The agency that launched without a plan, without clients, and without a single dollar of revenue in April 1996 looked very different by the early 2000s. Part 1 of this series traced how Silesky marketing growth began not with a pitch deck or a launch event but with a set of letterhead on a front stoop, a sold piano, eight weeks in Costa Rica, and a community of clients who already knew and trusted the person behind the work. By the time Susi Silesky replanted herself inside the Baltimore Jewish nonprofit community, something had shifted. The work was coming in. The relationships were holding. The question was no longer whether the business would survive. It was whether it could grow into something real.

The answer came in the form of a hire.

Susi describes the moment she brought on Kim Morehead as the moment the business stopped feeling like a freelance operation and started feeling like an agency. Not the first invoice. Not the first client retainer. The hire. That distinction matters because it reflects something true about how small businesses cross a threshold. Revenue is one signal. Bringing another person into the work, staking your livelihood on your ability to sustain them too, is a different kind of commitment entirely.

Kim Morehead was not hired into a defined role with a clean job description. She came into an agency that was still figuring out what it was. What followed was a true creative partnership, built in real time, on real projects, for real clients. The two of them did not divide labor along clean lines. They built the foundational work of the agency side by side, solving problems together, dividing tasks based on what each project needed.

Web design was not something Susi had trained for. At the time, no small agency had. The internet was changing what clients needed, and the agencies that survived that shift were the ones willing to pick up the skill while the work was already in motion. Susi and Kim learned web design together, taking on client projects that required them to deliver something neither of them had built before. The first website Silesky produced was for Sheldon and Sons. It would not be the last.

By the late 1990s, the agency had a body of work. Some of that work was proving to have a lifespan that nobody had projected. Logos and brand systems Susi built during this period are still in use more than 25 years later. Sheldon and Sons. Glen Burnie Transmission. Several others. The clients changed. Leadership turned over. Circumstances shifted. The brands held.

That kind of longevity does not come from following trends. Susi’s design philosophy, as she states it directly, is built on a short set of principles she has carried through every decade of the agency’s work:

These are not abstract values. They are conclusions drawn from watching what holds and what does not, across hundreds of projects and three decades of work.

Silesky did not grow by buying ads or chasing new markets. The agency grew through referrals, almost entirely, in the early years. The client relationships that formed during the Associated Jewish Community Federation period became the foundation. Those clients talked. Their networks talked. The roster expanded one name at a time.

The backstory of Silesky’s early growth is populated with specific people, not categories of clients. Neil Sweren, a mortgage lender, brought branding work for American Home Loan. Geoff Basik, Sandy Vogel, Ruthie Guggenheim, and Ken Davidson came through early on and opened doors to further work. The Center for Jewish Education was among the first clients, where Susi created an invitation for teenagers that she describes as one of her favorite early pieces.

Referral-based growth works this way. One person who trusts you tells one person who needs you. The pipeline has no automation. It requires the work to speak clearly enough that clients feel comfortable attaching their name to a recommendation. At Silesky, the work did that consistently enough to sustain the agency through its first decade.

The Jewish nonprofit community gave Silesky its footing, but the agency did not stay narrowly defined. As the late 1990s moved into the early 2000s, the roster expanded into private sector work. Printing companies, local businesses, and organizations outside the nonprofit sector began appearing on the client list. Each one came through the same mechanism: a relationship, a referral, a piece of work that someone had seen and remembered.

The shift from print and branding into web work marked a real transition. Era 1, the Print Dominance period, gave way to Era 2 as websites became something every client needed, and very few Baltimore agencies were equipped to deliver well. Silesky was already at work before the demand fully arrived. The learning happened alongside the client projects, which meant the agency was building capability and delivering at the same time.

The late 1990s produced some of Silesky’s most creatively specific work, and in at least one case, its most contested. These were not safe campaigns. They were pointed, particular, and sharp enough to draw attention from people who had not hired Silesky at all.

The Center for Jewish Education campaign drew on the imagery and influence of Golda Meir and other major historical figures to position the organization’s mission. For Har Sinai Preschool, Susi designed a front lawn billboard with the headline “I Choose Har Sinai,” a direct statement intended to speak to prospective families. The campaign worked well enough that a competing institution, Beth T’Filoh, replicated the concept without permission. The imitation was not flattering to Beth T’Filoh. It confirmed that the original had landed.

For Innovative Gourmet, Susi built a campaign around two images placed side by side: a bride and groom scuba diving underwater, and a traditional couple in a banquet hall. The header read: “It is not enough to be Classic, be Innovative.” The target was unmistakable. The campaign won local awards.

The Sheldon and Sons rebrand is the project Susi returns to most readily when she talks about creative instinct and the early years. Scott Sheldon came to the agency through networking. His goal was to reposition Sheldon and Sons as a more luxury-focused printing company, signaling a different level of craft to a different tier of client.

Susi’s first move was not to open a style guide. She asked about his dog. Angus was a bulldog. Within that conversation, the direction of the entire brand became clear. She and photographer Stuart Zolotorow spent a morning sitting on the floor of Scott’s house, adjusting angles and waiting for the shot until it was exactly right. The tagline that came out of that session: “Get Ready to Be Impressed.”

It was the first brand Silesky built around an animal. Susi names it as one of her favorite projects, not because of any award potential, but because the instinct was right, the client trusted it, and the work held.

By the early 2000s, Silesky had a roster, a creative partner, a body of work with staying power, and a clear sense of the kind of agency it intended to be. Growth had not come from outspending the competition or repositioning the brand every two years. It came from building relationships carefully, delivering work that lasted, and picking up new skills in real time when the market required it.

The agency had grown to five employees by the mid-2000s, a milestone that marked a genuine shift in scale. Susi was no longer the only person whose livelihood depended on the work coming in. For a business that had started with nothing more than a name on a piece of letterhead, that kind of growth represented something earned. What came next would test whether it could hold.

Part 3 picks up in 2006, when Silesky Marketing closed its doors with those five employees and no choice in the matter.