Tony Svanascini and the business of changing your business

Before Tony Svanascini was running a digital agency, he was answering to a less glamorous authority: the office fax machine. In the early 1990s, his computer networking business had reached 150 clients. A malfunction could send him or one of two technicians out the door. Success had acquired a peculiar sound. It rang, and somebody had to go.

That detail makes his career easier to understand than a collection of company milestones. Svanascini has spent decades following the changing work customers need done. The equipment changes. So does the scale. The awkward question remains: what happens when the service that built your business begins to limit it?

Today he is CEO and a co-founder of the modern Americaneagle.com agency, a family business whose history reaches back to 1978. His own story belongs to the transitions inside that history. Computers became networks. Networks led to websites. Websites became systems that people expected to work every hour of the day. Each turn required him to carry something forward and leave something behind.

The customer already had his number

His father, Norbert, acquired and renamed the original software business. The family duplicated adventure games and utility programs on diskettes in its basement. When the Apple II market faded, that trade ended. In 1990, Tony moved into selling used computers, installing software and connecting machines, alongside classes at DePaul University.

The web arrived through a remarkably useful asset: existing customers. The family hired a web developer in 1995, and roughly 70 percent of the client base moved onto the internet. By 1998, the networking operation had been sold. A business could change direction without starting every relationship again from zero.

There is a temptation to read an early internet career backward, as though the destination were printed on the first invoice. Svanascini's route is more interesting when the intermediate businesses are allowed to matter. Selling a computer and making it useful are different obligations. A customer who calls when something breaks has already made a judgment about whom to trust.

The later agency would make a business of that judgment. A website has an opening day; its owner has a business to run the following morning. Between those two facts sits a great deal of work that never appears in a launch photograph.

Room for the next version

By January 2013, Tony and his brother Mike were planning around another practical constraint: space. The company was moving into a 60,000-square-foot office. Its announcement described approximately 200 professionals and offices across the United States. Mike, the president and general counsel, spoke publicly about their ambition to grow over the following two to four years.

The brothers' partnership is part of the texture here. Tony's title is CEO; Mike's is president. Their father belongs to the company's earlier chapter. Calling Tony a co-founder of the modern agency describes the web business he helped build, while leaving room for the family enterprise that preceded it.

In January 2014, the agency announced a Fort Lauderdale office. Tony described an ambition to expand nationally and globally while serving existing and new customers. Regional offices were a concrete expression of that ambition: people who could sell and support the work closer to the people buying it.

Office openings are easy to make sound inevitable once they have happened. In a service business, they also create commitments. A new market brings another set of clients who expect someone to know their circumstances. The larger the map becomes, the more valuable the familiar voice can be.

By April 2024, Americaneagle.com was reporting offices in Brighton, England, and Sofia, Bulgaria, alongside its American locations. That year's announcement placed it at No. 287 on Crain's list of large privately held Chicago-area companies, its seventh consecutive appearance. The geography had widened considerably; the company remained family owned.

What he means by resilience

Svanascini has put his own explanation of business survival into writing. In an essay for the American Swiss Foundation, he uses Netflix's successive changes in business model to discuss resilience. The quality he admires is the ability to respond to a changing market, including changes that make an established way of earning money less useful.

“In business, resilience is everything when it comes to survival.”

Tony Svanascini, writing for the American Swiss Foundation

He argues for an organization that can notice outside pressures and develop responses. Read beside his career, the essay offers a useful interpretation of its turns. The firm did not need to keep selling the same thing to remain recognizably the same business. Its relationships and accumulated experience could travel into another line of work.

That is a harder proposition than the cheerful word “adapt” suggests. An old service comes with skills, routines and customers who still need help. A new service comes with uncertainty. Moving between them means deciding what deserves another investment and what deserves a buyer, a replacement or an ending.

His writing makes that decision organizational. Resilience has to become a habit of noticing and responding. It cannot depend entirely on a leader producing an inspiring sentence at the annual meeting. The fax machine, one suspects, would remain unmoved by the sentence.

A Chicagoan with a transatlantic calendar

The American Swiss Foundation connection extends beyond an essay. Svanascini is an alumnus of its 2010 Young Leaders Conference and serves on its board of directors. On March 26, 2025, he joined a gathering at the Residence of the Swiss Confederation in Chicago, organized with Swiss Consul General Pascal Bornoz.

The evening brought together 25 members of the foundation's network. Svanascini described himself as a proud Chicagoan and emphasized the relationship between Switzerland and the Midwest. The gathering also formed part of an effort to establish a Chicago chapter of the foundation.

It is a revealing addition to the picture of an executive whose working life concerns digital connections. Here the connections involved a room, a consular host and people maintaining relationships across borders. The mechanism was pleasingly old fashioned. Nobody needed to update a browser.

His public calendar also includes Chicago education. Midtown Educational Foundation named him an honoree, alongside Patricia M. Bidwill, at its October 2023 Reach for Excellence gala. The event benefited the Midtown and Metro achievement centers and their after-school and summer programs. These commitments give his public life a local setting even as the agency's work extends internationally.

The work after the launch

A May 2026 agreement gave the agency another kind of responsibility. Americaneagle.com would provide operational support for the infrastructure layer of Sitecore Managed Cloud. The arrangement concerns the machinery behind websites: keeping environments available and supporting the systems on which clients rely.

United Airlines supplied a concrete example in the announcement. Its IT application development manager described an employee portal serving more than 180,000 team members, and reported a reduction of more than 90 percent in critical ticket alerts with the agency working alongside Sitecore. Those are customer-reported results for that environment, rather than a promise about every project.

For Svanascini's story, the agreement is an instructive development. The person who once went out to connect office computers now leads a business helping operate infrastructure for an enterprise software company's customers. The distance between those jobs is considerable. Their shared concern is immediately recognizable: other people need the system to keep working.

In July 2025, Sitecore had named Americaneagle.com its Sales Performance Partner of the Year. In August 2026, the agency became one of four inaugural Diamond Partners, alongside Altudo, FPT and Horizontal Digital. The designation recognized investment, customer outcomes and contributions to the partner ecosystem. It also put a public marker on a relationship that had developed over years.

Another change in the customer's question

Svanascini joined Sitecore CEO Eric Stine and host Jon Price for a July 2026 episode of The Sitecore Water Cooler. Their discussion moved from cloud operations to AI discovery. Svanascini described an agency already evaluating and using Scrunch before Sitecore's acquisition of the company.

His emphasis included the less theatrical work of organizing existing information. Businesses with years of content and systems need clearer foundations before they can make effective use of new tools. Workshops examining objectives and technology are one way his agency approaches that work. There is something familiar about a new opportunity arriving attached to an old organizational problem.

The conversation also allowed for uncertainty about where AI would lead. That restraint suits a career spent crossing several versions of the technology business. Experience can help someone recognize a change without supplying a complete forecast of its consequences.

The interesting continuity in Tony Svanascini's working life is the customer who needs help making the next move. The company has grown from a family operation into an international agency, and its vocabulary now includes managed cloud and AI visibility. Underneath that vocabulary lies a question he has been answering for decades: can you make this work for us?