How Andy Burness built a workplace that feels like a calling

Founder of Bethesda communications firm recognized nationally for office culture rooted in service

June 17, 2026 9:46 a.m.

Andy Burness, founder and CEO of Burness, at the Bethesda communications firm's office. He was recently named the Small Business Council of America's Small Business Person of the Year. Credit: Jacqueline Kalil

When a letter arrived earlier this year informing Andy Burness that he’d been named the Small Business Council of America’s (SBCA) Small Business Person of the Year, he was confused.

“I had no idea. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t know where it came from,” Burness told Bethesda Today on June 10, recalling the moment. “I was surprised. I was flattered. I was like, did you get the right person?”

The council assured him it had.

The SBCA honored Andy Burness, founder of the Bethesda-based communications firm Burness, with its Mort Harris Small Business Person of the Year Award during a May 6 reception at the Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C. The award recognized his leadership as a small business owner and, as the SBCA put it, his commitment to supporting employees, public-interest clients and the broader community.

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Andy Burness was presented with the award during the council’s Public Affairs Day and Congressional Awards Reception by U.S Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) of Takoma Park, who received the SBCA’s Congressional Award for promoting accountability and transparency in Congress.

“I just can’t think of anyone in American politics who I respect more than Jamie,” Burness said. “To be there with him, in a national role rather than a local one, felt awesome. It felt fabulous.”

Jessica Summers, an employment attorney at the Bethesda law firm Lerch, Early & Brewer, nominated Burness for the award. Summers has worked with Andy Burness for more than a decade and serves as a strategic policy adviser on the board of the SBCA, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates on tax, health care and employee-benefits issues on Capitol Hill for more than 100,000 privately held and family-owned businesses.

When selecting its annual small business honoree, Summers said, the organization considers more than financial success.

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“What the folks are looking for is someone who is not just a successful small businessperson, but who also has a civic-minded approach to how they run their business,” she said. “It’s someone who has gone above and beyond in the business space to be innovative and help more than just themselves and their specific employees — the broader small business community.”

Summers, who handles employment-law matters for the company and works closely with Andy Burness and the company’s human resources team, said what sets Burness apart is how involved he remains in areas where many founders would take a more hands-off approach.

“He’ll say, ‘I want to be on the calls. I want to talk it through. I want to hear what the employee survey said,’ ” Summers said. “It’s a much more collaborative approach — genuinely caring that we did it right, not just that we get it right from a legal standpoint.”

When an employee policy isn’t working, she added, Burness is willing to revisit and revise it rather than settle for something that merely satisfies legal requirements.

That same philosophy extends beyond personnel decisions and into the culture Burness has spent decades building.

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Founded in 1986, Burness grew out of Andy Burness’ desire to use communications as a tool for social change. Rather than focus solely on corporate clients, he built the firm around helping nonprofits, advocacy groups, universities and other mission-driven organizations to amplify their voices.

The company is now about 65 employees strong — with roughly 40 of them in Washington, and a second office in Nairobi, Kenya. Over more than four decades, it has promoted its clients, which also include think tanks and activists, that are working on health, education, climate, social justice, science and anti-poverty initiatives.

“It’s good that you do good work out in the world,” Burness said. “But I think what also matters is whether it’s a good place to work.”

He said he has tried to build an organization that is kind to its people, flexible with their personal needs and collaborative enough that “work doesn’t feel as much like work as it does some sort of calling.”

More than 40 years in, he still isn’t bored.

“It’s the excitement of being around something really interesting and working with people who are really knowledgeable about what they do,” he said. “This is just a gift.”

A focus on community

In his remarks at the May awards reception, Burness highlighted several community initiatives the firm has helped build over the years that, he said, any small business could replicate. They included Business Leaders Fighting Hunger, a coalition addressing food insecurity in Montgomery County; the firm’s longtime participation in Montgomery County Adult English Learning’s annual Grown-Up Spelling Bee; and the Karel Fellowship, an eight-week paid summer program now in its 14th year that brings Black, Hispanic and other students of color to Washington for internships in public-interest communications.

Summers said she had recently been collaborating with the firm on the fellowship when it came time to submit her award nomination and she highlighted the program as a defining example of what makes Andy Burness stand out.

The Karel Fellowship is supported by funders including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Moriah Fund and Betsy Karel, widow of the late strategic communications leader and philanthropist Frank Karel, for whom the fellowship is named. It matches first-generation college students and Black, Indigenous and other students of color with leading nonprofits in the Washington, D.C., area. The program pairs fellows with communications mentors and aims to diversify a field that participants say does not always reflect the communities it serves.

Emmanuella Osei was a 2025 fellow who recently graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and will attend Yale this fall for a master’s in public health. Matched with the nonprofit Families USA, she spent the summer building media lists, sitting in on policy meetings covering Medicare and Medicaid, helping to compile daily press clips, and even spending a day on Capitol Hill watching health advocacy in action. The summer carried extra weight, she said, because it coincided with the passage of a major federal budget bill that reshaped public health funding — a moment she describes as emotionally heavy for the nonprofit, but one that underscored how much the work mattered.

Osei said she met Burness during her first week at the firm and came away surprised by how unassuming he was. “We were all kind of intimidated because we know Andy’s like a huge guy” in the field, she told Bethesda Today, “but he just had a very humble spirit.”

She said Burness told the fellows to call him by his first name and later sat down with her one-on-one when she had questions about applying to graduate school. She has since recommended the fellowship to other students.

Juleidi Machuca, a rising junior at the University of Florida studying history and journalism, is just two weeks into her own fellowship this summer, matched with the community health center Mary’s Center in Silver Spring. She first met Burness in March, during a fellowship-related excursion to the District before she’d even been selected. “You can just tell that he is a stand-up guy who really is passionate about what he’s teaching and applying to the communications field,” she said in an interview with Bethesda Today.

Burness, who lives in the Washington area with his wife, Hope Gleicher, and is a grandfather of two, said the questions that drive him today are the same ones that have guided much of his career: “How do I want to spend my life? What do I want my legacy to be?” he says. “What do I do during my days that gets me up with energy?”

He said the answer to those questions, nearly half a century into running Burness, hasn’t changed much: work that feels less like a job and more like a calling, done alongside people who care as much as he does.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine