J. Russell Krueger and the Retirement That Became a Company

In 1997, J. Russell Krueger sold a giftware company and retired to play golf and write books. Three years later, a former employee asked him for consulting help. Ocozzio began there. For anyone attempting to draw a firm line between work and retirement, this is an inconvenient opening.

It is also a useful place to meet him. Krueger, known professionally as Russ, had already spent years in corporate management and built a business of his own. He came to the new venture with experience, a completed sale and a perfectly respectable alternative use for his afternoons.

The request matters because it gives the founding a human scale. Before Ocozzio had a history, someone who had worked for Krueger wanted his help again. A former colleague supplied the opening that a retirement plan had left out.

His career would eventually include another business sale, public recognition in Augusta, a book for schoolchildren and a later description involving furniture making. The through line is a series of changes in what he did with his time. The golf, meanwhile, has proved remarkably persistent.

The experience that came before the favor

Krueger earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Mercer University and an MBA in marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School. The combination puts people and markets next to each other on the same résumé. His subsequent work took him into both marketing leadership and the broader business of running companies.

His corporate career included 20 years with Newell-Rubbermaid. Across national and middle-market businesses, his roles included chief marketing officer, president, group president and chief executive officer. Those titles describe different distances from the customer: shaping the message, managing an operation, overseeing businesses and taking responsibility for the whole enterprise.

For a reader meeting him through Ocozzio, the sequence is worth noticing. The agency came after that management experience. Its founder had already worked inside the kinds of organizations that hire outside help, with the responsibilities that continue after a presentation ends and everyone leaves the meeting room.

Experience can be difficult to represent in a founding story. It lacks the pleasing simplicity of a single sudden idea. Here it occupies a substantial part of the chronology. By the time a former employee asked for advice, Krueger had spent decades doing work that made the request understandable.

A business sold, a calendar reopened

In 1991, Krueger started a giftware company in Columbus, Ohio. Five years later came an Entrepreneur of the Year recognition. In 1997, he sold the business to a Boston investment banking firm. The period between founding and sale was six years.

That earlier venture gives the Ocozzio story an extra turn. He had already moved from corporate employment into ownership, then from ownership into retirement. Starting the agency would add another beginning to a career that had acquired what might reasonably have served as an ending.

The distinction between the two ventures is concrete. One sold giftware. The next offered marketing help. The continuity sits with the person moving between them, carrying a background in marketing and management into a different kind of business.

Golf and books were his stated retirement plans. Both are occupations with their own capacity to consume an afternoon, although only one routinely requires buying another small object after losing the previous one in water. The consulting request arrived in 2000. Whatever the intended balance of his calendar, Ocozzio now had a place on it.

The other audience: middle school

The writing deserves its own pause. Krueger authored Stepping UP, a book for middle school students. By the time of his 2015 speaker biography, it had sold more than 600,000 copies. The date belongs beside the number: this is a measure recorded in 2015.

A book for that audience is a different entry on the page from chief executive or company founder. It also prevents the retirement plans from becoming merely a comic preface to more work. Writing was part of his biography in its own right, with an audience outside the businesses he managed.

There is a temptation to make every activity in an entrepreneur’s life explain the company. This one can stand on its own. Schoolchildren were readers of his work. Business clients were another audience. A full account of a career has room for both without pretending they were the same project.

The boss at the back of the photograph

Ocozzio grew into a national business. By 2017, its clients were spread across more than 35 states. Augusta remained the company’s headquarters. A request from one former employee had become work involving a much wider set of people.

One photograph supplies a less formal view of that growth. In a 2017 conference program, Krueger stands behind three Ocozzio colleagues gathered around a couch. Someone extends an arm across the frame; the group is smiling. It is a workplace picture with very little interest in looking solemn.

The accompanying introductions carry the same informality. John Scott’s work in video sits alongside his musical interests. Taylor Guido is introduced through strategy, writing and kickboxing. Zach Swenson’s relationship-management work shares space with his drumming. Their boss receives teasing about financing the trip and spending time with clients on the golf course.

A conference biography is usually an opportunity to polish the executive. This one gives his colleagues permission to enjoy the occasion. The contrast is amusing because the formal role is still there: Krueger was CEO. The introduction simply declines to make that title the only interesting thing in the room.

What a colleague remembered

There is a more direct account of working alongside him. Marking eight years at Ocozzio in a public post, Zach Swenson included Krueger among the people who had mentored him. He also named Annie Yoder Smith, Shelby Wise and Trey Hinson.

Swenson described learning about business and about how to treat people. His account gave substantial weight to friendship, listening and the relationships formed in the office. He presented the company as a place where colleagues had invested in his development over time.

That is a colleague’s account, and its particularity is its value. It describes an experience with several named people. Krueger appears within that group, connected to work and learning that continued beyond a single assignment or an annual review.

Placed beside the origin of Ocozzio, it creates a recurring detail in the story: former and current employees have a place in the important turns. One asked for help and prompted a founding. Another later described what he had learned while working there. The company’s history contains those relationships alongside its dates.

Augusta had a place on the calendar, too

Krueger’s professional life also extended into Augusta’s business community. He appears as vice chairman in the Chamber’s 2013 board roster. Local television reporting identified him as Chamber chairman in 2016, when he spoke about the importance of the city’s public image and transparency.

In 2017, the Augusta Metro Chamber selected him for its Augusta’s Entrepreneur recognition and scheduled him to speak at its December member luncheon. The award considered business success together with creativity and community involvement. By then, Ocozzio’s reach extended well beyond the city.

The two scales sit comfortably together. Clients across many states made the agency a national business; Chamber service placed its founder within a particular local business community. Expansion did not remove Augusta from the biography. It gave the city another context in which to encounter him.

A second sale, with other people still at work

Broadtree Partners lists Ocozzio among its portfolio companies with a March 2021 starting date. Krueger subsequently described his decision to sell the company in a public testimonial. His comments emphasized the buyer’s understanding of the business and willingness to invest in the team.

Looking back two years after the sale, he expressed greater confidence in that decision. The company’s progress mattered to his assessment, as did what was happening to the people who worked there. His phrase was small and possessive: ‘my team’ is being rewarded.

“‘my team’ is being rewarded”

J. Russell Krueger, reflecting on Ocozzio’s sale

Ocozzio’s current leadership page names Annie Smith as CEO. Krueger’s place in its story is founder and former chief executive. There is a real change in those titles: responsibility for running the business now belongs to someone else, while the founding remains part of its history.

His later public description returns to golf and adds furniture making. After corporate roles, two entrepreneurial chapters and time spent writing, there is something pleasingly tangible about the furniture. A chair is allowed to remain a chair. It need not become a national business.

The first retirement was interrupted by a request for help. The later chapter includes watching a company continue under other leadership. Between those moments sits Ocozzio: a business that began because someone remembered working with him, and continued after he stepped away. Golf, at last, has another opening in the diary.