Parliament | This Was Never The Plan
Hoot Design Company was never part of the plan.
I moved back to Columbia in 2010 to be closer to family, started a small paperie in a closet-sized studio, and figured I'd work part-time while raising my kids. Adam had taken the safer route — engineering, steady income, predictable trajectory. Neither of us imagined any of this.
But the work kept pulling. And the business kept demanding more — more creativity, more courage, more willingness to figure it out at 4am before the kids woke up.
Somewhere along the way, Hoot stopped being something I was building and started building me.
Every leap the company took — from print shop to branding agency, from rented office to owning two buildings, from local clients to multi-day immersive workshops at The Bird House — required me to become someone I hadn't been yet. Same for Adam, who went from supportive spouse to co-owner of the property and a shared vision neither of us saw coming.
None of this works without a partner who never competed with it, never dimmed it, and never once asked me to be smaller. That partnership is as much a part of Hoot's foundation as anything on the timeline.
I'm telling you this because we just finished something I've wanted to build for a long time. A real Employer Value Proposition for Hoot. A new employee handbook. A hiring playbook. The kind of internal infrastructure that most agencies our size don't invest in because there's always another client project that feels more urgent.
And I'll be honest — for years, that was us too. We had the vision statement. We had the values. We talked about designing a world where people can become their best selves through work. But the internal tools to actually deliver on that promise to our own team? Those lagged behind. Not because we didn't care. Because we were growing fast and the client work always came first.
That gap bothered me. We spend our days helping other companies articulate who they are internally so they can show up externally with clarity and confidence. We tell founders all the time that you can't read the label from inside the jar. And yet, for a while, we were living in our own jar — knowing what we stood for but not having it operationalized in a way that could scale our hiring and onboarding.
So we did the work. On ourselves. The same work we ask our clients to do.
What came out of it is something I'm genuinely proud of. Not because it's polished or because it checks some HR compliance box. Because it's true. It reflects what this place actually is and what we're asking of the people who choose to work here.
Over the next few weeks, I'm going to share what we built and why. Part two of this series will break down our EVP — what it says, what it means, and why we think every company with a pulse should have one. Part three will get into the handbook and hiring playbook — the operational side of making your values show up in the day-to-day.
But this first piece is just the origin story. Because I think it matters that Hoot wasn't designed intentionally from the start, and if you’re building something, I hope that inspires you.
It was built by two people figuring it out in real time, making decisions that didn't always make sense on paper, and trusting their gut that playing the long game would pay off.
Turns out, it did.
