Twenty years, a lot of transitions, and the one thing that didn’t change.
I never planned to own a marketing agency. I wanted to write for a newspaper and surf before work.
That’s the real beginning of the Sparkable story – and the version that’s been missing from our website for too long.
Sparkable has officially turned 20 in 2026, which is a strange thing to write. Twenty years is a lot of life. A lot of partners came and went. A lot of plans changed. The version of the story you’ll find on most agency websites is clean and linear. Mine isn’t. And I think the honest version is more useful – especially if you’re a small business owner trying to figure out what you actually want your work to look like.
So here’s how we actually got here.
The accidental start (2007)
Spring of my senior year at Canisius College in Buffalo, two guys I knew – Clark and Dean – had started a marketing company the winter before called Sparkable. Clark and I had played rugby together. Dean came into my same orbit a little later, after he’d stopped playing.
They needed copy. I could write. So I picked up freelance work for them through the spring and stayed on through the summer. I wrote the first Sparkable brochure and website copy. It was the first time I’d actually heard the word “copywriting.” I had no idea it would become my career.
That fall I came home to South Jersey – Ventnor specifically – and took a job at a marketing agency in Atlantic City called Masterpiece. I was 22, fresh out of school, trying to decide if I wanted to be a journalist, a lawyer, or a college professor. I’d come home for the beach more than for any clear career plan. Marketing wasn’t the goal. It was the paycheck.
The dream job and the day it ended (2008-2013)
In June 2008, I left Masterpiece for what I thought was the job.
The Current was a community newspaper covering the South Jersey shore, and they hired me to cover Ventnor – my hometown. Writing about the place I grew up was the dream I’d actually come home for.
I held that job for five and a half years. It was good work. I learned the town in a way I hadn’t growing up in it. I also got to meet some new friends in the other towns that I covered – Margate, Longport and Somers Point, as well as my beats based on my education and passion- politics and music. The High Note blog started as a weekly column in the newspaper. I kept freelancing for Sparkable and Masterpiece on the side – they’d send me copy projects, I’d take them.
In November 2013, The Current let me go. The paper folded shortly after.
That stretch from November 2013 through the start of 2014 was the hardest part of my career to that point. I went back to Masterpiece briefly while I figured out what was next. I didn’t have a business plan. I didn’t have a vision. I had a Bachelor of Arts degree, having majored in Political Science and English and minored in creative writing with a pre-law concentration – basically what you need to get into law school. I had some marketing skills, some ideas and rent to pay.
The brand I borrowed (2014)
Clark and I had maintained our connection after we both moved from Buffalo – him to Berlin, Germany and me back to Ventnor. In 2014, he told me I could use the Sparkable name to sell services in the Atlantic City area, and that I could pull on their resources to offer more than I could on my own. It wasn’t a partnership in the formal sense. It was a gesture – take this thing we’ve built and run with it in your market.
So I did. I brought on my cousin Mike Wright, and we worked under the Sparkable name through 2014. By 2015 we’d made it official in New Jersey – Sparkable Inc., based in Atlantic City. Mike drove the U-Haul from Buffalo straight to our new office, the one we currently have, at the Schultz-Hill Professional Arts Building in Atlantic City. In 2017, Mike and I became owners. By 2018, we were the sole owners. Clark and Dean had moved on.
I didn’t think much about it at the time, but that was the first real transition. The Buffalo chapter had ended. The Atlantic City chapter was the one I’d be writing from there on.
A lot of transitions
If I had to pick a phrase for the years that followed, it would be that one.
Mike worked alongside me until COVID. By 2021 he’d moved on too. I brought on someone else – a guy named Jeremy Pingul- who I’d been working with for a while and thought might be a good fit as a partner. It didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.
I want to be honest about this part without making it about anyone else: I have worked with good people in a friendly business, and not everyone wanted to put the same kind of energy into Sparkable that I did. That’s not a moral failure on their part. People want different things from their work. But it meant I was the one who kept showing up to the same desk, signing the same checks, taking the same calls.
I didn’t realize that pattern was a pattern until 2022.
The 2023 moment
In late 2022, Jeremy and I had the conversation that changed everything.
I told him – directly – that I was going to keep doing Sparkable either way. Either he could leave, or I could leave. But the work was going to continue, with me, regardless of which path we took.
He left.
I remember sitting at my desk after that conversation and realizing something that probably should have been obvious for years: I was the constant. Partners had come and gone. Co-founders had moved on. Bosses, employers, even the newspaper I loved had dissolved. The thing that didn’t change was that I kept opening the doors.
That was the moment Sparkable stopped being something I was sharing with other people and became something I’d chosen on purpose for myself.
What 20 years actually taught me
What I’ve learned over those years – and what I’m still learning – is that I don’t want to be a bigger agency. I don’t want to scale to 12 employees and chase fancy office with glass desks, white couches and stainless steel chairs. I don’t want to sell scale-by-removing-the-human as a service.
I want to do good work for a small number of clients who actually care about it. I want to work so I can keep my mornings, evenings, and my weekends – having worked days, nights and holidays at the newspaper. I want to talk to my clients like they’re people, because they are – and because the version of marketing that scales by automating the relationship isn’t the version I’m interested in building.
We call that “Connection Over Perfection” inside Sparkable. It’s the operating principle. It means I’d rather have a real conversation with a client than ship them into an automated funnel that hits its quarterly KPIs. It means I’d rather take longer to build the right thing than ship the wrong thing fast.
It also means we’re boutique by design. Not boutique because we couldn’t scale, but boutique because that’s the version of this business that makes sense to me after 20 years of trying versions that didn’t.
The invitation
If you’re a small business owner reading this, here’s what I want you to take from it.
The marketing world is loud right now. Every tool promises to scale you, automate you, optimize you, and grow you. Some of that is real and some of it is useful. But none of it replaces what actually moves a small business forward – which is somebody who shows up, knows your business, and treats your work like it matters.
That’s what Sparkable is in 2026. After 20 years, two cities, four partners, and a long road to the version of the work I actually wanted to do.
If you’d like to start a conversation about how we might work together, I have afternoons open for new business calls. You can reach me at shaun@sparkable.com.
Here’s to the next 20.
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