Evan Lamont and the business of getting people through the door

At 22, Evan Lamont had an assignment with a fairly unforgiving deadline: the 2004 U.S. Olympic trials in Long Beach. He oversaw personnel and accreditation for swimming and water polo. Before his working life involved search results and advertising accounts, it involved deciding who could get through an actual door.

Accreditation is a wonderfully plain word for a complicated undertaking. A sporting event may belong to its competitors, but it also needs people who can make the surrounding machinery function. Lamont’s early career began on that side of the spectacle. The audience saw the event. Someone had to attend to the access list.

Today, he is the founder and CEO of TLG Marketing, the agency he established in Long Beach in 2006. Between those two roles lies a career in public relations, branding, digital advertising and, more recently, explaining AI to people with businesses to run. The recurring subject is access: to an event, an audience, a prospective customer, a useful new tool.

Twenty-two, with a list of names

Lamont’s Olympic trials work came through the Long Beach Visitor and Convention Bureau. He was its youngest director at the time. His subsequent management work included marketing, branding and media relations for a Long Beach professional sports organization, and work with the public relations firm Frank Groff Inc.

These are distinct kinds of communication. Tourism asks people to visit. Sports organizations need attention that survives beyond a final score. Public relations asks an outside audience to understand an organization’s story. Each puts a different demand on the person carrying the message.

His education includes California State University, Long Beach. The city also supplied the setting for those early jobs and, eventually, his own agency. In this career, Long Beach is a repeated address rather than a picturesque opening scene abandoned after the first paragraph.

A city beyond the client list

One of the more revealing documents in Lamont’s public record concerns a courthouse. In June 2009, signing as the owner of TLGLB, he submitted comments on the new building planned for downtown Long Beach. His letter identified five concerns: parking, sustainability, safety, design and labor.

The details were specific. He wanted enough parking to avoid pushing courthouse visitors into surrounding neighborhoods. He supported better opportunities for cycling and public transportation, while arguing that those improvements should accompany adequate parking. He asked for environmental standards that included a priority of LEED Gold certification or higher.

He also wanted the project to protect the safety and operation of nearby Cesar Chavez Elementary School. On architecture, he favored a welcoming, contemporary building and public consideration of competing designs. On employment, he wanted Long Beach workers to account for the great majority of jobs during construction and operation.

A letter about a public building offers a different view of a business owner from a credentials presentation. Here are preferences with consequences: for a school, a neighborhood, a commuter and a worker. They put some substance behind his local connection. Even a discussion of parking can tell you something, provided you resist the temptation to turn it into a personal brand.

The first impression arrives early

By May 2012, Lamont was CEO of The Lamont Group, LLC, managing more than 30 clients across several industries. He received Long Beach Post 40 Under 40 recognition that year. The agency had become a business serving a varied roster, rather than simply a new founder’s proposition.

That August, he was discussing online reputation and the differences between professional profiles and personal social media. His point was practical: an employer or potential business contact could encounter material online that conveyed something quite different from a résumé. Photographs tagged with a person’s name could appear in image searches.

It was an early version of a question that still follows anyone who does business in public. Who supplies the introduction when you are absent? A search engine may volunteer for the job. Its manners are inconsistent.

Lamont’s work addressed that introduction as well as the advertising that might follow it. Visibility carries context. Being found and being understood are separate parts of the same encounter. His public commentary in 2012 shows that the problem of first impressions was already part of his professional brief, years before AI became a subject of his workshops.

An Australian connection

On October 12, 2017, Australian communications group Bastion Collective announced its acquisition of TLG Marketing. The Long Beach agency would be renamed Bastion TLG. Its search optimization and digital advertising capabilities were joining a wider group of communications and advisory businesses.

The transaction connected two entrepreneurial stories. Bastion’s founder and executive chairman, Fergus Watts, had also started young. For the group, the acquisition added a California business with expertise in generating prospective customer inquiries. For Lamont, it offered a place within a broader community as Bastion expanded its American presence.

He described targeted campaigns as a capability that could serve clients across distances and time zones. He also spoke about meeting Bastion’s executives and finding an opportunity in the group’s culture and shared vision. Geography mattered, but the appeal he described included the people.

The practical attraction was a specialty with uses beyond its home market. A company entering a new territory still needs people to discover it, understand its offering and make contact. An agency that can help with those steps has something portable. Long Beach remained the point of origin; the assignment could extend considerably farther.

The confidence question

Two years after the Bastion announcement, Lamont appeared on Don Burdge’s My Company Story. The interview, published in October 2019, concerned the business he had built and the role of technology in helping other businesses communicate. Google, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn were among the platforms discussed in the episode’s description.

Play interview ↗

The account of the conversation includes a less technical difficulty: having the confidence to believe that what you are doing is right. It is a useful detail in a founder’s story. A service menu can describe what an agency offers; it says considerably less about the decisions involved in running it.

Clients need recommendations while platforms continue changing. A founder has to choose tools, interpret problems and make commitments. Confidence enters the discussion because the work requires judgment alongside technical knowledge. The interview gives that ordinary pressure room in a career that already included an acquisition announcement.

Lamont’s stated aim in the conversation was to help businesses address their particular problems with suitable technology and platforms. That places the business question before the software selection. A platform has to earn its place in the assignment, however impressive its presentation.

AI comes to the breakfast meeting

By 2024, Lamont was taking AI into professional networking rooms. AthletesTouch documented his presentation to its Orange County I group at the start of the year. His reply included a crossed-out reference to making the audience more scared, replaced with the hope that they were more curious. A little stage fright apparently deserved an edit.

On April 8, 2025, he presented an AI workshop to the Professional Fiduciary Association of California’s Long Beach chapter. Attendee Jodi Mixon described the session and said she had switched to Gemini afterward. That is one person’s response, with the specificity that broad claims about influence tend to lack.

The Orange County Bar Association also advertised Lamont for its Solo/Small Firm Section meeting on May 15, 2025. The session’s title was AI in Action - Tools Every Business Leader Needs. Its promised emphasis was practical: tools to save time, reach customers and help a business grow.

These appearances brought the subject to people with existing professional responsibilities. A fiduciary practice or small law firm encounters technology through daily tasks, client communication and limited time. The workshop setting asks a presenter to connect a new capability with an audience’s familiar work. Lamont’s subject had changed since 2004. He was still dealing with people who needed to know where to go next.

The work after the introduction

The agency’s current public name is TLG Marketing. Its team spans the United States, Europe, India and the Philippines. Alongside Lamont, its named leaders include Shawn Lamont in the United States, Tarik Rovcanin in Europe, Pawan Kumar in India and Russel Valdez in the Philippines. The list makes the international dimension concrete.

“Always willing to adapt, never willing to settle.”

Evan Lamont · TLG agency philosophy

TLG’s services now include websites, search optimization, paid advertising, lead generation and automation. Taken together, they cover several stages of a customer’s encounter with a company. Someone has to find the business, understand it and have a way to begin a conversation.

Lamont’s career has covered each side of that introduction: organizing access, shaping a message, managing digital visibility and explaining unfamiliar tools. The courthouse letter adds a useful reminder that he has also participated in the life of the place where he works.

There is a long distance between an accreditation list and an AI workshop. His route connects them through a sequence of specific assignments. At one end, people needed credentials to enter an event. At the other, business owners need enough understanding to put a tool to use. Someone still has to make the introduction work.