DDC_DC Magazine Summer 2022_062422

PROJECT FOSTERS A SENSE OF BELONGING IN DEKALB ENTER THE LAND OF LALA’S BAGELS OC CREATIVE MAKES A MARK ON DEKALB BUSINESS LANDSCAPE

UNITING THE COUNTY SOCCER CLUB CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS OF GOING STRONG

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INSIDE PLANS TO ROCK Aurora Music Company opening in DeKalb later this summer.......................................6 BELONGING IN DEKALB How a conversation inspired a community................8 ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL Local soccer club unites the county..........................12 IN THE LAND OF LALA’S BAGELS Commercial bakery sets up shop in DeKalb.............16 PEACE, LOVE, ART OC Creative making a mark on DeKalb business landscape.................................20

Project Manager: Lisa Angel Layout & Design: Julie Barichello Photos by: DeKalb County United Soccer Club, Dough Makers Pro, Mark Busch, Northern Illinois University, and OC Creative Writers: Kelsey Rettke, Shane Taylor, Kelley White Articles and advertisements are property of Shaw Media.

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Visit DiscoverSycamore.com DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 5

O T S N A PL

K C O R eKalb

g in D n i n e p o y Compan lor c i s u M ne Tay Aurora nd Sha ke a

ey Rett

By: Kels

C

hildhood friends and business partners from St. Charles hope to foster their love of music with a new downtown shop, Aurora Music Company, and are eyeing an endof-summer opening.

The business, located at 137 E. Lincoln Highway, is co-owned by president Rob Mondi and vice president Frank Agnello and will offer instruments for sale, equipment repairs, a space for local musicians to perform and resources for vocal and keyboard lessons. The pair said they hope to open by Aug. 1.

Mondi said he and Agnello grew up in St. Charles and loved music as kids.

“We played in bands with other kids in the neighborhood and have many fond memories of learning guitar and hanging out listening to music,” Mondi said.

Mondi isn’t a stranger to business ownership.

He is the founder of Mondi & Associates Inc., an organization that helps the elderly remain in their homes around DeKalb County. Recently, the business was awarded a $25,000 forgivable loan from the city of DeKalb’s architectural improvement program.

DeKalb seemed like the perfect spot to set down roots for a music shop, Mondi said.

“We looked for a long time on where to put our shop,” Mondi said. “Basically, west of Route 59 south of Elgin and north of Aurora and DeKalb kept coming up as a great location given the amount of families, the university, the revitalization of the downtown area. And we really wanted to be a part of that vibe.”

The shop will feature a retail section with

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various musical instruments and accessories for sale, primarily guitar and bass products.

It also will offer keyboard and vocal lessons, repairs for guitars, provide stringed instrument set-up and modifications.

Expanded offerings also are on the table, Mondi said, and more could come with time, depending on customer demand as the business grows.

The outlet will also give customers a chance to have custom Aurora brand guitars built by Agnello.

“What started as a hobby has become a fulltime venture for him,” Mondi said.

It’s been a labor of love for the duo as they bring their venture downtown. According to DeKalb city documents, Mondi bought the formerly vacant building on Lincoln Highway in July 2021 and has been renovating it since.

In a recent DeKalb City Council meeting ahead of a vote unanimously approved to award a $25,000 Architectural Improvement Program grant, City Manager Bill Nicklas said the pair already has invested about $75,000 of their own money into the space. “[They] have done a lot of things interiorwise,” Nicklas said. “So we are pleased to support them.”

The grant money will come out of the city of DeKalb’s downtown tax increment finance district fund. Under the Illinois TIF Act, TIF dollars, which are specially identified property taxes, can be used for areas of redevelopment and rehabilitation.

The funds will go toward improvements on the main level and lower level bathroom, by making them compliant with the Americans

with Disabilities Act. The funds also will help the interior be child-friendly for use during lessons and for future exterior work and window replacement.

“The building is as old as the Egyptian [Theatre] building so it needed quite a lot of updating,” Mondi said. “We really want it to be special to the community and to do it right.”

Fourth Ward Alderman Greg Perkins congratulated the pair on their efforts to bring lively business to empty downtown storefronts.

“I would encourage anyone out there to take a look at some of the pictures they’ve done.

It really tells a story,” Perkins said. “It’s a great story. Welcome and best of luck.”

With a $1.8 million downtown Lincoln Highway reconfiguration expected to start next week, sidewalks in front of downtown storefronts will have more space to set up tables. At the music company, Mondi said he is considering opening that space up for street entertainment.

“We also have a section in the basement for musicians to come by and play together,” Mondi said.

Second Ward Alderwoman Barb Larson said Aurora Music Company is just the type of business DeKalb needs downtown.

“I just want to say thank you for choosing DeKalb,” Larson said after the recent City Council vote. “I love what you’ve done inside. I’m like, ‘That’s exactly what we’re looking for in downtown DeKalb.’ Fresh, creative, with character. Thank you for choosing us. It looks fabulous.”

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BELONGI How a Conversation Inspired a Community

elonging and othering are concepts rarely explored in day-to-day conversation. Now, they have been brought to the forefront of the community in reflection of incidents that have changed the world in the last couple of years.

Northern Illinois University facilitated a conversation that was planned with Dr. John A. Powell, a national expert on belonging and othering, that has changed the course of the community.

Director of Community Promotion Jennifer Groce discusses how one community conversation evolved into a powerful movement and art exhibits that are delivered through three senses.

“We really look at it as a commitment that we as a global community can make to create a culture of belonging in our communities, and this began before George Floyd was murdered and before any of that took place,” Groce said.

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“DeKalb had some of its own incidences and challenges in the community, on campus and other parts of the area. An opportunity was presented to us to partner with our friends in Rockford and the Northern Illinois Center for Nonprofit Excellence. They had heard Dr. Powell speak and we collaborated with them. We were going to bring him here as they have identified belonging as an important component for our community.”

After meeting with his team, leaders from the university and the city sat down to decide if they wanted to work together to host a community conversation centralized around the concept of belonging.

“That answer was an emphatic yes,” Groce said. “What followed was an interesting grassroots process.”

After COVID-19 swept the globe, the group was forced to meet remotely.

ING in DeKalb “Over 500 people attended from start to finish, and it was a two-hour conversation where about 10 representatives from the community asked questions and Dr. Powell answered,” Groce said. “He laid out what belonging means, the impacts of othering and breaking in the community, and specifically about issues in DeKalb. The conversation resonated across our community in ways we didn’t expect.”

Groce, along with her colleague Monique Bernoudy, immediately began working hard for the cause, knowing how important the movement is.

“We were kind of the worker bees,” Groce said. “We’re very committed and willing to do all those little details.”

After the initial conversation, everyone decided to return the next day for a remote meeting to discuss and recap their thoughts. Groce said they realized a grant was available to support initiatives that focus on diversity, equity and

By: Kelley White

inclusion; however, the grant application deadline was the next day. The group immediately went to work to submit their idea to the grant committee.

“We wrote the grant to fund a formation council for the community as well as some community arts projects in the meantime that would acknowledge and explore issues around belonging in our community,” Groce said. “The DeKalb County History Center and the Elwood Historical Museum created Arts and Action. It is such an incredible installation that I am so happy will continue.”

Next, the committee introduced Faces of Belonging, a photo project that promotes belonging among those who live, work and study in DeKalb. The project features photographs of diverse people of DeKalb and interview excerpts that share their stories and what it means to belong in the city.

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 9

Faces of

BELONGING “The Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts had seen this in a New York Times article in Minneapolis where they had a lot of transition in their community and folks that know one another as the faces of their community,” Groce said. “We loved the idea of that, but we want to know what a DeKalb version would look like. We thought of the buses that move throughout the entire community, so we found an amazing photographer and we engaged students to do some learning and work.”

Groce noticed the students were the ones who thought to capture community members in a place and in a way they felt they belonged.

“It was an incredible project, and we were able to do it as a moving exhibit throughout the community where that exhibit will continue,” Groce said. “It’s kind of connected now to the curriculum in photography.”

The moving art exhibit lives online at belongingdekalb.com, and Groce noted they will continue to grow the online presence of the moving exhibit so that interested parties can learn about the faces while visualizing the context.

“It was an incredible project, and we were able to do it as a moving exhibit throughout the community where that exhibit will continue. It’s kind of connected now to the curriculum in photography.”

“You may not know the picture of the older woman wearing an oxygen mask with pink hair in Gordon’s Hardware feels like she belongs in Gordon’s Hardware,” Groce said. “But you can see thoughts and emotions that they all belong here.”

After the success of Faces of Belonging, the committee sought to take it a step further, questioning other possible media for change.

“The photographer had asked each subject three questions – we didn’t end up using the content from those, but the questions and stories were great,” Groce said. “That inspired the concept of another format where someone could tell their own story in their own voice, and thus Voices of Belonging was born. We partnered with WNIJ, a local NPR radio station.

Their producers are phenomenal at being able to capture audio content.”

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Voices of

BELONGING WNIJ used the same three questions the photographer originally asked: what brought you to DeKalb, what has been your experience with a sense of belonging, and what would you like to see next?

In an effort to capture the most organic response from their interviewees, they decided to go to community events and invite folks there to talk about belonging.

The Voices of Belonging exhibit will be on display at Kishwaukee Community College in the fall.

“They are extemporaneous, and they are unscripted,” Groce said. “It is meant to be a bit of a benchmark for our community as we begin the work to cocreate a culture of belonging.”

The Voices of Belonging audio exhibit features 11 interviews, as well as a littleknown recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found by a public radio station on the floor of a library in Ohio.

“He is speaking to a high school in a clearly prepared speech, but you can tell he’s talking to students,” Groce said. “There is a very honest tone to it where he talks about being tired of walking by the front seat of the bus every day and he says one day he will sit there and feel like he belongs because he said, ‘I belong there, I belong.’ I hope, in the future, we’re able to gain the trust of more of those folks that don’t always feel like they belong and give space to even more of those voices.”

Each photograph in the exhibit features the subject’s quote in their own voice. Visitors are meant to hear their story on the subject’s terms, learning more about their experiences in the community.

“I think it’s important to our world to do this, but we start where we are and for me, personally, the work of Voices of Belonging is so vital because it is your story in your words and your experiences and no one can take that from you,” Groce said. “Giving respect and life to that story is incredibly important as we begin to do the hard work together, co-creating.”

As the movement continues to grow in DeKalb, the community will continue to have healthy, productive and eye-opening conversations about what it means to belong in the place they call home. Right now, the committee is working on a new way to illustrate more stories of belonging and othering.

“We are working right now on that next format where members of the community can submit their words of belonging in a story, a poem, spoken word – in whatever way to answer those three original questions,” Groce said.

“Words of Belonging is the third of those three senses we really wanted to use to convey these important stories and truths.”

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 11

ALL FOR

AND ONE FO 12 | June 2022 | DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE

ONE

OR ALL

Local Soccer Club Unites the County By: Kelley White

F

or the past five years, DeKalb County United Soccer Club has been on the up and up, forging a path for future generations in the community. On their fifth anniversary, President John Hall is reflecting on the years he has spent bringing his club to life.

“The idea came back in late 2016. We had a number of players from the area I knew that were going to play at a club in Aurora at a sort of semi-professional level and I thought that was pretty neat,” Hall said. “I thought, why not here?”

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 13

“In the spirit of uniting the community through soccer, what better way than uniting two opposing youth clubs to actually come together and fly our flag while providing opportunities for young kids to be inspired by adult athletes?”

After some research into starting his own club, Hall sought answers drawing supporters from the local community.

“The dream at the time was trying to figure out how to bring people from DeKalb, Sycamore, NIU and Genoa all together on a Saturday night to support this thing that we grew together in DeKalb County,” Hall said.

“We wanted to really unite the community through soccer and that evolved our mission in United Through Soccer.”

Hall wanted to shine a light on local rivalries and unite communities through soccer.

“For me, it was how to get rivalries to lay down their swords,” Hall said. “We wanted it to be bigger than the rivalry – we’re all in it together.”

But starting a brand-new athletic club is not an easy feat. The foremost challenge, Hall said, was securing a means to fund to venture.

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“It’s a business in many ways, it’s a very giving organization and we’re not in it to make money for ourselves, we’re volunteers,” Hall said. “We’re doing it because we believe it’s a club that can provide value to our community, but we needed to figure out how to raise the money to rent fields, pay coaches, pay referees and run a soccer club with marketing and those kinds of things.”

For such a tight-knit community, the answer was rather simple – outreach to local businesses.

“We wanted to create a platform to partner with local businesses that would be proud to work with us, which translated right into marketing,” Hall said. “For businesses, we want to promote their services and help get them more clients, helping their marketing as well as ours. We started gathering startup money and building up a brand that we thought, with our logo and things like

that, people would identify with. The more businesses we can tie into our family, the better.”

The club’s emblem features a corn husk in the shape of a soccer ball, a nod to the region’s signature reputation for being an agricultural heavy hitter.

From the beginning, Hall has made good on his goals and gone above and beyond to ensure the future of the Club.

“I and many others have put a lot of work into getting this club to our fiveyear anniversary, our five-year birthday,” Hall said. “Sustainability from a financial standpoint is huge. We want to build the types of relationships that make us part of the fabric of what this county has offer so that businesses will support, people will show up to games, and players will want to play for us. The second part of sustainability is the volunteerism and having a group of

passionate people that not only want to show up for games but ask what they can do for the club.”

For the club, soccer is more than just a game.

It’s a conduit for uniting the community.

“We’ve put an increase and emphasis on community outreach, very rarely will you hear me or anyone else talk about the actual soccer,” Hall said. “That is sort of secondary to what our club is about. Where maybe another organization might have two or three fundraisers a year, we have between seven to 10 home games – those are our fundraising events.”

Hall is over the moon for his large pool of volunteers, recognizing their hard work as part of the lifeblood of his organization.

“Having the people that are willing to step up and do the hours all year long is critical,” Hall said.

Sports teams evoke a sort of romanticism in their communities, becoming a source of hope and loyalty. It is no different in DeKalb County.

“Everything on the field is fun and all, but I really think the fact we created something people want to be a part of is amazing,” Hall said. “We have lifetime memberships for sale, and we have lifetime members that have bought those. People buy memberships every year to support us, and people buy our merchandise to support us. There seems to be a want for this group to exist in the community, and that’s our biggest accomplishment, that people seem to have found a way to support us.”

Hall is grateful about the simple fact the DeKalb County United is still standing as an organization after its first five years.

“We’re still here, and we’ve somehow managed to find and connect with a group of businesses and people that want us to be here,” Hall said. “The community has embraced us. We had a terrible season last year, but the community said, ‘Let’s go again.’

The results on the field didn’t matter – what we do in the community does, and that’s not to say that I don’t want to win, but it has not been our main focus to this point as it won’t make us sustainable long-term.”

Drawing from his own childhood, Hall imagines that the community’s youths view the club as an opportunity to do what they love and create memories with a team. The

players themselves remain steadfast in their support of the club as a whole, Hall said.

He credits the club with offering players a professional-style experience with quality coaching, training and opponents.

KEEP UP WITH THE CLUB For information and to stay up-to-date on the latest DeKalb County United happenings, visit www.dkcunited.com.

“It’s as good as we can provide. It’s a professional club run on an amateur budget,” Hall said. “We don’t pay the players, but we want them to feel like professionals, we want them to bond as teammates, we want them to really come together and realize this club is not just 11 guys on the field. This is a community and again, I think they like it because we have a lot of players that want to play for us.”

On the sports side, DeKalb United has an impressive lineup of teams to their name.

Hall calls the Men’s First Team a semi-pro experience. The men’s reserve team roster is filled with players who are training to step up to the next level. The women’s under-23 team, which competes in the Illinois Women’s Soccer League, won the league title during their first season last year.

In January, DeKalb County United announced the creation of the DKCU Academy Youth Players.

“The Kishwaukee Valley Soccer Club and the Northern Illinois Soccer Club came to us last fall and said they wanted to merge, and they thought it would be really great to become the DKCU Academy,” Hall said. “We have a full range of players from very young up to adults. In the spirit of uniting the community through soccer, what better way than uniting two opposing youth clubs to actually come together and fly our flag while providing opportunities for young kids to be inspired by adult athletes?”

In the future, Hall hopes to win more trophies to increase the community’s morale with a winning legacy as a sports organization.

“When a team is winning, everyone feels good, and when we had a down year for the first time it made us, as a staff, question everything,” Hall said. “We have a renewed focus on the on-field product and we’re not going to let slip the community stuff, but we need to address the winning. We brought in a sporting director who is in charge of players and development, we have a new head coach, and we’re really excited for the trajectory of the on-field specifics. We hope that once we start winning more, it will pull in even more supporters.”

Hall said DKCU is striding toward the future with hope and determination.

“I want to keep the pedal down on community engagement. I want to continue to do those things more frequently and continue to get our name, brand and mission in front of new organizations and new companies to really make this the biggest, coolest thing it can be in DeKalb County.”

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 15

In the Land of

LALA’S BAGELS COMMERCIAL BAKERY SETS UP SHOP IN DEKALB By: Kelley White

ith a dream of bringing real bagels to Chicagoland, New Yorker Gerry McMahon and his fiancé, Philadelphiaborn Donna Mendiata, bought a well-known commercial bakery and renamed it Dough Makers Pro. McMahon talks about the journey so far and how, even in retirement, he is still learning new things about business.

“The parent company is called Dough Makers Pro, and one of my great contributions to this is the word Dough Makers,” McMahon said.

Another company in Illinois already had the name Doughmakers, but McMahon said his fiancé found a solution when it came to naming their own business. She recommended adding the word Pro. Dough Makers Pro is the parent company of Lala’s Bagels on Pleasant

16 | June 2022 | DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE

Street in DeKalb and represents the larger, more commercial side of the bakery. Lala’s Bagels and Lala’s Sweets are their own companies under the Dough Makers Pro umbrella.

“We do cold manufacturing, and we also sell directly to distributors like HyVee and various restaurants,” McMahon said. “That’s the majority of the business.”

Both Mendieta and McMahon have strong backgrounds in business and years of experience leading teams and sales, making them a perfect fit for Dough Makers Pro and, subsequently, Lala’s Bagels.

“The genesis of the whole thing was really Donna’s idea and concept,” McMahon said. “I’m officially retired, and Donna looked at me and pointed out our grandkids were back in Chicago. When you get to a certain age, you want to be closer.”

After McMahon and Mendieta moved to Chicago, they bought the existing business that was owned by a longtime Chicagoland baker.

“He was a man by the name of John Henner,” McMahon said. “He had been around about 50 years baking and owning his own companies, including this one.”

In interest of adding a retail storefront, McMahon and Mendieta installed Lala’s Bagels into the space where Neighborhood Bakery & Deli used to be. One of their main goals was to create the perfect bagel.

“Most of the bagels you get throughout the country are dough balls, with all due respect to the companies that make them,” McMahon said. “It’s a challenge to make them the way I think they should be made, which is crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. It took us a long time to perfect it. When we did, we had to decide if we wanted to open up that retail side.”

Lala’s Bagels is located across Pleasant Street, on the same side of Peace Road as the airport. McMahon points out the location is not like downtown, so there isn’t a lot of foot traffic.

“Lala’s Bagels is attached to the other factory,” McMahon said. “Our address is 2205 Pleasant St., Unit 1 and 2, so the

bakery is in the same building, which is logistically great for us because we can do everything right on our premises.”

When choosing a name for their retail storefront, McMahon and Mendieta cooked up Lala’s Bagels, a spin on the first letter of each grandson’s name: Liam and Aidan.

Dough Makers Pro has a business philosophy rooted in the success of its owners.

“Donna managed a business and took it from $3-4 million to $17-18 million when she left in 2021,” Mcmahon said. “In my background, I was managing sales teams responsible for $30-35 million a year. Our business is about how to manage the bottom line, how to manage a PNL, how to control expenses and what to look for and, on a very important level, how you lead a team. That’s what we felt was very translatable into any business.”

McMahon and Mendieta have a sharp eye for business.

“We looked at a number of bakeries in and around Chicagoland,” McMahon said. “One of the reasons why we chose this one was the excellent bookkeeping, and the owner made outstanding products. The building blocks were here.”

LALA’S BAGELS 2205 Pleasant St. Unit 1 , DeKalb 815-748-7707 www.lalasbagels.com www.facebook.com/lalasbagels www.instagram.com/lalas.bagels

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DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 17

“People in this community are incredible.

They’ve been so gracious to us – it’s the single biggest surprise I’ve had, just how absolutely lovely everyone in this community is. It’s very humbling”.

18 | June 2022 | DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE

McMahon has a keen business plan for Dough Makers Pro, knowing exactly the path to follow for success.

“You have to have a great product, then you have to build a team around it, then you have adapt your marketing programs and things like that to feature your products, and I think that’s where our background lent itself very well to this business. Donna has a real flair and love for baking. That plus her business acumen and my business background gave us inspiration to do it.”

Dough Makers Pro has kickstarted significantly since its purchase in 2021, despite such a short time under new owners.

“The company continues to do well, but the retail side has been asleep, and now we are trending,” McMahon said. “We opened the retail side the Monday before Thanksgiving, so we’re six months in now and our trends are very much ahead of whatever had been done on the retail side before us. I think a lot of that is due to effective social media use.

Our two managers are great at social media posting. As great a business, and as great of bakers as our predecessors were, we are evolving the business and continuing to grow an amazing legacy.”

One of the biggest challenges for McMahon and Mendieta has been ensuring their business gains profitability in a period of economic uncertainty and unexpected shortages.

“The key thing, from a business standpoint, is how you improve the bottom line,” McMahon said.

“The price of everything is going through the roof. We are just getting hammered on the cost of all the supplies we need, and there is a real threshold on how much you can charge for products. You can increase the top line, but it’s important to increase the bottom line.”

Still, McMahon has been blown away by the community response to their business.

“People in this community are incredible,” McMahon said.

“They’ve been so gracious to

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us – it’s the single biggest surprise I’ve had, just how absolutely lovely everyone in this community is. It’s very humbling.”

Another surprise for McMahon was the intense love he encountered in the community for bagel dogs.

“Our signature baked good is bagel dogs,” McMahon said. “Our manager here explained to me that we use a Vienna Beef hotdog wrapped in a poppyseed bagel. I thought I would sell five of them and throw the rest away. It’s the most unbelievable thing. We made 50 the first time and we sold out. It is the number one product that we have.”

Despite all of the experience Mcmahon has, he is still learning more each day.

“I checked my ego at the door with the first smudge of powdered sugar I got on my shirt,” McMahon said.

“All of my perceptions went out the window a long time ago. I am so grateful for the business. I just sit back and try to think of other things to shove in a bagel. We’re always thinking of new products and playing around with things.”

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Peace, Love, Art OC CREATIVE MAKING A MARK ON DEKALB BUSINESS LANDSCAPE By: Kelley White

20 | June 2022 | DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE

Top: An OC Creative shoots a Super Bowl commercial for Midwest Express Clinic in February 2022.

Middle: OC Creative President Brian Oster reviews a logo design for Mynd Match.

Bottom: OC Creative’s values are on display in their DeKalb office.

ith a Super Bowl commercial to its credit and many successful niche projects to its name, OC Creative of DeKalb is a local business worth watching. The niche advertising agency makes a unique mark on the local business landscape of DeKalb.

For Brian Oster, the company president and creative director, his journey with OC Creative all began with the desire to be closer to his family.

“We were out in Davenport, and my mom had a stroke.

Long story short, we wanted to be closer to family and move back in this direction,” Oster said. “We landed here as a temporary stay at first, but I ended up realizing this is where I wanted to stay within six months – the community was phenomenal. That’s what I found here more than anyone else. It’s a warm, welcoming business community.”

Oster bought OC Creative in January 2016. However, at first he did not have a strong desire to buy the company.

“My dad was pretty absent, and I feared that I would easily make OC my bride,” Oster said. “Between community people cheering me on and the previous owner being the best boss I ever had, I told my wife to hold me accountable so that I don’t turn into the dad I had. After six months of juggling that decision, we purchased the company Jan. 2, 2016.”

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 21

OC Creative is an award-winning creative agency with services that include photography and video production (top right) as well as design, such as the Byers Brewing can designs (middle right) and Family Service Agency website (bottom right).

Oster gives a lot of credit to his former boss and previous owner David Barrow, an enigmatic man with a talent for leadership and love for adventure. After three years together at OC Creative, Barrow left to pursue work on a documentary in his hometown, which left Oster to run the business.

“It became trial by fire for me,” Oster said. “When he came back it was late 2015 and he wanted to know if I was interested in buying the company.”

The first year into Oster’s ownership of OC Creative, he asked their part-time writer to help him document their core values.

Within a week, he wrote them based on what he observed within the company.

“We create the integrity we believe in, and we are going to be the people we expect our clients to be and set the example.

We give back, we donate, and we bring the arts to life in the community,” Oster said. “We build relationships that last, and we want clients to stay and to grow and to trust us. We improve at every opportunity, and I want to make sure employees know they can fail and make mistakes; in the end, we just want to encourage each other. We empower each other to succeed and celebrate each other’s successes. We customize every job for every client.”

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OC Creative transitioned from an advertising agency to a creative agency under Oster’s leadership.

“It’s a niche that specifically means we don’t want to do cookie cutter, rinse, and repeat products,” he said. “We just want to focus on the creative work which entails custom writing, and none of our logos, designs or videos ever look the same.”

The success of OC Creative thus far can be heavily attributed to Oster’s leadership and business philosophies.

“I’ve had many bosses profess to being Christian, but they didn’t really live it out in the workplace,” Oster said. “I want to be Christlike in how I lead, whether my team is or isn’t. We had no benefits when I started, but we have added one benefit a year based on what the team desired most at that time.”

Oster does not particularly like referring to his team as employees or staff because he understands the importance of such labeling.

“Words make a difference, and I want to be purposeful to say I would be nothing without a team,” Oster said. “One of my talents is to understand and read a client so I can communicate between a client and the creative. We’ve described OC with our clients and the community as a creative catalyst and we have incredible cohesiveness and creativity.”

Oster strives to foster a laid-back workplace that encourages freedom of expression. He believes that kind of environment stimulates success and a healthy, happier workplace.

“From the start, I established that we aren’t an hour-driven agency,” Oster said. “We are project- or task-driven. While I am more of an observant leader, I think I have found the balance between being collaborative and having autonomy, which adds to their productivity. I’m more of a coach. This freedom has created such a collaborative and creative environment where I encourage them to be curious and challenge themselves.”

One of the company’s most exciting accomplishments was adding their name to the Super Bowl commercial roster.

“We did a Super Bowl commercial, and it was fantastic. We loved it, but now that we’re a few months past that, its on to what’s next,” Oster said. “How can we challenge ourselves further? It’s not a hunger, but a team that likes to challenge themselves and continue evolving.”

OC Creative is a niche agency with creative evolvement in mind.

“I grew up in a time when most agencies were a one-stop shop,” Oster said. “It worked at the time, but it was a bit mediocre. As that formatting fades in effectiveness, this specific niche gives us high barriers to entry, meaning if you want something custom and creative and there’s a budget for it, that’s what we’re here for. This niche allows us to grow, and I don’t have to worry about competing. It’s not a commodity. We want to make sure what we do distinguishes us creatively.”

Alongside his business at OC, Oster pours his love of the

community into everything he does, instilling this value in his team as well.

“The majority of the women working for us – which OC is majority female – are a part of Gather, which is a women in business group under the DeKalb Chamber. There are enough bald white guys out there, and my role is not to build myself up. I’ll do just fine with the privileges that I have. We need to build others up, and we have incredible diversity on our staff.”

OC Creative takes a hand in local creative initiatives, furthering the cultural arts of the DeKalb area. For example, the business launched an initiative to rotate displays of the Kishwaukee Valley Art League’s work in the OC Creative office. Aside from a gallery in Sycamore, the art league had limited spaces to show work.

“The next initiative we are doing is having some downtown art,” Oster said. “I want to see the alley that goes from Van Buren Plaza from Lincoln Highway filled twice a year with artistic things.

For example, this spring and summer I want to see 200 colored umbrellas lining the alley, so you get beautiful color. For Corn Fest, I want to have 200 sunflowers hanging upside down just to give people to take a picture and go downtown and enjoy the art, realizing those kinds of things are here in DeKalb County – sometimes you just have to go and make it.”

OC Creative is a shining example of a healthy workplace doing good in their community with impressive creativity and a warm persona.

“Art is an important part of my business and my philosophy behind my business – it is behind everything,” Oster said.

“We want to be a creative catalyst in any way that we can.”

DEKALB COUNTY MAGAZINE | June 2022 | 23

Artistry.

Applied.

Find out more about the arts at NIU.

niu.edu/cvpa

College of Visual and Performing Arts

2021 - 2022 Season Presented By

Northern Illinois University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution. Produced by authority of the state of Illinois. niu.edu 5/2022

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