s work also emphasized understanding customers before taking a risk with a brand.

Travel and outdoor recreation became a more explicit business focus. In December 2023, Off Madison Ave announced its acquisition of CGPR, the Boston-area public relations firm founded by Chris Ann Goddard. Anderson explained the fit through the connection between travel and active lifestyle products. A trip and the equipment someone takes on it belong to adjacent parts of the same decision.

The acquisition brought experience with outdoor brands into the agency. It also illustrates Anderson’s operating role without making him the author of every campaign. Buying a business adds people, expertise and relationships. Whether those additions work together is precisely the question that occupies much of his leadership teaching.

The difficult exit

Anderson has spoken openly about stepping away from daily operations. In an April 2025 interview, he described an early handover that moved far too quickly. He hired someone to run the business and effectively withdrew immediately. The transition went badly, and he had to return and rebuild.

Later attempts taught him to spend more time on the handover, assess fit carefully and keep a transition schedule. His advice includes examining the founder’s own place in the team. A person who built a company may eventually become an obstacle to its next stage. Recognizing that possibility is an uncomfortable piece of job performance.

His favorite team analogy is a racing pit crew. Each person knows the assignment and how it connects with everybody else’s. In that picture, a leader needs to understand the whole operation while allowing skilled colleagues to do their jobs. There is little advantage in the driver climbing out to supervise every tire.

A short book, a wider circle

Published in 2019, Leader Is Not a Title turns Anderson’s experience into a practical guide for emerging leaders. Its purpose is to help readers develop leadership competencies and reconsider the role they play around other people. The book connects his presidential work with the business experience that followed.

His peer network widened through Entrepreneurs’ Organization. EO’s annual report announcement identifies him as global board chair for fiscal 2021-2022 and records his long involvement in the organization’s leadership. His work moved from building an Arizona agency to representing a community of entrepreneurs across borders.

Through DWA Leadership, Anderson now offers coaching, speaking and board advice. Clients including SimonCRE leaders describe help with team development, accountability and making more room for future planning. Those accounts make his own difficult handovers relevant to his work with others: he has experienced the problems that he asks them to examine.

What the next room needs

His stated purpose is to help people and companies thrive. The wording is broad, but his coaching topics are specific: teamwork, collaboration, accountability and candid feedback. His public biography also includes LighthousePE, the software business he co-founded, alongside the marketing agency and his leadership practice.

In May 2026, Anderson wrote about the daily habits behind effective teams. He encouraged experimentation, curiosity and attention to obstacles. One question he recommended was, “What are you stuck on?” It is short enough to ask before a meeting disappears into a forest of slides, and specific enough to invite an answer.

His June and August 2026 article titles turn toward algorithms and the returns from AI in marketing. The subjects have changed since that first knock on Hurni’s door. The recurring concern remains the behavior of people around the work: how they learn, how they disagree, and who gets the opportunity to take responsibility.

Outside work, his agency biography lists travel, reading, family and golf. There is a life beyond the next meeting. After years of preparing stages, building businesses and revising his own role, Anderson’s story leaves a practical question hanging in the room. Who else is ready to lead, and how well have you prepared them?