Ask most people where they learned to read a room and you will get a story about a job. Ask Giovanni Amodei and you get a story about a dining room.
Amodei grew up in his family’s restaurants, which is a particular kind of education. A restaurant teaches you that the person at table six is not a transaction, that a regular is worth more than a full house of strangers, and that nothing about any of it works if the people doing the work do not trust each other. It is also a business, and a hard one, run on margins thin enough that every relationship has to earn its keep.
On September 23, Turnstone Creative named him manager of strategic growth. The Bethlehem agency, which does strategic communications, marketing and video production, is barely nine months old in its current form, and Amodei arrives with more than a decade of sales and relationship management experience to lead its business and partnership development.
What the job actually is
Business development at an agency is a job that gets described in two very different ways depending on who is doing it. One version is a pipeline: calls made, meetings booked, proposals out the door. The other is slower and harder to put on a dashboard, and it is the one Turnstone’s leadership went out of its way to describe when announcing the hire.
“As Turnstone grows, we want to be just as intentional about how we build new relationships as we are about the work we deliver,” said Tina Hasselbusch, the agency’s CEO and co-founder. “Gio understands this community, but more importantly, he knows how to listen, recognize where there is an opportunity to help and build trust over time. That makes him a natural fit for Turnstone and for this role.”
In practice, Amodei will work across Turnstone’s departments rather than sitting outside them. The agency runs marketing strategy, public relations, social media, video production, storytelling and content development under one roof, which means the useful question in a first conversation with a prospective client is rarely “which service do you want.” It is closer to “what are you actually trying to fix.” His job is to work that out, decide whether the agency can help, and then put the right combination of its people in front of the problem.
Katie Santana, Turnstone’s president, framed it the same way. “Gio is naturally curious about people and their businesses, and that matters in this role,” she said. “He isn’t approaching business development as a transaction. He wants to understand what an organization is trying to accomplish and then determine whether and how Turnstone can help.”
That is a nicer sentence than most agencies manage about the person whose job is to bring in work. It is also, read closely, a hiring criterion: they wanted someone willing to say no.
Twelve years in food
Amodei comes to marketing from the food business, which is less of a leap than it sounds.
Most recently he spent seven years as an area manager for a national food manufacturer, covering the Pennsylvania region. Before that he spent five years with a national food distributor, starting in purchasing and then moving into a territory manager role serving the Lehigh Valley market. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business management from West Chester University.
Those two jobs are a useful pair. Purchasing puts you on the buying side of the table, where you learn exactly how a sales call sounds to the person receiving it. Territory management puts you on the other side, in the same accounts, month after month, in a region small enough that a reputation travels. Food distribution and food manufacturing are both businesses where the product is largely interchangeable and the relationship is the differentiator, and where the territory is the same few hundred operators year after year. Burn one and you do not get the account back.
It is also a beat that walks you through every independent kitchen, institutional cafeteria and regional chain in the Valley. A person who spent five years calling on Lehigh Valley food accounts has met a great many of the exact small and mid-sized businesses an agency like Turnstone wants to be talking to.
The agency he is joining
Turnstone Creative is new as a name and not new as a company.
It came together on January 1 of this year, when two Lehigh Valley firms that had worked alongside each other for more than a decade formally merged. ASR Media, founded in 2012 by Ashley Russo, Hasselbusch and Santana, was the video and storytelling side, and brought a shelf of Mid-Atlantic Emmy Awards with it. Social T Marketing & PR, which Hasselbusch launched in 2017 after seeing how much strategic marketing and public relations work the region was not getting, was the communications side. They had been partners in everything but structure, and the merger made it official.
Russo is the one Valley residents are most likely to have watched without knowing it. She created, produces and hosts The PEAK TV, the region’s first half-hour newsmagazine devoted to health and wellness, which airs Sundays on WFMZ-69. She came to the Lehigh Valley from network television, having produced for NBC’s Today Show. She is now Turnstone’s chief community and culture officer.
Hasselbusch runs the merged firm as CEO, with 25 years in marketing and communications behind her. This year Lehigh Valley Business named her to the inaugural LVB 300, its list of the region’s most influential leaders across every industry, and honored her with a Circle of Excellence award at its Women of Influence program. Santana is president. The leadership bench also includes vice presidents for operations, client experience and post-production, which is more structure than most agencies this size carry and a fair indication of where they expect to be.
The agency works out of 60 West Broad Street in Bethlehem and takes on nonprofits, healthcare organizations, educational institutions and businesses, with a client list that runs from local nonprofits to companies on the Inc. 5000.
And it publishes Fig Lehigh Valley, the lifestyle magazine that has spent years profiling the independent businesses and nonprofits of this region in print, on the web and in a weekly newsletter. That is worth noting in a story about a business development hire, because it means Turnstone is not only an agency selling marketing services to Valley businesses. It is also a publisher that has been telling their stories, which is a different and considerably warmer way to already know everybody.
A year of adding people
Amodei is the second notable addition Turnstone has announced in 2026. In May the agency brought on Sarah Elmer as marketing manager, hired out of Habitat for Humanity of the Lehigh Valley, where she ran fundraising and brand storytelling, and before that St. Luke’s University Health Network.
Two hires in five months, one on the delivery side and one on the growth side, is the shape a merger takes when it is working. The first year of a combined firm is usually spent proving the two halves can run as one team. Adding a dedicated business development seat is what a company does once it believes that question is settled and the constraint has moved to how much new work it can responsibly bring in.
For his part, Amodei puts the whole thing back where he started.
“Growing up in my family’s business, I learned early that success is built on relationships, trust and being invested in the community around you,” he said. “Those lessons have guided me throughout my career and are a big part of why Turnstone felt like the right fit. I’m excited to help strengthen connections across the Lehigh Valley and support organizations that are making an impact in our community.”
He has never lived anywhere else. In a region where a great many of the businesses on the client list are family businesses themselves, that is not a small thing to bring to the first meeting.
Turnstone Creative is located at 60 West Broad Street, Suite 201, in Bethlehem. More information is available at TurnstoneCreativeLLC.com.
