A company named Marathon was never going to be judged by how fast it started. It was always going to be judged by how long it could keep going.

When Tony Cortinas and three partners launched Marathon Consulting on April 1, 2006, the date was not part of a clever marketing plan. It was not even really about April Fool’s Day.

“I would say that was more accidental than anything,” Cortinas said. “We started on April Fool’s Day, or April 1, really just to have a clean quarter.”

The timing became part of the company’s story later. So did the recession that followed. Marathon launched just before the Great Recession, with four founders, a handful of clients and no perfect runway. Cortinas said the experience proved something every founder eventually learns: there is rarely a perfect moment to take the leap.

“There’s never a perfect time to say, ‘I’m going to quit my job and start a business,’” Cortinas said.

The opportunity came from a gap the founders saw in the Hampton Roads market. They had worked for a national IT consulting company that was eventually acquired by a larger global firm. As the model shifted toward billion-dollar clients and massive IT budgets, Cortinas and his partners believed there was still a real need for high-quality local consulting.

They did not build Marathon with a flashy launch or outside investment. They built it carefully. The four founders rolled into the company in phases, each going two months without getting paid to help create early cash flow. The company secured a line of credit from TowneBank, and the founders personally guaranteed it.

From the start, the goal was not just to win the first engagement. It was to build something that could last beyond it.

That is where the company’s name became more than a name.

“Most of us were athletic and liked sports,” Cortinas said. “We were literally in the office trying to come up with a name, and Marathon came out.”

The name gave the team a theme they could keep building around. Go the distance. Stay in the race. Keep moving. Even the early logo leaned into it, with the “T” designed as a runner crossing the finish line. Over time, the metaphor became part of the company’s culture.

“We’ve stuck to the Marathon theme pretty well,” Cortinas said.

But the real marathon was never the branding. It was the business itself.

Today, Marathon has grown from four founders and four clients into a Hampton Roads-based IT services company with an office in Richmond, about 125 consultants and more than 600 clients served. The company focuses on application development, data solutions and IT advisory services for commercial clients in Virginia and across the country.

That growth did not come from chasing every opportunity or lowering standards to move faster. Cortinas said Marathon’s mission has stayed grounded in finding talented people and giving clients a high level of service.

“We really stuck to our guns on our mission of hiring the best talent and providing that level of service to our clients,” Cortinas said. “Early on, it would have been very easy to grow the company a lot faster and sacrifice some of that quality.”

That restraint is the difference between sprinting and building for distance. Marathon’s story is not just about surviving change. It is about staying disciplined through it.

At the company’s 20-year celebration, that distance became visible in a way Cortinas did not expect. The wife of one of the retired founders brought back the empty champagne bottle the team had opened during Marathon’s first week. She had saved it for two decades.

“I was almost in tears,” Cortinas said. “It was right before I had to do my speech, so I had to gather myself, but it was really special.”

For Cortinas, the bottle was more than a keepsake. It was a reminder of how far the company had traveled.

“I don’t think any of us really imagined that we’d be celebrating 20 years later, especially with such a big crowd, with so many employees and clients,” Cortinas said. “All of us feel that this has well exceeded our expectations and really has been a tremendous ride.”

That milestone also arrived with broader regional recognition. On April 1, 2026, the same date Marathon marked its 20th anniversary, the company was named to the first group of 20 businesses selected for the IHR200, Innovate Hampton Roads’ curated list of the 200 most important privately owned, growth-scalable businesses in the region.

For Marathon, the recognition underscored what the company’s name had been pointing toward all along. Some businesses are built for speed. Others are built for distance.

Twenty years in, Marathon Consulting has not crossed a final finish line. It has simply proven the name was right all along.

 

Watch the Marathon Consulting episode of Disrupting the Tide here