Chapter 1

After rising quickly through the ranks at various agencies—including eight amazing years at Diamond Morgan Northend Albers (DMNA)—I had the audacity to think I could step out on my own.

So, with Adobe, Palm, and Yahoo! waiting in the wings, my longtime art director partner and I started Wonderful. And for a few great years it was exactly that.

But soon I craved something new and different. Like so many ideas, this one struck in the middle of the night: An agency I could run on my own, transforming on demand to meet the different needs of different clients. Turning to a cadre of the best and brightest independent professionals I’d worked with over the years and building bespoke teams. Or, having clients engage with me as copywriter slash creative director, working directly with their in-house teams.

Why exactly? The traditional agency-client model was going through a period of dramatic change. More and more creatives were choosing independent career paths. And large organizations increasingly had full-on creative departments, often only needing a writer—or a team or writers.

And like that, 3AM was born.

18 years later, others have picked up on our fluid agency model. While it’s no longer a novel concept, I like to think that being super responsive and flexible is an idea that never gets old. It’s worked beautifully for HP, Dell, 23andMe, Evernote, One Medical, Motorola, Cloudflare, and dozens of others. There’s very little we can’t do. Well, except maybe soufflé. Or curling. Point is, we’ll make sure your 3AM team is always designed to fit your needs. Never the other way around.