Who's Behind It
Meet EssToo.
Army veteran, analyst, teacher, and lifelong creative — the person behind EssToo Creative.
I enlisted in the Army in 1996. After a long stretch in language school and training, I landed with the 3rd Infantry Division, 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion — first a deployment to Bosnia, then an involuntary recall that sent me to Qatar and into the opening stages of the Iraq war with SOCCENT / CFSOCC. I hung up the uniform in late 2003.
The DoD chapter that followed looked a lot like the Army chapter, just without the uniform — another decade-plus of work that took me across Europe, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and points beyond. Some of it got harrowing more than once. I'd call my spouse from somewhere I couldn't fully explain and only half-joke that it was like I'd never actually left the Army.
That ran until 2015, when I traded it for full-time work at Bay Life Church, a non-denominational church just outside Tampa, where I serve as Communications Director and teach.
Somewhere in there I picked up a degree in Business and Language from Liberty University. Years spent supporting the government — and later nonprofits directly, with technology and marketing — sharpened something I still lean on every day: a knack for solving abstract problems inside complicated, high-stakes environments.
But the creative streak was there long before any of that. I was raised by a creative mother, a brilliant father, and artistic siblings — I spent my teen years studying drawing and oil painting, and found my way into community theater: acting, directing, producing. Still one of my favorite things to do.
EssToo Creative is where all of it lands — the discipline of a career built on precision under pressure, and a lifetime spent chasing the same creative instinct that had me at an easel, or on a stage, long before I ever picked up a camera.
Why "EssToo"?
I'm one of six kids — Stacey, Stephen, Stuart, Selah, Seleste, and Shannon — so growing up, people were always asking if I was "an S too." Then in the Army I worked division-level intelligence in an ACE — the G2 — while training and working alongside the tactical, battalion-level shop: the S2. Stephen Stough, two S's, cutting my teeth on the S2 — EssToo Creative was never going to be called anything else.
Most of what you see here, I shoot, edit, design, direct, and build — backed by nearly three decades of planning, producing, and what I like to call "solutioneering." But when a project calls for more, I bring in an extensive network of some of the most talented editors, designers, and storytellers I know.
