Rob Farinella built an agency. Then came the art of making room.

Buying a house and finding an office is one way to arrive in a new city. Knowing someone there would also help. Rob Farinella dealt with the property first. He had moved from Manhattan to Atlanta because it looked like a place where he could raise a family and start a business. The introductions would have to follow.

Blue Sky Agency opened in 1994. Its founder brought advertising experience and a fairly personal objection to the way he had experienced the industry in New York. He wanted closer relationships with the people who worked for him, and he wanted clients to feel that difference too. An agency could offer salaries and perks; he was interested in what happened between those transactions.

“I wanted to create an advertising agency with heart.”

Rob Farinella

That wish gives the career its thread. First, find people. Then build something with them. Eventually, work out how to let them carry more of it. The last assignment is particularly awkward for founders, whose original qualification was a willingness to begin before anyone else had signed up.

The newspaper route comes first

Before the client meetings came smaller jobs with less room for presentation. Farinella delivered newspapers, cut grass, shoveled snow and worked at car washes before turning sixteen. He was the third of four paperboys in his family. A customer waiting for a newspaper is an early introduction to the limited persuasive power of excuses.

He later found encouragement in an interview with Paul Newman. The actor’s account of rejection and persistence stayed with him. By the time Blue Sky reached its twenty-fifth year, Farinella was thinking about what tenacity actually required from someone running an agency. His answer included choosing battles, keeping the ego in check and accepting that leadership does not always come with applause.

One quality in particular complicates the usual picture of entrepreneurial drive: patience. Farinella treated it as a skill an ambitious owner must learn. There is some humor in that assignment. Starting a company rewards the person who cannot wait. Keeping it going requires that person to develop an occasional tolerance for waiting.

The tension is useful to keep in mind when looking at the business that followed. A founder can set a tone in a sentence. A functioning agency needs people with different specialties, different histories and their own ideas about the work. Bringing them together changes the job of the person who started it.

An agency learns to hire

In July 2009, Blue Sky reported a 34 percent increase in its television marketing division despite the difficult economy. It added Elizabeth Chunn as an account director to manage a growing network clientele. The roster included Turner Broadcasting, National Geographic Channel, The Weather Channel, Lifetime and Gospel Music Channel.

The figure belongs to that division and that period. It is a useful glimpse of the agency finding demand during a downturn, rather than a measure of everything it did. Chunn brought experience from Time Warner Cable, Oxygen Media and Turner. Farinella emphasized her understanding of both networks and operators. The business needed someone who knew how the parties on different sides of a television deal thought.

Two years later, Christi Korzekwa joined as director of account services. Her previous work included senior marketing roles at The Home Depot. Farinella said the staff had participated in recruiting her. That detail makes the appointment more revealing than a title alone: colleagues already inside the business had a part in bringing a new leader into it.

Hiring is one of the places where a founder’s stated values acquire consequences. A new colleague arrives with expertise, expectations and a way of doing things. The owner gets the benefit of that experience by allowing it to affect the company. Otherwise, the agency has bought an impressive résumé and given it very little to do.

What a gas company can promise

Farinella’s interest in relationships also appears in his thinking about brands. Gas South supplied a particularly clear problem. Natural gas is a commodity. A customer cannot admire the craftsmanship of one provider’s gas while complaining about the finish on another’s. The distinction has to live somewhere else.

In his account of Blue Sky’s work with Gas South, Farinella connected the “Difference is Good” campaign to the company’s behavior, including its community commitments. Advertising had a story because there was something for it to describe. The agency’s contribution was to develop and test the communication; the client had to keep living up to the promise.

His broader community-brand framework asks companies to understand a need, respond with a plan and sustain their involvement. Employees belong inside the effort. Feedback matters. So does the willingness to reconsider whether the activity is helping. There is a welcome inconvenience here for anyone hoping that a charitable gesture will double as a complete marketing strategy.

It is an argument that places some discipline around the word heart. A feeling becomes more useful when someone has to decide what to do with it, who will do the work and whether it should continue. For an advertiser, those questions also produce better material than another declaration of good intentions.

Atlanta becomes more than an address

The city Farinella entered without a network became a recurring subject of his professional life. His documented roles have included a Georgia Chamber of Commerce board seat, the Atlanta Super Bowl Bid Committee and the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl Selection Committee. An industry profile also lists an advisory role with the Atlanta Sports Council.

Those assignments place an advertising career inside the business of representing a place. A sports bid or civic initiative asks people to agree on how a city should present itself. The audience includes outsiders, but the work also depends on people who already live there. A city has rather more stakeholders than a campaign brief has pages.

His agency’s historical client list included the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers alongside television networks and other regional institutions. Sports provided work, connections and the occasional lesson in hospitality. Farinella recalled a client arriving at a Braves-Yankees game in a Yankees jersey while visiting the Braves’ owners box. A team official provided a Braves jersey and asked for a change.

The founder remembered being embarrassed. The client remembered a wonderful experience. It is an economical demonstration of how differently two people can value the same afternoon. One is managing the relationship; the other has acquired a story. Farinella’s reflection on those outings made room for both perspectives, recognizing the memories shared experiences can create for friends, relatives and clients.

It also supplies a useful detail in a career full of respectable institutional names. Even an executive with access to the owners box can discover that the day’s most pressing brand problem is standing beside him, wearing the opposition.

Other people get a say

By 2021, the business was bringing in another experienced agency leader. Annette Sally joined as executive vice president, overseeing client relations and new business development. She came from 22squared, with earlier executive roles at Leo Burnett Worldwide, Arnold NYC and Grey Group. Farinella welcomed her willingness to challenge industry standards as well as her experience with clients.

Sally’s arrival matters to the later chapter. Working with Springboard Strategy, she and Farinella addressed how Blue Sky could sustain its future with a wider leadership team. The work included weekly meetings, structured assignments and a workshop in which the new leaders could question the strategy and take responsibility for execution. It resulted in a three-year strategic plan.

The owners wanted to introduce new positioning and branding quickly. They paused to think through the strategy and assemble the people who would deliver it. For an advertising business, delaying the announcement long enough to settle the underlying decisions is a rather demanding exercise in practicing what one sells.

“Patience is a tremendous skill.”

Rob Farinella

The early and later problems fit together. At the beginning, Farinella needed connections in a city where he knew almost nobody. Years later, he needed colleagues to have a greater stake in a company that already had a history. Both required a founder to take other people seriously. The second also required him to share more of the decisions.

There is no shortage of language for an entrepreneur’s opening move: launch, leap, bet. The vocabulary gets quieter when the work becomes helping other people lead. Meetings, recruitment and patience rarely make a glamorous anniversary montage. They do, however, give a business somewhere to go after its founder has finished telling the origin story.

Farinella began by finding himself an office. The continuing assignment has been making room.