By Doug Easter

In 1976, when my father started Easter Associates, people were still working on typewriters. There was no internet, no email, no smartphones. The idea that you could hold a board meeting with people scattered across the state, without anyone leaving their home, would have seemed like science fiction.

Nobody knew what the next fifty years would bring, but when I look at why Easter Associates is still here after half a century, the answer has less to do with how we adapted and more to do with how we stayed the same.

What My Father Built

My father started this company when I was 12 years old. I grew up watching him work, and what I remember most is not the clients or the contracts, but how he carried himself.

Peter Easter was well known at the Virginia General Assembly, particularly for his honesty and his directness. In its early years, Easter Associates focused primarily on government relations, and my father believed that lobbying was about education, not persuasion. You go in, you tell the truth, you make sure people understand the issue and you trust them to make the right call. That approach built his credibility over time and shaped how people thought about him, not just as a professional but as a person. People who knew him still talk about him that way today.

When it came to association management, he approached it similarly. He called the day-to-day tasks “pick and shovel work.” To him, that meant sitting in association board meetings, listening directly to clients, gathering information firsthand and coming back with something practical and useful. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it’s still how we think about what we do for our clients today.

Taking the Torch

Before joining Easter Associates professionally, I also spent time in government relations and lobbying, which felt like a natural extension of everything I had grown up around. When I came on with the company in 2000, I worked alongside my father and got to know the clients firsthand, some of whom have been our partners for 50 years!

By 2006, I bought the company from my father and took over as its President. The way Dad handled that transition said everything about who he was as a leader. He never once told me how to run things or made me feel like I needed to do things the way he would have. He was simply there when I wanted to talk something through and trusted me to figure the rest out on my own.

He gave me the freedom to run things however I saw fit, but what I chose to do was carry forward much of what he had already built. My philosophy was not far from his: do the right thing, be honest and put people first. Those were the tenets I leaned on as the world around us continued to change in ways neither of us could have anticipated.

The World Changed. The People Stayed.

During my time as President, every few years brought something new that forced us to adapt. The widespread use of smartphones meant adjusting to a world where we can access each other 24/7. COVID moved nearly everything virtual overnight, and we had to figure out how to keep our clients and their associations moving forward in real time. Even now, artificial intelligence has created a lot of questions for what new technology can do for our industry. None of that has been simple, but through all the uncertainty, something has stayed remarkably steady: our people.

Executive Vice President Christina Sandridge has been with Easter Associates for 23 years. Current President Jonathan Williams has been here for 17. Executive Vice President Debbie Easter, along with our CFO and COO Bill Murrill, have been here for 13. When I look at numbers like that, I don’t think about retention strategy, but rather, what it means that people have chosen to stay. At Easter Associates, people genuinely know and care about one another, both inside and outside the office. The friendships here are genuine, and the fact that we are a family-owned business is more than just a coincidence. Everyone here feels like family, whether their last name is Easter or not.

I have been connected to this company since I was 12 years old, and I recognize that I am not a neutral observer. But watching what Easter Associates has become over fifty years and seeing the people who have chosen to be a part of it, is something I will never take for granted. This is my family’s legacy, and it means everything to me.

Looking Forward

I have no idea what the next fifty years will look like. In 2076, I imagine people will look back at where we are right now with the same disbelief we feel looking back at floppy disks.

But I’m hopeful. I have watched this company navigate five decades of change that nobody saw coming, and what carried Easter Associates through it all was never the technology or the era, it was the people who were a part of it and what they believed in.

Associations exist because people need each other. That was true in 1976, it’s true today, and it will still be true long after the tools we use now are considered ‘outdated.’ Association management, at its core, is about creating community, giving people a place to learn from one another, a voice for their industry, and the sense that they are part of something larger than themselves. For fifty years, Easter Associates has done exactly that because we genuinely believe in what can be accomplished through collaboration. It is not just a mission statement; it is the reason we all come to work every day.

As long as that stays true, I think we are going to be just fine.