Founder and CEO
Sam Silvey learned marketing by doing it. Every job, by hand.
Sam founded Spectruss in Chattanooga in 2012. In the fourteen years since, he has personally done the work in every discipline of marketing and advertising, for 250+ companies from funded startups to publicly traded companies.
Every job, done by hand
The résumé reads like a trade list.
Where it started
He started as a programmer. Then he learned every other job.
Sam started building websites for companies in 2006, as a freelancer, while studying computer science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. One of the first was for a local coffee shop, paid half in food and drink credits.
He founded Silvey Development in 2012 and slept on a futon in the office for six months while it got going. In 2013 it became Silvey + Huffaker Creative, with Sam as principal, adding brand and design to the code.
In July 2015 he renamed it Spectruss: spectrum, for the range of work, and truss, for the beam that holds a structure together. One strategy, holding every discipline in place.
Every lane
Most marketing leaders came up through one lane. Sam came up through all of them.
He has built brands and designed them, written the positioning and the brand voice, and shot the photography and the video. He has produced TV commercials, from the monthly spots for Fowler Brothers Co. Home & Patio to the ADDY-winning Liberty Safe commercial, photographed lifestyle brands, and placed the print.
He has coded the websites, built API-connected e-commerce and POS systems, run the market research, and managed influencer campaigns. He has bought the digital ads as a Google Ads certified marketer and set up the analytics to read what actually happened.
When you have done every job, nobody can fool you on the cost, the timeline, or the effort of any of them. That is the job a Chief Marketing Officer is supposed to do.
The record
Fourteen years of work, with names attached.
Sam has worked inside 250+ companies, from funded startups to publicly traded companies. Past clients include First Horizon, CBL Properties, Astec Industries, the US Chamber of Commerce, Liberty Safe, Transcard, Conversant Group, Fenix24, the Hunter Museum of American Art, and the Chattanooga Choo Choo. A few of the milestones:
How he works
He can check the work because he did it by hand.
Sam's read on the usual setup is blunt: a company hires an SEO person and a social media person, nobody connects the dots, and the owner ends up as the CMO by default. His job is to make the website talk to the ads, and the ads talk to the CRM.
Spectruss uses AI everywhere it earns its place, and Sam audits that work himself. When you have hand-built the thing AI is now drafting, you can tell at a glance whether it is right or confidently wrong.
Sam leads it; Spectruss runs it. A content and design team, vetted specialists, and AI do the production under his direction, so the strategy has one owner and the production has a system.
He also hosts the Spectruss Speakeasy, sitting down with founders, operators, and experts to talk about what is actually working, plus Spectruss AI Live sessions on putting AI to work.
In the community
Chattanooga is home. He shows up for it.
Sam served on the Chairman's Board of the Hunter Museum of American Art from 2018 to 2019.
He was a founding member of the Lookout Wild Film Festival and served on its board from its first year through 2021.
Off the clock
A racer before he was a marketer.
Sam raced bicycles from his early teens. He won the Tennessee State Pro Road Race Championship in 2008 and the SEC Division I Overall Mountain Bike title, and closed out his cycling career in 2009 with Team BMW Litespeed, racing Cat 1 on the road and UCI Pro on the mountain bike.
Along the way he guided tours at the Tour de France and worked as a tech rep for The North Face. When the 2008 downturn made a pro contract unlikely, he went back to the keyboard.
Today he races hard enduro motorcycles, with finishes of 15th in 2022 and 23rd in 2023 at the Red Bull Tennessee Knockout, the US Hard Enduro National Championship, and he drove the Spectruss UTV in the 2019 Mint 400. Ask what drives him and the answer is short: beating the competition, and winning for clients.
