To Dave, with love*

“But how do you thank someone, who has taken you from 100K to 10MM? It isn’t easy, but I’ll try.”

Imarc Partner, Dave Tufts stepped down at the end of August, after a long and fruitful sabbatical this year. As I told the team, this is bittersweet for me and all of his close collaborators over the past 25 years. We’re losing one of our mainstays – a guy that broke so much trail with me in the earliest days of the agency.

Dave is one of those rare right and left-brained people that you sometimes find in the world; He is a gifted musician, artist, and photographer, but also became a really skilled designer, coder, and eventually a producer of really successful and effective websites and applications.

We went through so much together in our lives over all those years, personally and professionally, and we built something together that I am very proud of: A place to work, and grow, and create, and an agency that values and nurtures its team as much as its customers. We weathered the boom and bust of the early dot-com era together, 9/11, two wars, one pandemic, two economic recessions, and several reinventions of the agency as we grew and adapted to the changing market.

I liked to say, Dave was Imarc’s Pete Townshend to my Roger Daltry. I wore the tight pants and did the frontman bit, but he was the true talent in the band. We were a very complementary and successful couple of collaborators, for a very long time. I would not trade that experience with him for anything, and I would not have wanted to do it with anyone else.

Dave set out in a new direction in his life during his sabbatical this year, and I cannot remember seeing him any more joyful in the 30ish years that I’ve known and worked with him, even preceding our years together at Imarc. That’s the sweet part of the news today – my long-time friend and Partner is very happy, and learning and growing in new ways, which is wonderful to behold.

So we celebrate you, my friend and Partner, with thanks and appreciation for so many things, spanning so many years. And with a tear in my eye too. Thanks for taking this wild ride with me and everyone else that got to work with you. Thanks for pulling us through some difficult moments. And above all, thanks for always doing it with a ton of class, purpose, and integrity.

Enjoy the hell out of this next chapter, you’ve earned it. We all wish you the best.

Love,
Nils

*Thanks for the inspiration, Lulu.