Small Biz Focus: PILLAR, an Arlington agency built on an old idea
May 19, 2026 | By Tara Palacios
When Eddie Kaufholz and his family moved to Arlington nearly five years ago, they were not thinking about starting a business. They wanted to live in a place that was diverse, interesting and full of opportunity, with a school system they could rely on. Arlington fit.
In the years that followed, working out of a home office off Columbia Pike, he consulted with organizations across Northern Virginia and around the country: nonprofits, advocacy groups, mid-sized companies, agencies of various sizes. The work itself was good. But somewhere across all those projects, he started to notice a pattern.
”The agency model has gotten really bloated,” Kaufholz says. ”Layers, handoffs, middle management. The senior people who pitch the work often disappear once it starts. The idea with PILLAR was to strip all of that down; keep senior people on the work, approach each client with humility and care, do world-class strategy and execution, and pass the efficiency back to the client instead of absorbing it as agency margin.”
That thinking, slowly, became PILLAR, the Arlington-headquartered creative, communications and marketing agency Kaufholz founded.
PILLAR, he says, is built on an old idea. ”An idea that has always been possible but rarely practiced: that an agency should be structured to serve the work itself.” The team that delivers the work is assembled around the specific needs of each client and only stays as long as the work calls for them.
”The senior strategist on your kick-off call is the senior strategist writing your messaging,” Kaufholz says. ”Every person on a project is there because the work specifically calls for them.”
PILLAR’s recent work has spanned human rights, executive leadership, higher education, advocacy and direct-to-consumer ecommerce. The roster has included national nonprofits, a national multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer brand and a number of institutions navigating significant moments of strategic change. The model is built to scale up to be the agency of record for a national brand, or to scale down to design a logo for a neighborhood nonprofit. PILLAR takes equal pride and care in both.
What Kaufholz did not understand when he started, he said, was how much the County itself would matter in making any of it possible.
”I came in thinking about my family,” he says. ”I was not thinking about the small-business ecosystem here. I had no idea what was actually around me.”
What Kaufholz experienced was a deep pool of senior creative talent across the DMV, an unusually generous community of small business owners willing to share what they had figured out, and a set of institutional resources that small businesses in many parts of the country simply do not have access to. Among those resources, Arlington Economic Development’s BizLaunch.
”BizLaunch is the kind of thing you do not fully appreciate until you actually need it,” he says. "And then you realize there is a whole team of people whose entire mission is to help small business owners with everything that comes with running a business.”
PILLAR is certified through Virginia’s SWaM program, and was among the small group of Virginia businesses recognized at the 2026 SWaMmy Honors in April, presented each year by the Virginia Department of Small Business and Supplier Diversity in partnership with BizLaunch. From the stage that night, Kaufholz did not talk much about his agency. He talked about what the community had made possible.
”It feels encouraging to be here as part of a team, and to be encouraged by the Commonwealth in this work,” he said. ”Thank you for helping us get our foot in the door.”
That kind of access is exactly what BizLaunch was built to provide. With more than 45 years of combined experience supporting Arlington entrepreneurs, the BizLaunch team is here to help small businesses across the County, whether you are running one already or thinking about starting one. Visit www.bizlaunch.org to learn about programs, schedule one-on-one counseling, or sign up for the next Small Business Coordinating Council meeting. Or if you have a project that could use a hand, you can also stop by pillargroup.co to see if PILLAR might be a fit.