Concrete goals and missed opportunities driving Fitzco to make diversity matter.

Last week, Fitzco publicly announced our goal of achieving 50% people of color in both our leadership team and general population by 2026. It’s an important commitment, a statistical means to a transformational end that will be realized by this and other initiatives in the coming years.

And yet, I’m haunted by the knowledge that this could have happened ages ago. 2004, perhaps.

It was then that I found myself in a heated discussion with a black, female colleague. I don’t recall details, only that what I perceived to be reasonable sparring about a work-related issue took a sharp, uncomfortable turn.

Through angry tears, she told me the way I was engaging with her was offensive. I wasn’t listening. I was being condescending and dismissive, reacting to her not as a peer with a passionate point of view but rather, as she put it, as an angry black woman.

I was mortified. Confused. I’m sure defensive. Never had I been confronted about my behavior vis-á-vis race, at work or anywhere else. But looking back, yes – I was ignorantly contributing a moment to a long-stitched patchwork of demeaning and dismissive moments she’d experienced at work, in life.

A torch was laid at my feet.

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Over our 37 years and like the vast majority of our peers, Fitzco never codified or publicized diversity goals. We hosted events and training. Sent employees to diversity conferences. We invested our time and treasure in moments of meaningful activity, like hosting the One Club Boot Camp and co-founding Advertising for Change, a group of Atlanta agencies using our collective resources to create and empower the country’s most diverse and inclusive advertising and marketing agency community.

Still, we’ve made no Best Of lists when it comes to meaningful change. When our diversity numbers rose, it was more by chance than design. When they fell, we spoke earnestly of doing the right things moving forward, but usually allowed open-role urgency to trump diversity ambitions.

Good intentions, all. But collectively, not nearly enough to move the needle. If we didn’t know it already, our people told us so last summer with the straight talk we insist upon. Their collective message: pick up the damn torch, and per our agency’s mantra, make it matter.

Our 50%-by-2026 goal was designed using assumptions about 3 key levers: agency growth, employee attrition and diversity-hiring percentage targets. If our assumptions turn out to be wrong, we’ll know it and they’ll be adjusted. You’ll know it too, as we update our diversity statistics at fitzco.com.

The goal is aggressive because it must be. But we also know it’s achievable because it must be.

Hiring is only part of the solution. A D&I audit conducted last fall by an outside consultant revealed much about where we stand relative to the industry – salary equity, promotions, policies, procedures, recruitment, onboarding. Some areas are starting out in decent shape. Others, we have hard work to do. We’ve shared it all with the agency.

We hosted a 10-part town hall series – My Black Experience – featuring the stories, advice and inspiration of clients, colleagues and community leaders.

We adopted a 501(c)3 – Nicholas House – to aid and assist in economic and social inequities facing Atlanta’s black community.

We partnered with Cristo Rey Jesuit School, inviting 4 POC students into Fitzco to give them real-life exposure to agency life, roles and opportunities.

We’re building a database of black-owned businesses for us to tap into for our needs – from production to printing to catering and everything between.

We’ve pivoted our summer internship program, working with the Morehouse College marketing department to source candidates. 

And we continue our commitment to Advertising for Change, including our shared support of MAIP (the 4As Multicultural Advertising Internship Program), joining forces to expose Atlanta-agency MAIP interns to all of our member agencies.

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Seventeen years ago, an employee had the courage to tell me she’d had enough. That torch was, in retrospect, a gift. A gift I failed to see for what it was, naïve to its true meaning, a moment I wasn’t mature enough, brave enough, introspective enough to handle.

I know I’m not alone in that experience. Many of us have taken and continue to take stock of lost opportunities and wasted time. But thanks to an impassioned agency that lives and breathes our Make it Matter philosophy, Fitzco is doing DEI very differently now. We must. Our people, clients, work and future all depend on it.

We won’t be perfect. I won’t be perfect. But together we will, at last and consistently, carry the torch and walk the talk - to 2026 and beyond.