Before there was a global agency, there was furniture to make. Fred Ewald remembers working late on wooden desks as MarketOne took shape in a converted Massachusetts textile factory in 1998. His fellow founders were Spencer Harvey and John Strehle. Every business has its foundational documents. This one also had foundational carpentry.
The photograph survives: Ewald at work, the future still requiring assembly. It is a pleasingly literal beginning for someone whose career would involve operations, finance and technology. A desk has an advantage over a business plan: you discover quite quickly whether it can support anything.
MarketOne would eventually combine telephone outreach with marketing automation and consulting. The interesting question in Ewald’s story is how a founder moves from doing necessary jobs himself to creating a business in which other people can take responsibility. Furniture provides a good opening scene. The people who later occupied it make the longer story.
Economics, accounting and a wider map
Ewald’s background brings several kinds of business thinking into one room. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Colgate University, a master’s in professional accounting at the University of Hartford and an MBA in marketing at New York University. That is a substantial education in what people want, what things cost and how the two might be persuaded to meet.
Originally from Chicago, he moved with his family to Massachusetts in 1971 and attended Dexter and Noble & Greenough. His early work included audit at Arthur Andersen and internal audit at Siemens Nixdorf in Germany. He also worked at PACE Institute International, in foreign student exchange, and became vice president of operations at Impole.
The sequence resists the tidy idea that an agency founder must arrive by way of advertising alone. Ewald had spent time inside the machinery of organizations. It makes his later emphasis on business operations easier to understand, without requiring us to pretend that every early job was a rehearsal for MarketOne.
Permission to try, with a condition
A revealing episode comes from a former colleague’s account of returning to MarketOne with a proposal for a consulting service. The agency had invested in Eloqua managed services. The proposed addition would help clients plan and design the processes around the technology, including project management and lead management.
Internal agreement was incomplete. Ewald nevertheless agreed to try it, with a practical condition: the person proposing the service would initially have to sell it himself. The arrangement gave an idea somewhere to go beyond the meeting in which it was first discussed.
There is a useful distinction between applauding initiative and giving it a consequential test. Customers can be remarkably helpful editors of a business proposal, particularly when asked to pay for it. In that account, the consulting work found demand, other business development colleagues began selling it, and the service became part of a broader offer. Ewald’s contribution was a decision to let the experiment begin.
Breakfast in two cities
By May 2012, Ewald was explaining demand generation to audiences in Singapore and Melbourne at breakfast seminars organized with Eloqua. His subject was the effect of search, social media and content on the way companies reached prospective buyers. The agency was helping clients develop lead nurturing programs that could turn initial interest into revenue.
Breakfast is an appropriately practical setting for that conversation. Before lunch, a roomful of marketers could consider whether the people they wanted to reach were looking for something quite different from the message they were being sent.
Ewald opened the discussion; Eloqua’s Greg Lui demonstrated the platform, and MarketOne’s Warren Everitt presented work for Intel. The program put the commercial argument alongside the technology and an example of its use. It also places Ewald’s international work in a specific room, doing a specific job: explaining why a company might need to change how it found customers.
The work behind the offices
International expansion sounds rather elegant until someone has to coordinate it. In March 2016, MarketOne appointed John Rohloff vice president of client services and delivery, with a brief to improve global alignment as clients worked with the agency across multiple regions. He came from Epsilon, where he had led the Dell account globally.
Ewald welcomed his experience in digital work, international business and managing change. The appointment accompanied changes elsewhere: Brosio took responsibility for global corporate development, Jeff Wright became vice president of new product development, and Steven Elliott took on digital strategy and marketing worldwide.
The arrangement shows a company distributing work that can otherwise accumulate around a founder. Client delivery, new services, internal functions and worldwide marketing each require attention. They also require people who can make decisions together. An office on a map is a location; a client receiving coordinated service across those locations is a more demanding accomplishment.
Another example arrived in July 2018, when Brad Fijac was promoted to oversee operations in Australia, Singapore and India. He had joined MarketOne in London as a program manager nine years earlier and later moved to Melbourne. His next role carried responsibility across a region.
Ewald credited both Fijac’s operating ability and Warren Everitt’s work building the business there. Everitt would concentrate on strategic sales and partnerships. The change gave each a different kind of responsibility rather than treating a promotion as a solitary ascent.
Fijac described a workplace where people willing to work hard could find opportunities in other countries. His own route gave that description something tangible. For a business dependent on local knowledge and shared delivery, a colleague’s ability to grow into another role is part of the operating model. It gives the organization experience that has travelled with it.
When the award puts you in the spotlight
In September 2020, Ewald was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New England finalist. The recognition was personal; his response directed attention toward employees. He described hiring capable, curious and creative people, inspiring them, and then giving them space.
“My focus is on hiring and inspiring the best employees”
Fred Ewald, 2020
The answer has a useful lack of theatricality. It puts recruitment and the conditions of work ahead of a founder’s claim to be the indispensable ingredient. Ewald also pointed to ingenuity, integrity, respect and tenacity as company values.
Those are easy words to print and considerably more demanding words to organize around. The significance here is how consistently he returns to the subject of other people’s initiative. On MarketOne’s leadership page, he again describes seeking people who can start things themselves and allowing them to thrive. The recurring subject is the room a leader makes available.
Following the buyer, counting the outcome
Ewald’s interest in measurement also appears in research MarketOne undertook with TechTarget. The team conducted half-hour interviews with 30 leaders in B2B marketing, sales and operations. The questions concerned changing priorities, digital transformation and how marketing and sales could work together.
His discussion of the findings paid attention to the ability to report on conversions and act on them quickly. That is a practical concern for anyone whose work travels between departments. A promising contact can look different to the person who generated it and the person expected to turn it into business.
In May 2022, the agency was recruiting a North American head of sales as part of a three-year growth plan. Ewald connected the hire with MarketOne’s messaging around a unified customer experience. The ambition required coordination inside the agency as well as a proposition to take to customers. Selling joined-up work brings an obligation to organize some of it yourself.
By June 2023, Ewald was drawing attention to the increasing difficulty and cost of converting leads into opportunities that sales teams would accept. MarketOne introduced SD360, an approach addressing sales development across the buying journey, rather than concentrating attention only on generating names at the beginning.
The vocabulary in this field can make a perfectly ordinary commercial problem sound like an examination. Someone has shown interest. Someone else needs to decide whether a useful sales conversation can follow. Between those moments sit information, timing and judgment. Ewald’s comments kept the economics of that passage in view. Activity has a cost even when the outcome fails to arrive.
A colleague takes the chair
On July 1, 2025, Enrico Brosio succeeded Ewald as MarketOne’s global chief executive. Their working relationship stretched back to 2002. By the handover, the international operations Brosio had helped develop represented more than 70 percent of global revenue. MarketOne described a business with more than 350 employees across six offices at that point.
Between Brosio joining MarketOne in 2002 and succeeding Ewald as global CEO in 2025.
Ewald expressed confidence in his colleague’s judgment, client relationships and experience building teams. The succession gives the story an ending more interesting than another founding anniversary. A person who had helped expand the company would now lead it.
The practical founder had once helped supply the furniture. Over time, his work included backing proposals, appointing colleagues and giving responsibilities somewhere to settle. The handover allows that history to be read as a sequence of decisions about who could do what next. For a business to continue, eventually someone else must occupy the chair.