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From Concept to Nationwide Rollout
Built on Hustle.
Proven by Decades.
Proven by Decades.
From selling roses in a Long Island nightclub to orchestrating thousands of brand activations across New York State - this is the story of how one founder's instinct became a 35-year legacy.
From selling roses in a Long Island nightclub to orchestrating
thousands of brand activations across New York State
- this is the story of how one founder's instinct became a 35-year legacy.
See What We Do
“I didn’t start with a master plan. I started with awareness. And then I started moving.”
Keith Hart
Founder & CEO at Hart Agency
The Beginning
An Idea Born at Closing Time
Long Island, 1990
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
Show More
Growing Pains
Beautiful Chaos
1991–1994
There was no business plan. No roadmap. Dozens of women working every week. Multiple nightclubs. Cigarette promotions, rose girls, beer promotions, liquor activations - all happening simultaneously. Different places, different nights, different clients. One phone. No system. Just the founder - running operations from his apartment in Farmingdale, roses in the living room, schedules scrawled in notebooks.
Business calls at 8 a.m. Nightclub calls at 4 a.m. No vacations, no days off, no holidays. Every dollar went back into the company. For the first three or four years, the founder rarely took any money out of the business. The nightclub promotions paid the rent; the agency got everything else.
“There were many times when things became so difficult that I wanted to break down. But I kept pushing because I believed in what we were building.”
Show More
The Partnership
The Right Person at the Right Time
1994
The turning point came when Larry Golus - who had worked alongside the founder as a barback, bartender, and nightclub manager through multiple venues was offered a small salary and 20% of the business. It was less than he’d been making. But he saw something. He took the chance.
Larry was everything the founder needed: steady, organized, detail-oriented. He’d show up early while the founder was still asleep from the night before and just start working - schedules, payroll, calls. The creative energy and relentless drive were already there. Larry brought the structure that made it sustainable.
Their first move together: a small office off Route 110 on Long Island. $700 a month - a fortune at the time. An old phone system for $1,500. White shirts and ties on day one. T-shirts and jeans by the end of the week. Because that’s who they were.
Thirty years later, Larry is still with the company.
Show More
Scale
The Hamptons, Big Brands, and
Legendary Campaigns
Legendary Campaigns
Mid-1990s – 2000s
Bigger accounts followed - Budweiser, Miller, Molson and the Hamptons became a second home. Neptune’s, The Seaport, Beach Bar. The team grew from dozens to hundreds of Brand Ambassadors working across Long Island and Manhattan simultaneously.
Then the campaigns got legendary. 100 women body-painted in different colors for a Jose Cuervo activation moving through the streets of Manhattan. Coordinated Red Dress street teams flooding New York for wine promotions. At its peak: over 2,000 promotions orchestrated in a single week.
This was before social media amplification existed at today’s scale. You had to create instant visibility with nothing but spectacle, coordination, and sheer operational muscle. Companies like Microsoft, ESPN, and McDonald’s started calling. Hart wasn’t just a nightlife company anymore - it was a full-scale experiential marketing machine.
“A lot of agencies today can run digital ads. Very few can say they orchestrated hundreds of live activations simultaneously across major markets with celebrity-backed brands.”
Show More
Going Statewide
New York City and the Southern
Wine & Spirits Deal
Wine & Spirits Deal
1997–2008
Expanding into Manhattan with a dedicated office - led by Cara Damer - established Hart’s footprint in New York City and unlocked multi-state programs for brands like Stoli and Black Haus across New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
Then came the deal that changed everything. Southern Wine & Spirits had been running their own internal promotional company, Divisions, at a reported cost of over $1 million per year. They gave Hart the opportunity to take it over. The president of Southern Wine, Larry Goodrich, had one piece of advice: “Be careful what you wish for - and don’t mess it up.”
Hart didn’t mess it up. With Leah Guidarelli leading Upstate New York as General Manager, the company built management teams in New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and Rochester - transforming from a local promotional business into a true statewide operation.
Show More
Evolution
Technology, Cannabis, and the Next Chapter
2000–Present
While other agencies ran on clipboards and phone calls, Hart invested in event technology and reporting - systems to track activations, measure outcomes, and deliver real data back to brand partners. That early investment laid the groundwork for what would eventually become HEMS, Hart Agency’s proprietary experiential management platform launching in 2026.
Today, Hart Agency operates across Metro New York, Long Island, and Upstate New York with a lean management structure, a senior leadership team that includes a CTO, CMO, CFO, COO, and VP of Business Development, and a scalable field workforce that can activate anywhere across the state.
Show More
“I didn’t start with a master plan. I started with awareness. And then I started moving.”
Keith Hart
Founder & CEO at Hart Agency
Your Agency, Amplified
Expand Your
Agency's Reach
The Beginning
An Idea Born at Closing Time
Long Island, 1990
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
Growing Pains
Beautiful Chaos
1991–1994
There was no business plan. No roadmap. Dozens of women working every week. Multiple nightclubs. Cigarette promotions, rose girls, beer promotions, liquor activations - all happening simultaneously. Different places, different nights, different clients. One phone. No system. Just the founder - running operations from his apartment in Farmingdale, roses in the living room, schedules scrawled in notebooks.$60 invested, nearly $400 back.
Business calls at 8 a.m. Nightclub calls at 4 a.m. No vacations, no days off, no holidays. Every dollar went back into the company. For the first three or four years, the founder rarely took any money out of the business. The nightclub promotions paid the rent; the agency got everything else.120 activations booked in a single week.
There was no business plan. No roadmap. Dozens of women working every week. Multiple nightclubs. Cigarette promotions, rose girls, beer promotions, liquor activations - all happening simultaneously. Different places, different nights, different clients. One phone. No system. Just the founder - running operations from his apartment in Farmingdale, roses in the living room, schedules scrawled in notebooks.
Business calls at 8 a.m. Nightclub calls at 4 a.m. No vacations, no days off, no holidays. Every dollar went back into the company. For the first three or four years, the founder rarely took any money out of the business. The nightclub promotions paid the rent; the agency got everything else.
“There were many times when things became so difficult that I wanted to break down. But I kept pushing because I believed in what we
were building.”
were building.”
The Partnership
The Right Person at the Right Time
1994
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
The turning point came when Larry Golus - who had worked alongside the founder as a barback, bartender, and nightclub manager through multiple venues was offered a small salary and 20% of the business. It was less than he’d been making. But he saw something. He took the chance.
Larry was everything the founder needed: steady, organized, detail-oriented. He’d show up early while the founder was still asleep from the night before and just start working - schedules, payroll, calls. The creative energy and relentless drive were already there. Larry brought the structure that made it sustainable.
Their first move together: a small office off Route 110 on Long Island. $700 a month - a fortune at the time. An old phone system for $1,500.
Thirty years later, Larry is still with the company.
Scale
The Hamptons, Big Brands, and
Legendary Campaigns
Legendary Campaigns
Mid-1990s – 2000s
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
Bigger accounts followed - Budweiser, Miller, Molson and the Hamptons became a second home. Neptune’s, The Seaport, Beach Bar. The team grew from dozens to hundreds of Brand Ambassadors working across Long Island and Manhattan simultaneously.
Then the campaigns got legendary. 100 women body-painted in different colors for a Jose Cuervo activation moving through the streets of Manhattan. Coordinated Red Dress street teams flooding New York for wine promotions.Companies like Microsoft, ESPN, and McDonald’s started calling.
“A lot of agencies today can run digital ads. Very few can say they orchestrated hundreds of live activations simultaneously across major markets with celebrity-backed brands.”
Going Statewide
New York City and the Southern
Wine & Spirits Deal
Wine & Spirits Deal
1997–2008
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
Expanding into Manhattan with a dedicated office - led by Cara Damer - established Hart’s footprint in New York City and unlocked multi-state programs for brands like Stoli and Black Haus across New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
Southern Wine & Spirits had been running their own internal promotional company, Divisions, at a reported cost of over $1 million per year. The president of Southern Wine, Larry Goodrich, had one piece of advice: “Be careful what you wish for - and don’t mess it up.”
Hart didn’t mess it up. With Leah Guidarelli leading Upstate New York as General Manager, the company built management teams in New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and Rochester - transforming from a local promotional business into a true statewide operation.
Evolution
Technology, Cannabis, and the Next Chapter
2000–Present
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
While other agencies ran on clipboards and phone calls, Hart invested in event technology and reporting - systems to track activations, measure outcomes, and deliver real data back to brand partners. That early investment laid the groundwork for what would eventually become HEMS, Hart Agency’s proprietary experiential management platform launching in 2026. A natural extension of three decades of experiential marketing expertise in highly regulated industries. New territory, but a playbook perfected over 35 years.
Today, Hart Agency operates across Metro New York, Long Island, and Upstate New York with a lean management structure, a senior leadership team that includes a CTO, CMO, CFO, COO, and VP of Business Development, and a scalable field workforce that can activate anywhere across the state.
“I didn’t start with a master plan. I started with awareness. And then I started moving.”
Keith Hart
Founder & CEO at Hart Agency
The Beginning
An Idea Born at Closing Time
Long Island, 1990
The Hart Agency started the way most real things do - almost by accident. After a trip to Chicago, where a woman selling roses inside a nightclub caught his attention, the founder came home to Long Island with an idea. His girlfriend Maureen tried it at Coco’s, one of the island’s busiest nightclubs. Eighty roses at sixty cents each. Within two hours, every rose was gone - $60 invested, nearly $400 back.
The lightbulb went on. With relationships across every major nightclub on Long Island, the founder began recruiting outgoing women, dressing them in tuxedo outfits, and placing them in clubs across the island. Within a year, the operation spanned 20 nightclubs. Then came Polaroid photography promotions with branded sleeves. Then shot promotions. Then cigarette activations for Newport and Kent. Then the first liquor client - Brown Forman and Southern Comfort promotions that scaled to 120 activations booked in a single week.
Brown-Forman flew executives from Kentucky to Long Island just to see how it was done. What they found was something national agencies couldn’t replicate: deep local relationships, operational speed, and a founder who understood nightlife culture from the inside out.
Show More
Growing Pains
Beautiful Chaos
1991–1994
There was no business plan. No roadmap. Dozens of women working every week. Multiple nightclubs. Cigarette promotions, rose girls, beer promotions, liquor activations - all happening simultaneously. Different places, different nights, different clients. One phone. No system. Just the founder - running operations from his apartment in Farmingdale, roses in the living room, schedules scrawled in notebooks.
Business calls at 8 a.m. Nightclub calls at 4 a.m. No vacations, no days off, no holidays. Every dollar went back into the company. For the first three or four years, the founder rarely took any money out of the business. The nightclub promotions paid the rent; the agency got everything else.
“There were many times when things became so difficult that I wanted to break down. But I kept pushing because I believed in what we were building.”
Show More
The Partnership
The Right Person at the Right Time
1994
The turning point came when Larry Golus - who had worked alongside the founder as a barback, bartender, and nightclub manager through multiple venues was offered a small salary and 20% of the business. It was less than he’d been making. But he saw something. He took the chance.
Larry was everything the founder needed: steady, organized, detail-oriented. He’d show up early while the founder was still asleep from the night before and just start working - schedules, payroll, calls. The creative energy and relentless drive were already there. Larry brought the structure that made it sustainable.
Their first move together: a small office off Route 110 on Long Island. $700 a month - a fortune at the time. An old phone system for $1,500. White shirts and ties on day one. T-shirts and jeans by the end of the week. Because that’s who they were.
Thirty years later, Larry is still with the company.
Show More
Scale
The Hamptons, Big Brands, and
Legendary Campaigns
Legendary Campaigns
Mid-1990s – 2000s
Bigger accounts followed - Budweiser, Miller, Molson and the Hamptons became a second home. Neptune’s, The Seaport, Beach Bar. The team grew from dozens to hundreds of Brand Ambassadors working across Long Island and Manhattan simultaneously.
Then the campaigns got legendary. 100 women body-painted in different colors for a Jose Cuervo activation moving through the streets of Manhattan. Coordinated Red Dress street teams flooding New York for wine promotions. At its peak: over 2,000 promotions orchestrated in a single week.
This was before social media amplification existed at today’s scale. You had to create instant visibility with nothing but spectacle, coordination, and sheer operational muscle. Companies like Microsoft, ESPN, and McDonald’s started calling. Hart wasn’t just a nightlife company anymore - it was a full-scale experiential marketing machine.
“A lot of agencies today can run digital ads. Very few can say they orchestrated hundreds of live activations simultaneously across major markets with celebrity-backed brands.”
Show More
Going Statewide
New York City and the Southern
Wine & Spirits Deal
Wine & Spirits Deal
1997–2008
Expanding into Manhattan with a dedicated office - led by Cara Damer - established Hart’s footprint in New York City and unlocked multi-state programs for brands like Stoli and Black Haus across New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
Then came the deal that changed everything. Southern Wine & Spirits had been running their own internal promotional company, Divisions, at a reported cost of over $1 million per year. They gave Hart the opportunity to take it over. The president of Southern Wine, Larry Goodrich, had one piece of advice: “Be careful what you wish for - and don’t mess it up.”
Hart didn’t mess it up. With Leah Guidarelli leading Upstate New York as General Manager, the company built management teams in New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, and Rochester - transforming from a local promotional business into a true statewide operation.
Show More
Evolution
Technology, Cannabis, and the Next Chapter
2000–Present
While other agencies ran on clipboards and phone calls, Hart invested in event technology and reporting - systems to track activations, measure outcomes, and deliver real data back to brand partners. That early investment laid the groundwork for what would eventually become HEMS, Hart Agency’s proprietary experiential management platform launching in 2026.
Today, Hart Agency operates across Metro New York, Long Island, and Upstate New York with a lean management structure, a senior leadership team that includes a CTO, CMO, CFO, COO, and VP of Business Development, and a scalable field workforce that can activate anywhere across the state.
Show More
The Team Driving Every Activation.
Experienced across operations, staffing, and execution -
driving programs across every market.
Keith Hart
Founder & CEO
Larry Golus
Executive Vice President
Leah Guidarelli
Chief Operations Officer
Joe Kelly
Vice President Of Sales
Stephanie Karamanoglou
Chief Marketing Officer
Christopher Azrak
Chief Technical Officer
Ivie Edwards
Financial Controller
Driven by collaboration, creativity, and precision.
35
Years in Business
Board Members
The Advisors Behind the Vision
Strategic leaders guiding long-term growth,
operational excellence, and the future of experiential execution.
Craig Stacy
Founder & CEO
Larry Goodrich
Founder & CEO
Ray Sidhom
Founder & CEO
Our journey
35 Years at
a Glance
Over 35 years, Hart has expanded its reach, workforce, and operational scale to
support brands across every major New York market.
1991
Founded
On-premise promotions for major beer, wine, and spirits brands. Operating in the biggest nightclubs on Long Island.
1994
Larry Golus Joins
The partnership that brought structure to creative chaos - and still anchors the company today.
1995
Regulatory Shift
State liquor regulations change to allow spirit samplings in off-premise retail, transforming the business landscape.
1997
NYC Expansion
Manhattan office opens. Multi-state programs launch for Stoli, Black Haus across NY, MA, CT & PA.
2000
Tech Investment
Event technology and reporting systems implemented - laying the foundation for what becomes HEMS.
2008
Upstate Expansion
Hart expands statewide representing Southern Glazer's, Empire Merchants, and DeCrescente Beer Distributor.
2026
Full Operations & HEMS
25 FTEs, 5,000+ Brand Ambassadors, senior leadership team, and the launch of HEMS - Hart's proprietary platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Answers to common questions about
working with Hart
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Keith Hart
Founder & CEO at Hart Agency
We will be happy to answer! It should take between 1 to 2 working days.
24hr avg. response
35yrs of answers
"At the end of all of it - every deal, every risk, every reinvention - the people are still the reason. You don't build something that lasts 35 years by accident. You build it by choosing, again and again, to move forward - even when the path isn't clear. Especially then."
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