Our Story

It was February 11th, 2023, a Colony House concert at the Ryman Auditorium. If you know the Ryman, you know there’s something about that room… the pews, the history, the way sound moves through it… that makes everything feel a little more significant.

I’d been searching for a name for months. Nothing was right. Then somewhere between the songs it just arrived. Colony Creative. I did what any reasonable person does at a concert: ignored the band and grabbed my phone to check Godaddy…

The domain was available.

It was also $3,300…

To understand what that number meant, you need some context.

Our home wasn’t just recently damaged; it was uninhabitable. We weren’t recovering from a setback; we were starting from a floor we hadn’t chosen. By the grace of close friends, we’d been given a place to stay: an 11-acre farmhouse in Franklin, Tennessee.

We brought what we could. A king bed and my office desk went into the living room, right there when you walked in the front door. A six-foot black folding table held everything else we owned, with a TV sitting on top of it. My wife moved her desk into one of the guest rooms. That was it. That was all we had, and honestly, that was all we needed.

It was quiet out there. The kind of quiet that either breaks you or gives you room to think clearly for the first time in a long time.

It was at that desk, on that farm, that I actually figured out what Colony was going to be.

So when the moment came, close to the last money we had, the math didn’t make sense. But the decision was already made before I finished the thought.

We bought it that night.

Some decisions don’t make sense on paper. They just feel like the ones you’ll regret not making.

We had a name. Then came the next problem.

If Colony has a symbol… a mascot, an icon, something that means something… what is it? The easy answers came fast. Bees. Ants. Both have rich symbolism, good stories, instant recognition.

But they were all just workers. Interchangeable parts of a larger machine. That wasn’t what we were building.

In deep research one night, I stumbled onto a 1974 field study out of Brigham Young University documenting the ecology of a barn owl colony that had formed inside an abandoned steel mill in central Utah.

Barn owls are solitary by nature; independent hunters, built to operate alone at an extraordinarily high level. But under the right conditions, they form colonies. Not out of instinct. Not because they have to. Because the environment makes proximity advantageous. The individuals stay exactly who they are. The ecosystem just creates better outcomes when they choose to align.

I recognized it immediately… because it was exactly how we had always worked.

Throughout my career I had built alongside other agency owners, small business owners, and specialist contractors who were exceptional at what they did. Together we could accomplish more than any of us could alone. Not because we needed each other to function, but because we chose to build something bigger. I was in a unique position to take the logistics, the agency infrastructure, and the operational foundation and build the floor that the rest of the team could stand on. We could do it independently. We just didn’t want to.

That was Colony. And now it had its symbol.

From there, everything else followed. The ethos. The values. The mission. The mark.

We built the brand around a simple belief: creativity isn’t just a service we offer, it’s who we are at our core and it’s how we operate. The barn owl became more than a logo. It became a lens. Every decision about who we bring in, how we work, and what we build is measured against it.

The values wrote themselves: deliver excellence, embrace the chaos, learn fast, stay all in. The mission was simple… creative minds, digital solutions, and an unwavering commitment to the people we build for and alongside.

And there’s still so much more to come. The long-term vision is to continue to scale the creative ecosystem. Build a place for the kind of people who choose collaboration not because they have to, but because they understand what it unlocks.

We are storytellers, designers, developers, and strategists. We are problem solvers and, yes, sometimes magicians. We make things because we can. We take chances, fail fast, and keep moving. We are not a hive.

We are something else…