Business Spotlight: Small Truck, Big Vision

All True LLC’s personal brand might best be summarized in the 1996 Honda Acty mini truck its owners purchased last year. The $6,500 vehicle, which partners Jacob Scowden and Jesse Tyler imported from Japan, was a shared personal dream – one they were able to achieve through planned growth that nearly doubled 2024 revenue for their company, which specializes in strategic branding. It’s also become a symbolic mascot for their core values in business and in life.

“It’s how we view the world in a lot of ways. It’s awesome looking, but it’s purposely built to do a specific job, and nothing more, nothing less,” Tyler says. “There is a real honesty and utilitarian essence to a truck like this. It’s not showing off, but it is just awesome cause it does its little thing so well and it has so many thoughtful design features.”

It’s a lot like All True, they say, a small but mighty agency that does a few strategic things right.

The truck was one of the more lighthearted goals Scowden and Tyler set to pull their agency out of dire straits. The year was 2023, the place was their downtown Springfield office at Highwater, the excitement was high, but the revenue was just not there – and it hadn’t been for two years. So, Scowden and Tyler sat down, faced the music and strategized a solution. It’s what they do for clients every day when developing brands, and that type of values-based truth telling is part of their own business identity.

“We had to get serious about putting things under the microscope, understanding what was going wrong. If, again, we work hard and the work looks good but we still don’t make enough money, what’s the problem?” says Tyler, All True’s founder. “That’s where we started tracking things more, having serious conversations around our goals, standards that we had in terms of what we needed to get paid, how we would win work that would pay us more.”

The process worked. In 2024, All True nearly doubled revenue to $228,000 and increased sales by 80%. Already in 2025, they’re set to meet 2024 revenue numbers by June. The saying, “where attention goes, energy flows,” was accurate for All True’s growth spurt. The partners began relying on analytics to track growth and identify losses, setting specific goals and creating standards for bid amounts.

“The attention to it made it grow,” Tyler says. “All the right stuff was there, it just maybe wasn’t being applied in the right way.”

True story
Tyler wasn’t new to entrepreneurship when he started All True in 2017. He had already founded the social enterprise apparel brand Take Heart Apparel, no longer active, and co-founded publishing company Manuscripts, LLC, still active. He also worked as brand manager and marketing director for Classy Llama Studios LLC. His original partner at All True transitioned out of the venture shortly before Scowden joined as brand designer and partner in 2021. Scowden has 15 years of experience and was the first graphic designer for Convoy of Hope. Together, they began honing their specialization toward focused branding including naming businesses and creating identity designs such as logos.

“It’s inspiring to help brands become meaningful to people,” says Tyler. “It’s more than just the service that they offer. And the logo becomes the thing that holds that for people.”

The work is a passion for Tyler and Scowden. It’s an outlet for creative expression, a way of helping their community thrive and something they both enjoy waking up to do every day. They’ve created brands for Springfield companies and organizations including Celebrate Springfield, The Moxie for Moxie Cinema LLC and The Coffee Ethic LLC and for national startups such as mining biotech corporation Endolith, and hospitality tech company Focal. They also branded media retailer Future Commerce and are their current acting creative directors. Yet, they found themselves as the protagonists in an all-too-common storyline when entrepreneurs sacrifice financial well-being on the altar of passion. It’s easy to say money doesn’t matter when you love what you do, Scowden says, but money sustains the venture and good work deserves good pay.

Scowden and Tyler realized in 2023 that they were not charging anywhere near what they were worth and it was impacting their ability to do what they loved.

“We’re both aligned on money is not the thing that makes the job,” Scowden says. “I could be making four times what I’m making now in a job I absolutely hate. So, we both understand that but we also both understand the thing we want out of a job. For me, it’s that my work is respected. … You can build that and then go, actually money is a representation of these things, as well, right? And so, if I am to be respected, it means I should be charging more.”

When it comes to branding, the adage is true: A logo should cost as much as the billboard it’s going on, Scowden says. He and Tyler began looking seriously at their bids and realized they were bidding three times less than competitors. They had to get serious about charging what they were worth and identifying their target client who would pay that amount. They found that client niche in seed-stage start-ups with large venture capital and biotech companies. All True doesn’t do traditional marketing, relying primarily on word-of-mouth between these clients who value working with a small design studio that provides one-on-one, specialized services.

Currently, it’s just Scowden and Tyler running the ship, though they’re open to adding more employees when the time is right.

“In specifically what we do, the world is actually pretty small,” says Tyler. “We just are on a short list.”

In 2024, they shifted so that approximately 60% of their overall clientele come from larger companies with larger budgets. All True supports itself financially through these projects, enabling them to more easily provide lower-cost services or, in some cases, no-cost services to local clients who make up approximately less than 10% of their overall revenue. They budget each quarter for a certain number of these smaller passion projects. Altruism is at the core of what they do, Tyler says, and it’s how the business got the name: All True, as in “all-true-ism.” Increasing 2024 revenue also allowed All True to make a sizable donation to Moxie Cinema LLC and be a sponsor of Springfield Art Museum’s 99x: Music for the Muse.

“We want to be generous. We made a lot more money last year and so we gave more last year,” Tyler says. “We hit a goal and then say, ‘what can we do with the rest?’ All of those things are what’s exciting for us and gives us reasons to grow.”