about us
Stephen Hawley Martin
Senior Partner
In college, Stephen Hawley Martin was editor-in-chief of the yearbook, an all-conference center on the varsity football team, cartoonist for the college newspaper, and rush chairman of his fraternity.
After graduation, he went to work for a major advertising agency in Baltimore and in just 18 months was handling that firm’s largest account, USAirways.
A few years later, he joined his brother, David, and served as Strategic Plans Director of The Martin Agency during the period the firm grew into a national agency that ADWEEK dubbed, “The hottest in the United States.”
A prolific and gifted writer and thinker, for several years Steve penned a weekly online column for Virginia Business magazine called Insights on Excellence. He has also written or edited more than a dozen books, several of which have won top book industry awards. He is, for example, the only three-time winner of the Writer’s Digest Book Award, having won twice for fiction and once for nonfiction. He has also won a first prize for fiction from Independent Publisher and a first prize for nonfiction from USA Book News.
Steve has a passion for creating effective communications in every form. Until recently he was host of an Internet radio show that attracted 30,000 listeners per episode on average. He once served as the wordsmith for two experts on the Toyota production system, Six Sigma and lean management, penning a book on taking companies lean that has sold more than 100,000 copies. This work has been translated into Chinese, German and Italian, and is used by companies around the world to streamline their operations. He has planned and executed successful marketing and communications plans for dozens of companies in a variety of fields, ranging from Alcoa, Nestlé and Riggs Bank to Colonial Williamsburg, Foxboro Corporation and General Motors.
Steve and his wife of 24 years have two school-age children and one in college. In 2005, he was tapped for membership in the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity by the University of Richmond chapter. Steve has also been listed for a number of years in Who’s Who in the Media and Communications and in Who’s Who Worldwide.
