Three generations, one family name

The oldest thing this family does is not a company at all. Mark and Tammy have been cooking together since 1989 — thirteen years before there was a business of any kind, and they are still at it today as Chef Poppi and Chef Gia.

The first company came in 2002, from a single idea: local businesses would happily pay for the shirts a school could not afford, if somebody would just put the two together. That company, USA Advertising, is still trading more than twenty years later.

Others followed as the opportunities did. Rail services in 2015, now twelve locations across six states for Union Pacific and General Motors. A telecom practice in 2017 that fights carriers on its customers' behalf. A workshop making wreaths and bags by hand from 2020. Farmland in Cattaraugus County, New York, worked since 2021.

Every one of them started as work before it became a company. The paperwork caught up afterwards, which is usually how it goes when a family builds something rather than launching it.

United Specialty Allied Group holds them together. Mark and Tammy own it in equal halves and have never taken an outside partner — no private equity, no silent investors, nobody to answer to but each other and the people who work here.

One finance function serves them all, led by chief financial officer Parker Lewis. It is the reason each operating team can stay pointed at its own customers instead of at paperwork.

The second generation is already in the chair. Amanda Tompkins Laney runs USA Advertising, the company her parents started. Krystal Tompkins runs USA Communications. Tammy makes every piece that leaves Meraki Customs herself. And there are five grandchildren coming up behind them.

Five different trades. One family. That is the whole structure, and it is deliberate: when the work is right, the credit belongs to the people who did it — and when it is wrong, everyone knows exactly whose name is on it.