We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amy Lovell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I’ve started two businesses, both pretty different! The first business was a coaching company, though I suppose you could say that at the beginning it was less of a company and more something I did on the side of my other jobs. That started completely coincidentally–I had just left my role at Glossier, and a friend of a friend was launching a new coaching platform. Because of my experience with startups, she asked if I’d be a coach on her platform. I said yes, and within a few days I had my first couple of clients. I absolutely loved the work–I loved meeting with young, visionary entrepreneurs, with ambitious managers and directors at high-growth companies, and with people who were in between roles and looking to land their dream job. Over the years I continued coaching, always working with 5-7 clients at a time, but never considered doing it full-time until a year or so ago. I was a couple of years into my other entrepreneurial venture (more on that in a minute) and was also doing some consulting work that wasn’t very fulfilling. When I took a step back, I realized that I left every single coaching call energized, happy, joyful, and excited. I couldn’t say that about any of my other work. That was the moment when I decided to pursue coaching full-time–I created a name, logo, ethos, website, and I honed in on exactly what kind of clients I serve and how to talk about my coaching methodology. I got a coach myself and dedicated a lot of time to figuring out my marketing strategy and how to represent myself online. I told my existing clients that I was looking to expand, and they not only supported me through testimonials but promoted my coaching company on their social media handles. Many of my clients happen to be content creators with large followings, so I got a ton of inbound interest through their referrals. Leaning into coaching full-time and building a business around it was one of the most fulfilling things I’d ever done in my career!
My second entrepreneurial venture came about a bit more purposefully. I’d been working for 10+ years in venture-backed startups, mostly in marketing leadership roles but also as a COO and Head of People, and I wanted to apply my experience and expertise to an industry I was wildly curious and passionate about: publishing. I’ve always been a huge reader and just obsessed with books, but never tried working in publishing. Partly because my friends who were in publishing told me how terrible it was, partly because it’s famously difficult to break into unless you start as an assistant somewhere right after college. I figured starting my own publishing company, on my own terms, would enable me to have the best of both worlds. I had a clear vision about where I wanted to go–I wanted to leverage D2C brand-building and customer-first principles to this very old-school industry–but I was nervous to go straight into publishing. I thought I had to earn trust through curation first; however, once I started pitching possible investors I realized I needed to take the big risk and go right into publishing, I committed, raised money in a seed round, found my first few authors, hired a designer, and got to work. The early days of building a brand from the ground up, being able to fully realize your own creative vision, and create a literal physical product from scratch are SO exciting!
Amy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a creative entrepreneur with a passion for building brands and high-performing teams; I’m also a coach for fellow creative entrepreneurs who are experiencing the wild rollercoaster of building a company. I started this part of my career after a couple of uninspiring years working in big pharma–I craved more creativity and impact–and found myself at a marketing and publicity agency for consumer tech startups. I quickly began working with brilliant entrepreneurs who trusted us to launch their companies to wide fanfare, and we advised on everything from market entry strategy to pricing, inventory, and messaging. After several years of helping to build, launch, and scale exciting new startups, I left and took an in-house Director of Communications role at SeatGeek. While being in-house at such a successful and fast-growing startup was fun, the company culture was not for me. About one year into the job, a colleague introduced me to Emily Weiss, the founder of just-launched Glossier, who was looking for a Head of Communications. I was wary because I didn’t know or care much about beauty at the time, and it was such a small company. Emily and I met and the rest was history–I was willing to follow her anywhere, I was so inspired by her fresh and bold approach to brand-building. At Glossier, I oversaw communications, experiential marketing, influencer marketing, social media, partnerships, editorial (Into the Gloss), and offline marketing. I then transitioned into a Chief of Staff role, becoming an extension of Emily and helping her build out a strong leadership bench, and then I moved into a Head of Talent / interim Head of People role. I’d still say these were the most formative years of my career; however, at a certain point I realized I needed to move on to a new challenge. I wanted to take a break from full-time work and did some consulting (mostly Head of Brand or Head of People work) and then was recruited by one of my clients to join full-time. The client was Haus, a direct to consumer aperitif company, and I became their COO, overseeing every part of the business. This was a tremendously exciting and big role, and building out that team and seeing how much impact we were able to have in a short amount of time was another career highlight. At a certain point, however, I realized I was ready to start my own venture and I left to launch Parea Books, my publishing company. I had also been coaching ever since leaving Glossier, and I built out my coaching business further.
Now, after a few years of running Parea Books and coaching, I’m settling into the next phase of my career. While I am so proud of what we did at Parea, I realized that my talents are not best suited for being the CEO of a company. I’m pausing operations at the publishing company, as I don’t think it’s fair for my authors or anyone else involved in the company to not be fully supported. I shifted my focus to coaching full-time, knowing that I could help people in a much better way through my coaching practice. At the same time, I was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build a new beauty company from the ground up with one of my coaching clients who I believe in so deeply, so as of a few weeks ago I’m the Chief Brand Officer of a forthcoming beauty brand. It’s all coming full circle!
The throughline that’s present across my work is a human-centric approach to everything I do. I can quickly and deeply understand people–what motivates them, what’s holding them back, what they need to hear or do in order to make fast progress, and how they can best use their talents. I can do this on an individual basis, with my coaching clients, or at scale, as I do in my brand-building work. Nothing, and I truly mean nothing, brings me greater joy than helping people realize their full potential.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I’ve had to pivot so many times–in fact, one of the sayings I believe in most is “there are no such things as right or wrong decisions, only decisions–and it’s up to you to make them right.” I don’t get hung up on big decisions, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t challenging, especially when other people are involved. Most recently, I had to make the very big decision to pause operations of my publishing company. I have investors, authors, employees, contractors, and others who were relying on me. I disappointed countless people, many of whom were my friends. The thing is, I knew in my heart of hearts that whatever disappointment they felt now would pale in comparison to how disappointed they’d be if I kept operations going. The moment of clarity came to me after probably a year or so of feeling like something wasn’t working–I had received a particularly sharp email from an author, and I realized that if you asked my authors what it was like to work with me vs. my coaching clients what it was like to work with me, you’d get two very different answers. I was not showing up in a way I was proud of in my publishing company, and that’s because I was doing work that I didn’t know how to do, didn’t have the right resources to continue doing, and wasn’t dead set on continuing. I realized that, as it stands now, Parea didn’t stand a chance of impacting the publishing industry in a meaningful way (which is what I set out to do) and it had become just another publisher that pays authors a small royalty percentage, can’t break through the marketing noise of the bestseller list, and distributes through traditional channels. While the decision to pivot was not taken lightly, I felt a tremendous amount of relief after letting my authors know. I felt like I was back to being fully transparent, even if it was hurtful, and I was released from the guilt of not meeting their expectations. Importantly, I don’t consider any of this a failure. It wasn’t the outcome I was hoping for, of course, but it was an amazing learning experience, we produced some very important books, and we gave authors who would have had a difficult time breaking through in traditional publishing a platform.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
This is something I’m very passionate about! If you’re a founder or you have the ability to shape your team culture, the single best thing you can do is get very specific about what your team culture and working environment is like. Too often, companies are afraid of coming across in a negative way so they try to portray their culture in positive generalities. If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to no one (at best) and at worst, you attract the wrong kind of people who actually create a lot of friction in your team. If you’re a company that makes decision by consensus, say that. You’ll need strong communicators and excellent collaborators to facilitate that. If you’re a company that needs your employees to be on the clock all the time to manage last-minute client needs, say that too. You don’t want to hire someone who’s super smart and skilled but refuses to work past 5pm. Don’t try to use the buzz words that you think people want to hear unless they truly embody your culture.
Once you’ve set your company culture, get to know your people individually. Become a student of each of your team members and ask yourself how they like to receive feedback (it’s not the same for everyone!), how they like to be recognized, how they make decisions. Figure out if autonomy is more important than direction, if your public support is more important than you covering for potential mistakes. You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to management, and if you don’t get to know your team on an individual basis then you won’t be a very effective manager. Management takes real time to do well, and if you want to truly be great then you will need to invest a lot of energy into it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.creative-by-design.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amylaurenlovell/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lovell-9392ba23/
