Nearly 20 years ago, as Facebook and other social platforms began reshaping the internet, Lee University roommates Eric Brown and Taylor Jones were busy building websites.
Brown, a divinity student studying to become a minister, and Jones, an accounting major, quickly developed a love and appreciation for digital communications.
That college side hustle evolved into Whiteboard, a Chattanooga-based creative agency which helps businesses and nonprofits across the country with their digital strategy and products across all facets of the internet — websites, apps, branding, automation and advertising.
“We started developing websites in our dorm room as sophomores … and never stopped,” Brown recalls.
“Whether we’re dealing with the C-suite of a major company or a company founder starting his or her business, I think the website embodies what they are chasing in the world. That remains our first love.”
Chattanooga roots
Although many internet giants are based in Silicon Valley and the biggest advertising and branding companies are in New York City or Atlanta, Brown and his wife decided to raise their family and build a business in Chattanooga.
While considering an offer to move to New York 15 years ago, Brown recalls coming across a magazine called Next American City, which had an article touting the revitalization of Chattanooga’s Main Street. Brown says that was the catalyst he and his wife, Katie Brown, needed to choose Chattanooga as their home — and they haven’t regretted the decision since.
Brown met his future wife, then Katie Black, on a blind date in his senior year in high school. After getting married and changing her last name from Black to Brown, Katie convinced Eric in 2010 not to take the job offer in New York but pursue the business dream of Whiteboard in Chattanooga instead.
“As a 23-year-old who didn’t know a lot about business at the time, she gave me permission to fail — and she even put it in writing,” Eric recalls.
As it turned out, they didn’t need the safety net. Since its launch, their company, Whiteboard, has worked with more than 140 clients annually.
The agency has crafted digital strategies and websites across a range of industries and nonprofits, including iconic Chattanooga companies like the Tennessee Aquarium, Ruby Falls and the Hunter Museum of Art. Still, most of Whiteboard’s work comes from beyond city limits, including major clients like NCR, the IEX stock exchange, and TED Conferences in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Last year, the company generated more than $7 million in revenue and now employs more than 40 workers and contractors across offices nationwide.
Building the brand
Like the company name suggests, Whiteboard tries to take ideas and turn them into innovative websites, apps and other digital communication means to promote the organization and its brand. From its start, the company has pushed the boundaries of web design and use of video.
In 2012, Whiteboard won an AWWWards international design recognition as one of the best 365 websites in the world, boosting the company 600 web visits a month to nearly 100,000. The next year, the company was able to acquire the Chattanooga design firm Widgets and Stone, which has been involved in the design of 82 active entities in downtown Chattanooga, including Clyde’s, St. John’s and Main Street Meats.
In 2014, Whiteboard merged with the FiveStone agency in Atlanta, which was started by Jason Locy who has known and worked with Brown since Whiteboard was first started. FiveStone specializes in helping charities and has worked with more than 600 nonprofits. Locy, who started FiveStone 23 years before merging the company with Whiteboard, says at the time of the merger that he “could not think of any single agency better suited to steward the mission and vision of FiveStone forward.”
Brown said he is open to other acquisitions and mergers as the company continues to grow.
“I still feel like we’re on the ground floor of Whiteboard,” Brown says.
Whiteboard is organized into three studios that specialize in digital branding, digital experiences and digital activation top develop strategy, designs brands, develops websites, builds apps and launches campaigns.
Jones says he believes the organizations that shape the future “will be the ones that are the most natively digital.”
“If you want to exist in the future, you must adopt a digital-centric organizational strategy from the inside out.”
Relational culture
Brown hopes to eventually transition the business into an employee-owned company, and says he is passionate about fostering a culture that uplifts both clients and staff.
Whiteboard’s mission statement emphasizes that “the only way to a brighter future is together by empowering one another to engage” with one another. A native of a small town in Bartow County, Georgia whose parents worked with special needs students at the local school, Brown says he gained his empathy and relational skills from his parents.
“How to we connect what is to what ought to be” is sort of our frame for the definition of design,” Brown says.
Although Whiteboard has worked with many Fortune 500 companies and major nonprofits, the company has also worked with many startup ventures.
Lauren Hall, CEO of First Things First, says Whiteboard gave her company’s brand an upgrade with a refreshed logo, new website and a structured style guide. With Whiteboard’s help again, Hall says First Things First will soon undergo another brand refresh.
“This was pivotal at the time because First Things First was changing its model from relying on a hefty government grant to building residual income through charging for services,” Hall recalls. “This meant our brand had to appear equally as valuable as our content and programming. “
One thing Whiteboard does differently than most companies: Free cooked breakfasts are provided for workers every morning, and every week brings every morning for its workers, and every other week there is a meeting for staff to discuss ways to help clients and one another.
“We’re trying to embody a place that people can really love,” Brown says.
In 2017, Whiteboard became one of Chattanooga’s first Certified B-Corporations, which ensures a company meets environmental, community and social goals, in addition to making money. B Labs scores companies more favorably based upon their environmental footprint, how much they compensate their workers and how much they support and buy from the communities where they operate.
Last year, Brown and Jones wrote about their approach to business in the book, “Agency: The Antidote to a Culture Obsessed with Self.”
“If you’re feeling burned out, ineffective, isolated or even vain (a common trait in an influencer-driven society) — we’d suggest that your posture of agency may be out of alignment,” Brown and Jones wrote in their book. “We know that because we’ve been there, too.”
Brown says the antidote to burnout, ineffectiveness, isolation and vanity is to practice agency on a personal level and at work, balancing tensions of purpose, expertise, advocacy and ambition.”
Internet manners
While Jones and Brown have capitalized on the digital revolution, they remain cautious about parts of the Internet experience. In 2017, Brown started an initiative known as the Reformation of Internet Manners, which promotes programs to limit cell phone and screen time access for children and youth and encourages respectful dialogue among people.
“The internet’s capacity for high-speed scale comes with great opportunities, but also great consequences,” he said. “The earlier kids get cell phones in their hands, the worse it is.”
Instead of using the Internet for ego, rivalry and division, Whiteboard’s mission statement focuses on empathy, community and generosity.
“Cultures in most agencies are grueling, fueled by unrealistic expectations and glorifying a lack of work/life balance.,’ says Kevin Paul Scott, the co-funder of ADDO and the Chick-fil-A Leader Academy who has worked with Whiteboard on a number of projects. “Eric and Taylor have been so intentional about building a culture that is not just different, but countercultural in the creative agency industry.”
Eric Brown
* Age: 38
* Job: Co-founder and chief vision officer of Whiteboard
* Education: 2009 graduate in discipleship ministry from Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee
* Career: A native of White, Georgia north of Cartersville, Brown worked for two years as a project and research manager for THINQ Media before he and his college roommate from Lee University started Whiteboard in 2010 in Chattanooga. In 2023, Brown and Kevin Paul co-authored “ROI : Return on Inspiration,” and last year Brown and Jones wrote “Agency: The Antidote to a Culture Obsessed with Self.”
*Awards: Whiteboard’s work instigated new internet design trends with video backgrounds and parallax design and the company has won multiple Awwwards, The Webbys, and other awards.
* Personal: Wife, Katie; children, Ella and Owen
Whiteboard
* Founded: 2010 by Eric Brown and Taylor Jones
* Headquarters: First and second floors at 1433 Williams Street in Chattanooga’s Southside
* Acquisitions: Widgets & Stone, 2023; Five Stone agency, 2024
* Annual revenues: Over $7 million
* Staff: About 40 employees
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