Founder
Walter Steelman.
Entrepreneur First.
Marketer Because He Had To Be.
Nobody taught Walter marketing at an agency. His ventures taught him, products designed, patents filed, payrolls made, and every marketing dollar spent was his own, which turns out to be the most rigorous marketing education there is.
The Résumé Is a List of Things He Had To Figure Out.
Six years in market research came first, as a manager, a programmer, and an analyst, which is where the habit started of asking what number is behind a claim before believing it. Then seventeen years as an art director in printing and publishing, from 1997 to 2014, learning what makes a page work when the ink is permanent and somebody already paid for the print run.
Websites the entire time, starting in 1997. Google was founded in 1998.
He started his first company in 2001 and has owned and operated four businesses since. In 2011 he filed his first patent, a new method for the payments industry. And through all of it he kept making things by hand, printmaking and glassblowing, disciplines where the craft cannot be faked and the material tells you immediately when you have rushed it.
That combination is unusual and it explains the agency: the analyst asks for the number, the art director makes it look like something, the operator has signed the front of the checks, and the craftsman knows the difference between finished and done.
He Built the Vendor He Could Never Find.
Every operator has the same vendor stories: the agency that reported "impressions," the invoice that never tied to an outcome, the account manager who'd never run anything. In 2017, Walter founded 11 Marketing + Design in downtown Amarillo as the inversion of those stories: an agency run by someone who's been the client, priced like the small-business budgets it serves, and reporting the way an owner actually reads, calls, leads, customers, sources attached.
Five years in, Amarillo's business community put $100,000 of EnterPrize grant money behind that model; seven years in, the city voted it Best Advertising & Marketing Agency.
What's a Factotum?
Walter's actual title, and the most honest one in the industry: factotum, from the Latin for "do everything," historically the person in an operation trusted with all of it. In a founder-led agency, that's not a joke title, it's the org chart, and it's why clients here get answers from someone who can see the whole board: the site, the rankings, the ads, the brand, and how each moves the others.
The Operator's Three Questions.
Where did that number come from? If a stat has no source, it's decoration.
What do I own when we part ways? Your site, accounts, and data should be yours, walking away should be possible, which is what keeps vendors honest.
Who actually does the work? Meet them before you sign, not after.
We built this agency to survive all three questions from the kind of buyer Walter used to be. How we work.
Talk to the Operator.
The demo isn't a pitch deck; it's Walter or the team reading your actual market with you. Bring your numbers, or let the free audit pull them first.