ACCESS GRANTED: JENNY WOLDT AND THE STORY OF SPLASH BOX®

Jenny Woldt, Founder, CEO

On paper, the origin story of Splash Box® Marketing, LLC reads like it was born out of necessity and desperation: a company coming to fruition in one of the most challenging seasons of Jenny Woldt’s life. She was a single mom to three young children, out of the workforce for 12 years, needing a career reset. She needed to provide for her family. She needed income and stability, but desperately wanted her children’s lives to stay as steady and normal as possible.

Woldt decided to step out in faith, create Splash Box Marketing, and rebuild her career from the ground up, under pressure, and with no guarantee of success or stability. She wasn’t stepping onto a well-trod professional path. She wasn’t looking at influencers to see how they’d accomplished it. Instead, she started her own journey. Splash Box started at home, during the in between – early mornings, late nights, and the hours or minutes scrounged up between school drop-off, sports, and church.

Two decades later, Splash Box is marking its 20^th anniversary. And the company is far from a survival story. In fact, Splash Box is a study in how the thing you stumble into during a moment of necessity can become what defines you. Today, Splash Box is recognized for two interlocking capabilities: marketing services and 508 remediation services. And with the launch of Splash Access^TM Alt Text, the company is entering a new chapter that feels like a natural arrival.

Jenny and Craig Woldt

As Splash Box® grew, Woldt hired employees, brought her husband, Craig, to the team, and began focusing more deeply on accessibility services. What may appear to some as a narrow specialization would become foundational to the company. Over time, accessibility grew from one service among many to one of Splash Box’s greatest strengths and clearest niches.

For Woldt, 508 remediation was never just technical work. It was personal. Her grandfather lost his sight, and from a young age, Woldt remembers how much that cost him. “I remember how difficult it was to watch him lose the ability to read, especially at night. I remember buying him books on tape and seeing how much they meant to him.” That image has traveled with her across her life as well as across twenty years of business.

When Woldt later learned about accessibility services and 508 remediation, especially the opportunity to make information accessible to seniors with visual impairments, it immediately spoke to her. That’s why accessibility at Splash Box has never been reduced to a regulatory hurdle or a checklist to complete. As Woldt says, “To some, 508 remediation may look like compliance work. To me, it has always felt like service.”

Like every technology-focused company, Splash Box has had to confront the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence. For Woldt, the answer to the AI question was never going to be simply ignoring it and sticking heads in the sand. Avoidance was not a serious option. But can AI be used ethically? Can it serve people better, solve problems faster, and increase accessibility? Woldt sat with these questions before diving into the deep end of AI. “Just because something is powerful does not mean it should be used carelessly. AI is a tool. It can help us serve people better, solve problems faster, increase accessibility, and create new possibilities. But it can also tempt people toward shortcuts and the loss of human care. I do not want to be a leader who resists every new thing out of fear. But I also do not want to be a leader who chases every new thing without wisdom. The goal is not simply to keep up with change. The goal is to walk faithfully through it. AI may shape the future of business, but it should never shape our values.”

Splash Access^TM Alt Text was built with this tension in mind. It’s an AI-powered accessibility tool that generates clear, meaningful alt text for images, making digital content more accessible for people who use assistive technology. It allows organizations to improve accessibility more efficiently while still supporting the human responsibility to communicate with care, clarity, and dignity. In many ways, it’s a natural expansion for Splash Box®. The company has been doing hands-on accessibility work since 2012. So, it’s another way to serve, another way to remove barriers, and another way to innovate and create something meaningful.

There’s a version of Woldt’s entrepreneurial story that sands down the difficult and messy parts in favor of clean narrative of hustle and triumph. Jenny Woldt does not tell that version. She is precise about the cost of Splash Box®’s early years as well as what those years gave her. “When I was younger, I probably thought leadership meant having the answers, making the plan, working hard, and pushing through,” she says. “And certainly, discipline, vision, and perseverance matter. But life has a way of humbling us. Loss humbles us. Financial pressure humbles us. Responsibility humbles us. Watching doors close when you have done everything you know to do will bring you to your knees in a way success never can.”

What Woldt learned in those moments was that leadership begins with people – clients, employees, vendors, and ultimately, the person that’s on the other end of every decision. It’s about seeing the person in front of you clearly enough to lead them well. Woldt says, “When you have walked through grief, uncertainty, and exhaustion, you become much more aware that everyone around you is carrying something. A good leader cannot just focus on performance and outcomes. That does not mean avoiding hard conversations or lowering standards. It means leading with truth and compassion together. It means remembering that the people who work with us are not machines.”

Reaching a twentieth anniversary in small business is a statistical achievement worth celebrating. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly half of small businesses don’t survive past five years. Making it to twenty years is significant, and it shows the depth of character and leadership Woldt brings to her company.

If the first twenty years of Splash Box taught Jenny Woldt anything about leadership, it’s that the values worth keeping are the ones that get tested, not the ones that go unchallenged. Courage, humility, and integrity are the values she holds closest to the heart. At Splash Box®, these values aren’t just buzz words or forgotten in the employee manual. They’re present in how the company operates every day. About these values, Woldt says, “Fear is a terrible leadership strategy. Fear narrows vision. Humility keeps us teachable and prevents us from building the business around our own pride.” And perhaps most challenging is integrity. Woldt says, “When pressure rises, character is revealed. It is easy to talk about values when everything is going well. It is much harder to live them when money is tight, when the future is unclear, or when compromise looks like the easier path.”

Jenny Woldt built Splash Box from the hours of a life under pressure, without a roadmap, and with three children watching her figure it out. Twenty years later, the company she built stands as a testament to what happens when necessity meets conviction and when a leader refuses to let fear have the last word. ●