Whitney is the hidden face of YaZu Yachting.  She designed our website, publishes and distributes our monthly Log and takes care of our social media.  She’s your first point of contact with YaZu Yachting– though you don’t know it! She is familiar with what is current and what is soon-to-be-current in the media world and keeps us on our toes, so that we are ‘riding the wave’ of modern communication.

We first met Whitney many years ago, when she worked for a yacht brokerage in Deltaville. We were really impressed with her marketing skills and at the time we thought ‘We’d like to have her on our team’. Fast forward to 2021, YaZu Yachting needed a website and we wanted something original; we wanted someone who understood the area in which we live, the boating industry, the internet & social media and we wanted someone creative and flexible – tough criteria indeed.  Word around town was that Whitney had started her own marketing company, ‘startsmall. THINKBIG! Marketing’….. Perfect person, perfect timing… and so our wakes crossed and merged.

Learn more about Whitney:

My family originally migrated to Urbanna, Virginia from Tangier Island  after the Great August Storm that flooded the island in 1933.  

I come from a family of generations of commercial watermen and women (for some time my grandmother and her sister were the only licensed commercial waterwomen on the east coast, taking over their father’s business after his death). 

My parents were small business owners, in Urbanna. My mother, a hairdresser, also assisted my father, a commercial waterman. We spent our summers boating on the Rappahannock, Chesapeake Bay and Urbanna Creek. During the later part of my schooling, I spent my summers helping my Dad crabbing for peelers and hard crabs (a dirty summer job).

I attended Christopher Newport University where I studied Business and Studio Art (Photography, Videography, Graphic Design). After college, I spent some time as a yacht broker/marketer for a yacht brokerage in Deltaville, then as a car saleswoman/marketer at a dealership in Williamsburg. All the while I knew I wanted to start my own business and was gathering valuable experience. 

My husband, Travis, and I met at high school and were bound by our love of the water and the Chesapeake Bay. We married in 2018 (after dating for 10 years!) and in 2020, two weeks after I found out I was pregnant, our world was rocked by the COVID pandemic. As I spent my days at home working remotely, I decided to take the leap to start my own business (with my employer at the time becoming one of my first clients). So, I gave birth to my new company startsmall.THINGBIG! Marketing and my daughter, Winter Grace, in the same year!

I now have the opportunity every day to help businesses I care passionately about build their brands,  their online presence and tell their stories,  while working from home with my daughter, and still being able to enjoy the water on the weekends.

Travis, Winter Grace and I spend most every weekend aboard our Albemarle 27 exploring the Bay, cruising and fishing (though my laptop and hotspot are usually tagging along just in case). We sometimes go offshore or to Norfolk for wreck fishing or we’ll hop across the Bay to Cape Charles for a bite to eat. We also spend lots of time exploring and enjoying the outdoors at our home on Winter Harbor (hence Winter Grace) in Mathews, Virginia where we are surrounded by the water, marshlands, and wildlife and we have plenty of room to roam with our daughter and 3 dogs.