Today we’d like to introduce you to Paige Arnof-fenn

Hi Paige , we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?

I started a global branding and digital marketing firm 23 years ago. I did not plan on starting a company though I always wanted to go work for a large multi-national business and be a Fortune 500 CEO. When I was a student I looked at leaders like Meg Whitman & Ursula Burns as my role models. I started my career on Wall Street in the 80s and had a successful career in Corporate America at companies like Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola and worked at 3 different tech startups as the head of marketing, all had positive exits. I became an entrepreneur and took the leap right after 9/11 when the company I worked for cut their marketing. I had nothing to lose. My company’s mission is to bring world class marketing talent and expertise to organizations that want to make a difference in the world regardless of size or budget. We believe every organization deserves the right words and pictures to tell their story in compelling ways. It has been a lot of fun, I joke that I am the accidental entrepreneur. I knew I had made it when Harvard wrote 2 case studies on my business a few years after I started it, we were very early to pioneer sharing resources on the marketing front (before my company it was really only done with HR, legal and accounting/finance).

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

For the first 5 years I was scared to go on vacation for fear all my hard work would unravel. Then my in-laws, father, mom and stepdad all started to get sick and I wanted to be there for them. They all lived thousands of miles away so I started to work less. After years of decline they each died about 8 months apart (7 people in 6 years) and I became executrix which is like having another job at times. So I had to take very good care of myself or I would not have been helpful to anyone else. I started working out every day. I started planning me time on my calendar. I became more comfortable with white space in my day and stopped over scheduling myself. And guess what? My business did not suffer, in fact it became stronger. We moved up the food chain and have better clients. I do not think I could ever go back. Downtime and vacations are not optional, you need to take breaks to be productive, creative and energized. I am so much happier and more productive as an entrepreneur than I ever was working for others. It is all about controlling your calendar. I no longer try to squeeze in more meetings or hit multiple events at night. As an entrepreneur, I can be selective. Less really is more. I’ve chosen quality over quantity. It sounds trivial but it is true. I created a platform to do work I enjoy and feel energized by. I feel I have found my purpose because I used to work all the time and life was passing me by. I got raises and promotions but I was all work and no play and I did not feel fulfilled. Since starting my business I have joined boards and volunteered at several organizations. I am a mentor to the next generation of leaders and have helped build a very successful anti-bullying program that >250,000 middle school aged kids have gone through. As a marketing consultant I am able to write articles, contribute to books and speak at events to share my experience and lessons learned.

My biggest challenge early on was that the people you start with are not always the ones who grow with you. The hardest lesson I learned when I started my company is not getting rid of weak people earlier than I did in the first few years of my business. I spent more time managing them than finding new customers. I knew in my gut they were not up to snuff but out of loyalty to them I let them hang around much longer than they should have. It would have been better for everyone to let them go as soon as the signs were there. They became more insecure and threatened as we grew which was not productive for the team. As soon as I let them go the culture got stronger and the bar higher. “A” team people like to be surrounded by other stars. It is true that you should hire slowly and fire quickly. I did not make that mistake again later on so learned it well the first time. I wish I had known it even earlier though but lesson learned for sure!

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?

Mavens & Moguls is a virtual marketing department for organizations that want access to great talent on an as needed outsourced basis. We work with early stage VC-backed startups, Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations and mid-emerging market firms looking for help with their communications, research, PR, branding or strategy as a seamless extension of their team. We are storytellers and content creators which is a great way to build your brand, increase your visibility more broadly, raise your profile and ultimately attract more attention/clients/customers. We help our clients find the right words and pictures to create interest for their products and services. My company’s mission is to bring world class marketing talent and expertise to organizations that want to make a difference in the world regardless of size or budget. I think we are more relevant today than when we started 2+ decades ago, great stories never go out of style.

Everyone in the group comes out of industry so our heads and hearts are much more aligned with our clients than a typical agency or consulting firm. We are not professional PowerPoint makers, we have actually done the job as marketing and communication leaders so our recommendations come from having been in our clients’ seats before. We are an extension of their team and spend their money the way they do, not as a vendor so I think that is a compelling angle when they hire us. We do not see marketing as a necessary evil, we believe in the power of great brands and think all organizations regardless of size or budget deserve great marketing advice. Our passion comes through in our tag line and everything we do. We believe marketing matters.

I am very proud of the work we have done for organizations across many categories and geographies. We branded and launched a conference as part of the Sundance Film Festival to “invest in media that matters,” we created a major fundraising opportunity for a nonprofit celebrating a milestone anniversary for helping people live productive lives with AIDS, we rebranded and renamed 2 social service agencies that help people with mental disabilities and we rebranded and elevated the profile and awareness of a for-profit organization that is an intensive family- and community-based treatment program that focuses on addressing all environmental systems that impact chronic and violent juvenile offenders — their homes and families, schools and teachers, neighborhoods and friends. These are all great organizations that are better off today because of our work and that is incredibly fulfilling. However the one client I am most proud of is an industrial products company based in New Orleans that we started working with just before Katrina and continued to work with them for years after. Our work with them spanned many areas and we were able to “keep the trains moving” post-Katrina when their biggest trade show of the year was happening and they ended up as the belle of the ball there, our branding work for them helped them recruit great talent after the storm, the tag line we created for them helped them solidify their message and in conjunction with the branding messages we developed for them, stand out from the pack of competitors. I grew up in New Orleans so helping a local business means a lot to me even though I have not lived there since college.

How do you think about luck?

My grandfather had a plaque on his desk that now sits on mine “The harder I work the luckier I get!”’ It has a lot more to do with doing your homework and being prepared than luck. Once you really know your business, the market and the competitive landscape well you are able to see trends and opportunities much better. It takes a tremendous amount of preparation and work to get to the point where it looks easy. I think Michael Jordan would tell you the same thing in fact. It has taken decades of busting my butt to get here, luck is great but hard work is a safer route. Even if you’re confident in your decisions, it’s impossible to know how they will turn out in three or five or 20 years. To some extent, success is based on making as many good decisions as you can to set yourself up for success, and then getting lucky once in a while.

Is there a little luck in every success? Sure. We all took risks in our careers, and, through some unmeasurable balance of skill and timing and good fortune, they paid off in ways that led us to where we are. But was it all luck? If we had to do it over again, is there a chance we’d end up as failures? I don’t think so. Luck just influenced the path. It shifted the winds. If luck had broken for me differently, perhaps I wouldn’t have this job I have now but I am absolutely certain that I’d have found some other satisfying path and built some different version of success, and I think the same is true for leaders who work with what they’ve got. Sometimes it’s a lucky break. Sometimes it’s not. The important thing is that we keep moving forward and know that because we took one big step forward, and we didn’t fall down, we will stay standing when we take that next step, too. Luck and timing both play a significant role in success. The success stories we hear always seem genius in hindsight, but everyone with any degree of self-awareness who reaches the top could give you a ton of examples where they got lucky, or tell you about a decision that worked brilliantly at one moment but could have been a failure shortly before or after.

I always laugh when people ask me if I have always been lucky or how I became an overnight sensation. I smile and respond that I have worked really hard for decades! There is no shortcut to success. There is no manual or playbook either. I have all the war wounds and scars from years of stumbling, falling, getting up, and trying again until I make it work. I do not believe in failure, I think you just get smarter each time until it works. I joke that every successful person can tell you parallel stories that are the flip side of what is on their resume so that every “success” they mention could have just as easily been what went wrong instead of what went right. That is how you learn the lessons best in fact. I have had fights with bosses, been upset at performance reviews, been passed over for promotions, worked many nights, weekends and holidays! That is how you become a success, luck is great but you need more than luck to make it happen over an entire career. Luck can give you a break or opportunity but you have to do the rest the old fashioned way through blood, sweat and tears! I commuted 56 miles each way to work for more than 3 years, worked thousands of miles away from my husband for a big job for almost a year, I worked 80+ hours per week on Wall Street in the 80s and at 3 successful startups in the 90s and early 2000s. That was not luck, it was a lot of hard work over years of my career. You make your luck.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mavensandmoguls.com