Agathi Georgiou-Graham and Zach Graham run an empire of love.
Over the course of less than ten years, the couple has grown their one-venue, one-employee event-planning company to a three-venue brand with nearly a hundred employees. They credit their success to a number of factors, but it boils down to three ingredients: entrepreneurial spirit, persistent demand for their aesthetic, and—perhaps most importantly—a family-oriented approach.
Georgiou-Graham went to school for fashion design and marketing but had a slow start. “I realized very quickly there wasn’t a lot of work in Buffalo or Rochester for that,” she says. “I loved it, but I wasn’t making much money . . . I was so bright, bushy-tailed. I was twenty-one years old, and I wanted more.” She had an opportunity to work events for another organization, and something clicked. “I realized very quickly that I have the type of personality that likes to take charge and be a leader,” she says.
In 2008 she went to graduate school to study business and launched Agathi & Co. in 2011, a full-service event-planning company. “But of course it wasn’t a slam dunk,” she says. “It took me about five years to really start making a living.” During those years she organized for the Lilac Festival, Fringe, Fashion Week, and Greentopia’s Dinner on the Bridge. It was there she met the owner of 17 Pitkin Street, who was looking for people to occupy the space.
While Georgiou-Graham discovered her entrepreneurial spirit through working for others, Graham has been scrappy and resourceful as long as he can remember. “I always had these little hustles that I would do as a kid,” he says. “We had a cherry tree, and I used to sell cherries. I was always shoveling driveways. One time I found a used bookstore that would pay you for books, so I would find ways to collect old books and sell them.”
When he was eighteen, Graham started to push the scope of these hustles. “We would basically put together different sorts of events, so we would organize a limo bus that was going to do a wine tour, then set up a wine dinner at a restaurant . . . we put all this stuff together and then sell tickets to it.” While it was a fulfilling and lucrative venture, Graham says it wasn’t worth the amount of work it took. “And I mean like a dollar an hour,” he laughs. “But it always felt cool to have a business. You feel good about it.”
His first established business was opening a maker space on Elton Street. “It was a cool little artsy building,” he says, “a cool loft-type space, and we had an art gallery.” In addition to selling art and coffee, Graham got in early on the artisanal donut kick of the twenty-tens. “Basically, what we’ve always done is go to New York City and find out what’s cool and trendy there. ‘Okay, let me steal that.’ And then we bring it back to Rochester,” he remembers. “So I knew there were all these cool donut shops in Brooklyn, and I was like, ‘we should do that here.’ So I made donuts for a while.”
As Graham’s gallery grew in popularity, he started getting requests to host private events. “We quickly learned that was way easier than anything else we were trying to do,” he says. It just so happened that Georgiou-Graham ran her event planning business out of the same building. “So I actually approached her and was like, ‘you’re an event planner!’”
This was just about when Georgiou-Graham met the aforementioned owner of 17 Pitkin St. “It all happened at the same time,” Georgiou-Graham says. “I had signed a lease on Pitkin Street, he and I started dating, and I realized very quickly I could not do this myself. We formed a professional relationship and a personal relationship at the very same time and fell in love opening up.”
They started Arbor Loft with one employee. While Graham tended bar and did dishes, Georgiou-Graham served, cleaned, and came in the next morning to prep for that day’s event. Then things happened fast—both for the business and family. Arbor Loft opened in 2016, and in 2017 they got engaged and found Arbor Loft’s second location at the Port of Rochester.
“We were the first couple to get married at Arbor at the Port,” Georgiou-Graham says. Operations continued until they learned they were expecting in 2019, and in 2021 they found Arbor Loft’s third location—Arbor Midtown—which opened in 2023. “And that’s kind of been the trajectory of not only the life of our venues but also our love story.”
Today, each venue hosts about a hundred events a year, and the Arbor team has grown to about fourteen full-time staff and eighty part-time servers and bartenders. “There were maybe only four or five of us back in 2020,” Georgiou-Graham says. “So it was after Covid that everyone decided, ‘if we’re going to celebrate, we’ve got to do it now.’ So events came back with a vengeance.”
After almost ten years of business, Arbor Loft’s farmhouse-chic style is as desirable as ever. “It really hasn’t changed, this aesthetic,” Graham says. “It hasn’t gone out of style as quickly as we thought it could.” Georgiou-Graham adds, “There was a point where people started to get sick of country clubs and hotels, your typical places, banquet halls. They wanted something a little bit cooler, more interesting, I hate to use the word ‘bespoke,’ but it very much is that.”
Aside from the successful aesthetic, Graham and Georgiou-Graham agree that the real secret is that they practice what they preach. “Our love story is what developed Arbor,” Georgiou-Graham says. “And it helps to sell the brand because we are the brand. We are planning peoples’ happily ever afters. And we are a perfect example of two people who fell in love planning events and opening the empire that has now been created that we’re very proud of and still very much invested in, and we’re very much invested in the growth of our employees.”
Most of the company’s business comes from word of mouth, but they want to spread beyond Rochester. “We live in a bubble, in the city . . . you get outside to the suburbs, people have no idea what’s going on in Rochester,” Georgiou-Graham says. “It blows my mind . . . so we try to rank as high as we possibly can for Google, and we have a great social media team.” With the growth of the business and family, priorities and responsibilities have shifted.
“At first we were everywhere, and we would divide and conquer,” Georgiou-Graham says. “Then we started our own family, so we wanted to scale back a little bit.” Georgiou-Graham and Graham don’t make it to a lot of events these days, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t intimately involved. “We do so much more during the week to prepare, train, and manage. Those events happen with a lot of time, love, and energy that we put in throughout the week,” Georgiou-Graham says.
That doesn’t mean, however, that nothing’s lost in the transition. “I used to be behind the bar personally, for one hundred percent of every single event,” Graham says. “And I used to love that . . . you definitely lose a part of hands-on. And miss what you used to have. To a certain degree, you have to let certain things go.”
The couple finds fulfillment in building and training their team, then watching them thrive. “We can live vicariously through the people that we’ve put a lot of time, energy, and heart into,” Graham says. “My favorite thing is when I see somebody that we brought on do something that I didn’t expect them to do, but it’s cool and interesting . . . that’s a huge high for me,” he adds. “It makes us feel like we got the right people.”
“It’s fun for us to really get to know and seek out other talent,” Georgiou-Graham says, “to bring them on our team, develop them, help them grow their own skills, and see them shine in real time. To see them really develop into their role and create and execute.” In fact, when Graham and Georgiou-Graham do show up at events, it’s not always fruitful. “Because it’s like, they’re running the show now,” Georgiou-Graham explains. “They’re doing the things. But when we’re there, we kind of start throwing wrenches into things because we’re the helicopter parent.”
His whole life, Graham has heard warnings about mixing business and family. “I just could not disagree more with that. I love working with her. I love working with my family.” Georgiou-Graham agrees. “I don’t quite understand why we’re not sick of each other yet,” she says. “We disagree all the time, but it’s okay. There’s something about our personalities that make it work for us.”
For the couple, the key to this balance lies in the priorities. “We both put the family and our relationship before the business,” Graham says. “That’s the only way it can work—if you have those priorities straight. I think when people mix family and business and it doesn’t work out, it’s because they’re probably putting the business before family.”
“The funny thing about business is, it carries its own internal inertia of wanting to grow,” Graham says. “If it’s doing well, it wants to grow.”
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of (585).
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