At the beginning of my career, I thought strong values were enough. Connect with good people, do meaningful work, treat people well, have fun, and success would naturally follow.
Years later, I still believe every one of those things, especially since Titan One has become a Certified B Corporation. (Applause to our whole team for this achievement!) But I've also learned something I didn't quite get back then: values only matter when they're reflected in the decisions you make, the systems you build, and the way you hold yourself accountable.
That lesson didn't come overnight...
Back when I started my corporate career, I had a romantic view of what work would be like. I imagined walking into the hustle and bustle each morning, surrounded by smart people solving meaningful problems, building great brands, and maybe even changing the world along the way.
As I settled into my first role, that picture started to change. I had a great boss, talented colleagues, and interesting projects, yet my days became increasingly consumed by meetings, approvals, and processes. It wasn't a toxic workplace, and there wasn't anything "wrong" per se. I just found myself wondering how so many organizations had evolved this way.
Over time, I realized I wasn't alone. Friends in technology, finance, and other industries shared similar frustrations. They were at different companies with different career paths, but many of us shared the same underlying question:
Is there a better way to build a business with a deeper sense of purpose?
I didn't know what that better way looked like yet, but I knew I wanted to spend my career trying to build it.
Finding a Better Way
When Scott and I started evolving Titan One over a decade ago, becoming the company it is today, we wanted to answer that question for ourselves. We wanted to create an agency where people enjoyed coming to work, where clients felt like genuine partners rather than transactions, and where success wasn't measured solely by revenue or awards, but by the kind of company we were becoming together. We established values that reflected those ambitions and tried our best to make decisions through that lens.
Titan One grew. New people joined, each bringing their own great ideas, perspectives, strengths, and values. Before long, the culture became something much bigger than Scott and I could have created on our own. Every person who has joined Titan One has shaped the company we are today, and this journey belongs to all of us. We are incredibly grateful to every Titan who has been part of this journey.
As Titan One evolved, I began to appreciate the notion that values are only as strong as the systems and people that support them.
Anyone can write words like integrity, curiosity, or accountability on a website. The real challenge is building an organization that consistently lives those ideas through its governance, policies, hiring decisions, leadership, and everyday operations.
In the past few years, we've also been fortunate to work with several Certified B Corporations that showed us the way, both as clients and business partners. The more we learned, the more it resonated with us – not because it promised perfection, but because it demanded intention. It wasn't about saying the right things; it was about building a business that could consistently live them.
That distinction mattered to us. We weren't looking for another certification or a new marketing angle. We were looking for a framework that would help us become the kind of company we'd been striving to build all along. In many ways, B Corp didn't change our direction – it simply gave us a more intentional path to follow.
Better, But Never Finished
So our journey didn't begin the day we became a Certified B Corporation. It began years earlier, when we started asking ourselves more difficult questions about the kind of company we wanted to become. That continued through formalizing our original Connect with Purpose philosophy, investing in wonderfully bright people, then together creating Titan Impact Days, launching the Purpose Fund, strengthening our governance, and making decisions as a team that reflected the future we hoped to create rather than simply the business we already had.
Certification doesn't mean we've figured everything out. One of the things I appreciate most about the B Corp framework is that it acknowledges there's always more work to do.
We still have areas where we want to improve – we always will – and we'll undoubtedly get some things wrong along the way. That's exactly the point. We’ve realized that B Corp isn't about proving you've arrived; it's about committing to keep asking difficult questions, learning, improving, and moving forward.
Now we have a shared standard that keeps us accountable and encourages us to keep asking how we can become better – not only as marketers, but as employers, partners, and members of our community.
What Becoming a B Corp Means to Me
Ultimately, becoming a B Corp is not about claiming to be a perfect company. (Could anyone claim that?) It's about making a long-term commitment to building a better one.
If we can continue helping ambitious B2B organizations grow while creating a workplace our team is proud of, supporting the communities around us, and proving that purpose and performance can strengthen one another rather than compete, then I think we'll have built something truly worth talking about.
Looking back on that younger version of myself walking into his first office, I'm not sure he would have imagined this is where the journey would lead. I still believe business can be exciting, meaningful, creative, and ambitious. I just no longer believe those things happen by accident.
They happen when people come together to build a business intentionally, one decision at a time, with values pointing us in the right direction.
And that's the journey we're committed to staying on.
Explore Titan One's B2Culture program and our journey to B Corp Certification here.