Thirteen years is an awkward length of time to put on a résumé. It does not fit neatly into the little space reserved for education. For Greg Zilberfarb, it is the time he spent taking night classes to earn his bachelor’s degree while working full-time and raising four children. A line about an Averett University qualification conceals a fairly crowded calendar.
That detail is a useful place to begin with the founder of TSN Communications. Public relations produces plenty of polished accounts of success. Zilberfarb’s working life offers something more interesting: classrooms, vehicle demonstrations, client displays, a marketplace for used vehicles and a small-business hosting service. Much of it concerns the practical business of helping people do something they have not done before.
He founded TSN in 1997. The agency worked virtually from the beginning, allowing him to recruit experienced people around the country without requiring them to move. Years before remote work became a familiar management debate, he had made geography a smaller part of the hiring decision.
Thirteen years, after hours
He earned his degree in Human Resources Development. The subject sits comfortably beside the company he built, although the title alone cannot explain a founder’s decisions. The more revealing detail is the arrangement: employment, children and education occupying the same years. Completing a course was one commitment among several, carried forward over a long stretch of ordinary evenings.
He also continued working events and setting up displays for clients. An executive title apparently offered no permanent exemption from the furniture. There is something reassuringly specific about that. A display must be assembled before the visitors arrive; a strategic vision cannot stand in for it.
A degree earned alongside full-time work and raising four children.
The classroom had wheels
Zilberfarb’s alternative-fuel career crossed several kinds of organization. He worked on national accounts for alternative-fuel vehicles at Ford, directed a natural gas vehicle program at Washington Gas and held the marketing role at the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition. He also served as executive director of National Clean Cities Inc. The work placed him between technology suppliers and the people expected to put their products into service.
In February 2005, that educational work took him to Manila. As a vice president at ASG Renaissance, he helped lead a Clean Cities training effort preparing for the planned arrival of 200 compressed natural gas buses. Seventy-five people attended. Mechanics received an introduction to natural gas vehicles, alongside preliminary instruction about CNG stations.
“It was like CNG 101,” he said. The ambition extended beyond that first class: develop local technicians, fleet operators and fuel providers who could eventually train and certify others. A visiting expert could deliver a session; an enduring program needed people who could carry the knowledge forward after the visitors left.
His name appears on another practical teaching document in April 2007: A Practical Guide to Using B20 in Your Fleet, prepared for ASG Renaissance and published by the Maryland Energy Administration. The work was close to the reader’s operational questions. New fuel choices needed instructions as well as enthusiasm.
The same pattern continued through his consulting for the Propane Education & Research Council, known as PERC. His work included propane-engine commercialization and outreach, mower studies, road shows and the Propane Engine Fuel Summit. In 2011, he was included in Green Fleet magazine’s inaugural group of 40 Sustainability All-Stars.
The teaching formats could be wonderfully prosaic. A 2009 propane-forklift webinar paired a live online presentation with a simultaneous conference call. The 2010 fuel summit offered a live internet broadcast. These were ways to bring an industry conversation to people who could stay at their desks. For someone running a virtual agency, the format had a familiar logic.
At the 2011 Green Fleet Conference in Dallas, his discussion of propane vehicles moved through purchase costs, operating costs, manufacturers and refueling. The questions were the ones a fleet manager would need answered before committing money. A fuel could sound promising on a stage and still require a serious conversation about the dispenser back at the depot.
What happens to the second owner?
By 2012, Zilberfarb was working on a different piece of the adoption problem. Fleet vehicles eventually leave their first owner. A market that encourages people to buy alternative-fuel equipment also needs a way for those people to sell it.
He started AFVResale.com as a place to list previously owned alternative-fuel vehicles and equipment. It was designed for fleets but open to other buyers and sellers. Listings included vehicles powered by electricity, compressed natural gas and propane autogas. Interested buyers contacted sellers directly and negotiated the transaction themselves.
His advice to sellers was plain: provide useful detail. Buyers wanted the make and model, mileage, price and fuel type, with photographs where possible. The attraction was practical too. A used vehicle could give a fleet a less expensive way to try an alternative fuel. The site addressed a modest, necessary part of a much larger industry conversation.
Two years later, he launched My CloudHosts for small businesses, charities and associations. The service offered web hosting and, in two of its packages, website setup and management. Its intended customers included small organizations that wanted to get online or had struggled with larger hosting providers.
The proposition brought a technical service down to the scale of an owner’s working week. Someone could manage the website while the customer ran the business. Security, backups and an administration interface were parts of the offering; personal help was central to the pitch. Between the resale site and the hosting business, Zilberfarb kept finding places where an available technology still left a customer with work to untangle.
A company held together by work
Meanwhile, TSN grew beyond its beginnings as a one-person operation. Its project structure allowed clients to commission work without a required retainer. The virtual arrangement also became part of its account of working life: professionals could serve clients while retaining time for family and interests outside the agency.
A dispersed team still needed common habits. In a 2020 essay, Zilberfarb described regular communication through several channels and a project-management system. He said hiring came through existing team members’ recommendations, and that the agency had never posted a want ad. Referrals were doing some of the work a shared office might otherwise do.
“We honor our team above any individual.”
Greg Zilberfarb, 2020
The agency also worked for larger agencies, an arrangement that made a small team part of another organization’s capacity. A separate 2016 hiring announcement described the same referral approach when an account manager joined. These were repeatable choices about how to find people and fit their skills to assignments.
Zilberfarb made shared process part of TSN’s public identity. It is a sensible preoccupation for a company whose colleagues do not gather in one room. The client needs the work to arrive coherently, however many homes and time zones sit behind it. The method has to do some of the organizing that proximity cannot.
Passing the daily work to someone else
In June 2022, TSN announced Natalie Hill as its new CEO. Previously senior vice president of client services, she took responsibility for the company’s strategic plan, client relations and operations. Zilberfarb stepped back from day-to-day leadership after 25 years.
The announcement placed his departure from the daily role alongside a promotion for Adrianna Amato and the arrival of editorial director Erin Tholen. The business was arranging its next stage around people already responsible for clients and the work. Zilberfarb described his original aims as providing marketing and public relations services while creating career opportunities for team members.
Today, TSN identifies him as founder and president. The distinction matters in following his story: Hill runs the agency as CEO, while the founder remains associated with the business he started.
The next question is already here
His recent writing addresses an industry trying to establish what clients should pay people to do when software can produce so much material. In an October 2026 agency playbook, he argues for experienced human oversight of strategy and published work, with AI helping execute tasks. The position extends TSN’s longstanding emphasis on experience into a new argument about the tools.
Other October essays examine agency selection and changing buyer discovery. On October 22, he wrote about the difference between appearing in search results and being named in an AI-generated recommendation. His advice includes making a company’s web pages specific and easy to understand, while continuing conventional search work. These are his prescriptions for a changing market, rather than settled promises about what any tool will deliver.
Away from the agency, he has volunteered as an overnight dog rescuer with Rural Shelter Transports, a role he lists as beginning in 2013. It is a small detail with a definite task attached. Someone, somewhere along a journey, needs to take responsibility for the next part.
That idea runs through the documented work: a class that needs teaching, a vehicle that needs another buyer, a business that needs a website, a team that needs a successor. Zilberfarb’s story becomes easier to follow at that scale. Start with the question in front of somebody. Then look at who has agreed to help.
Continue the conversation
Explore Zilberfarb’s work and public writing.