Why We Gave Up on Naming Our Agency

"Hi, I'm Chris from That One Firm."

Every time I say it at a networking event in Tacoma or Gig Harbor, I get the exact same reaction. A pause. A double-take. And then, without fail: "Wait, really? That's the name?"

\\Yes, really. \\

There is no deep, philosophical Silicon Valley meaning behind it. We didn't pay consultants thousands of dollars to invent a name that sounds like a pharmaceutical drug. The truth is, we were sitting at the kitchen table, exhausted from trying to come up with a "cool" professional name. Finally, I looked at my wife Leah and said, "Screw it. Let's just call it That One Firm and be done with it."

We started humming the 1980s A-Team theme song as a joke. "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them... maybe you can hire That One Firm." But the more we joked about it, the more we realized it perfectly described who we are and the decades of dirt we had to walk through to build this company.

Phase 1: The Jobber Years

To understand how we operate today, you have to go back to 1996. I was fresh out of radio broadcast school, working at KITI Live 95.7 down in Centralia, Washington. Over the next decade, I didn't learn media from a textbook; I learned it in the trenches. I moved from radio to physical print shops around Y2K, and eventually into selling commercial airtime for Tacoma cable TV. I touched every medium from the ground up.

During this time, I was also training to be a professional wrestler. In wrestling, there is a role called a "jobber"—the guy who does the hard, unglamorous work, taking the hits so the main-event star looks good. When we launched our very first digital SEO agency in 2007, we called it Jobber Town Media.

That was our DNA: we do the heavy lifting in the background so the local business owner shines.

Phase 2: Mud and Politics

In 2008, we took that scrappy mentality into local politics, organizing a rag-tag initiative in Lakewood against the casino industry. We had a $10,000 budget; the opposition had $250,000. We lost by a fraction of a single percentage point.

We parlayed that into managing grassroots campaigns across Washington State, culminating in the 2012 I-522 initiative. We micromanaged a half-million-dollar campaign on a skeleton crew, coordinating hundreds of volunteers, paid signature gatherers, and media events statewide. We didn't even get paid until the very end. It was an absolute masterclass in stretching a dollar and mobilizing actual human beings.

If you want to know why we hate bloated "vanity metrics" and "engagement theater" today, it's because we learned how to move actual crowds on shoestring budgets in the real world.

Phase 3: Sankofa, The Lab, and the Pandemic

After burning out on the statewide political circuit, I realized I needed to understand the deep, academic mechanics of why people take action. So, in 2014, I went back to the lab.

I started at Tacoma Community College, knocking out minors in Psychology and Graphics, before transferring to The Evergreen State College Tacoma in 2016. And let me be very clear: Evergreen Tacoma is not Evergreen Olympia. We are Sankofas, not Geoducks.

I found myself—a white, exhausted political activist—stepping onto an Afrocentric, strongly left-leaning campus right in the middle of the explosive 2016 Trump/Clinton presidential cycle. It was a crucible. But earning my Kente cloth and graduating in 2018 fundamentally changed my perspective. It stripped away the macro-political noise and grounded me in what actual, community-level involvement looks like.

With that foundation, I went to Fielding Graduate University from 2018 to 2020 to earn my Master's in Media Psychology. I was six months deep into my thesis when the COVID-19 pandemic locked down the globe. I pivoted my research entirely. In April 2020, I presented my thesis: a state-initiated social marketing proposal called #growfoodwa.

The proposal served as a blueprint to prevent starvation and hunger after a global pandemic.

I studied the history of World War I and II "Victory Gardens," where the government asked families to grow food as an act of patriotism and self-sufficiency.

I highlighted that true social marketing isn't just social networking; it is focused on influencing behaviors to improve health and contribute to communities.The pandemic exposed exactly how vulnerable our society and supply chains are to disruption.

Phase 4: Building Digital Victory Gardens

I graduated into a locked-down world. The South Sound economy was panicking. Local businesses didn't need fancy agency slides or theoretical branding exercises. They needed digital Victory Gardens. They needed practical, survival-level digital operations to keep their doors open.

And that is the moment at the kitchen table when That One Firm was officially born.

We are veteran marketers, developers, and media buyers who got tired of the corporate BS. We built this agency for South Sound operators—the roofers, the logistics companies, the local retailers—who clock in early and don't have time for tech theater.

What works in Silicon Valley doesn't always work on SR-16. If you are tired of juggling three different vendors and just want someone to handle the complex digital operations so you can focus on doing good work for good people... well, you found us.

That One Firm

Related reading

• Our Story: That One Firm
• The Trust Factor: Why South Sound Business Owners Choose Us