I Sold My First Ad in Heels and Red Lipstick to a Dairy Farmer. Here’s How That Turned Into Parli & Co.

Every “why I started my agency” post is supposed to open with a lightning bolt of clarity — a single defining moment where the founder just knew. Mine opens with a business-card-sized ad, a $99 invoice, and a dairy farmer in Washington County, New York, who had no idea what he was buying and, frankly, neither did I.

That’s the honest version. So let’s do this one the honest way.

The Résumé That Makes No Sense on Paper

If you lined up my life like a LinkedIn timeline, it would look less like a career path and more like a geography quiz having a breakdown. I grew up in Chattanooga Tennessee, then packed a bag for Hawaii at nineteen because nineteen-year-olds do that. I spent my early twenties as a makeup artist, then pivoted to esthetics in upstate New York, in the Glens Falls area — a place better known for its ski hills than its ad agencies.

None of this, on paper, says “future marketing strategist.” But it turns out learning how to read a room, sell someone on a look they didn’t know they wanted, and make a stranger feel comfortable in a chair for an hour is, in fact, the entire job of advertising. Nobody puts that on a syllabus. I learned it by holding a mascara wand.

A friend referred me for a job as an advertising specialist at The Post-Star, and I said yes before I fully understood what the job was — a pattern that, in retrospect, has served me shockingly well.

My very first sale was a two-by-two-inch print ad to a dairy farmer in Washington County. Ninety-nine dollars. I closed it wearing heels and red lipstick because if you’re going to talk a farmer into print advertising, you might as well look like you know what you’re doing. Then I drove to go pick up the physical check and drove it, myself, back to the office. No invoicing software. No DocuSign. Just gas money and a folder.

Here’s the part that should be framed in every conference room: at the time, we were giving away digital impressions on PostStar.com for free because nobody — not the sales team, not the clients, arguably not the internet — understood what an impression was yet. My, how times have changed. I now spend my days optimizing for AI answer engines that didn’t exist when I got into this business, and somewhere a dairy farmer is still getting more value out of that $99 than most six-figure ad buys I’ve seen since.

Newspapers, Nashville, and a Front-Row Seat to Digital Disruption

From The Post-Star, I moved to another newspaper publishing company in the area, then chased family back to Nashville, where I landed as a marketing manager for The Tennessean — supporting home delivery sales. In 2012. If you know anything about print media in 2012, you know that’s the marketing equivalent of being handed the aux cord on the Titanic.

It was intense. It was also the best crash course in “sell the thing people are actively deciding to stop buying” that I could have asked for. Less than a year in, I moved into advertising sales at The Tennessean, and that’s where I got introduced to tourism marketing.

I was hooked instantly and completely. I loved tourism marketing. I loved working with destinations. I loved the travel, the conferences, the client dinners where someone inevitably pitched a campaign idea on a cocktail napkin. I loved all of it, in the uncomplicated way you love the first thing that actually fits.

Girl Power, a Tinder Date, and a Move to Oakland

After a few years at The Tennessean, I moved back home to Chattanooga and bought my first house, entirely on my own. Hashtag girl power, and I will not be taking questions about the hashtag.

While I was there, I met my husband, Jared — very romantically, on Tinder. Ninety days after we met, we packed up and moved to Oakland, California, together, which is either an incredibly fast timeline or an incredibly efficient one, depending on how the marriage goes. (Spoiler: it went well. He has been blindly, relentlessly supportive of every unreasonable decision I’ve made since, including this one.)

In Oakland, I spent two years at Pandora — now SiriusXM — working with small businesses and learning the actual power of audio in the marketing funnel, back before “audio strategy” was a line item every agency claimed to own. This was a time where I learned Aya Miyazaki’s unparalleled skills at photoshop and Megan Konieczny shockingly got me to fall in love with spin class. It was a genuinely great chapter. Oakland, however, was not forever. I distinctly remember sitting in our wildly overpriced apartment telling Jared we should move back to Tennessee, because our quality of life would improve and — critically — we could have a backyard. With an engagement ring on my hand, we came home.

Eight Years, Two Kids, Two Dogs, One Cat, and a Whole Lot of Tourism

Back in Nashville, I landed at Orange142, a digital advertising and managed services company based in Austin, Texas, built around tourism marketing. I was home — the state, the city, the industry, and eventually the marriage — all at once.

I spent the next eight years there. Somewhere in the middle of it, we moved to Navarre, Florida, with our two kids, Roman (almost four) and Penelope (six), our boxer Ajax, our border collie Finn, and — because apparently we weren’t busy enough — our newest addition, a cat named Valentine.

Orange 142 gave me the best gift a marketer can get: a front-row seat to the entrepreneurial side of the business, not just the campaign side. I learned how agencies are actually built, run, priced, and staffed — the stuff nobody teaches you in a marketing degree, and, it turns out, the stuff you need most if you’re ever going to build one yourself.

It also gave me something I never expected: the confidence to find my voice. Through countless opportunities to speak at conferences, host webinars, and represent our work as a thought leader, I slowly overcame a fear of public speaking that I had carried for years. Those experiences didn’t just make me a better marketer—they gave me a platform to advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community within the tourism industry and champion the importance of authentic inclusion and representation in destination marketing. For that, I’ll always be grateful.

I’m also incredibly thankful for Lindsey Wilkes and Doug Mankiewicz. They couldn’t be more different as leaders, and that’s exactly what made working with both of them so valuable. They challenged me in different ways, taught me entirely different skill sets, and each helped shape the marketer and business leader I’m becoming. And somewhere in between the deadlines, client calls, and campaigns, they also gave me a whole lot of laughter—especially those legendary, often wildly inappropriate COVID Zoom happy hours that, to this day, have never been topped.

Cliff Ward and I have laughed many times about how “unlikely” of friends we are on paper. But I have learned more from that man’s wealth of knowledge than from just about anyone else I’ve met. His mentorship, friendship, patience, and willingness to answer every random business question I’ve thrown his way have shaped both my career and the person I am today. I’ll always be thankful for him—and for putting up with my occasional (okay… frequent) unhinged-ness.

The best gift Orange 142 gave me, though, was my forever friendships.

Then COVID Crashed Tourism Marketing (And, Somehow, Saved a Little of My Sanity)

There is no version of “I work in tourism marketing” that survives a global pandemic gracefully. In the span of about two weeks, an entire industry built on getting people to travel toward things watched every travel budget on the planet get slashed to zero. Destinations went dark. Campaigns we’d spent months building got pulled mid-flight. Nobody was going anywhere, and marketing anywhere felt, briefly, like a very expensive joke.

It was terrifying. It was also deeply weird, in the specific way that only a once-in-a-century event can be — one day you’re optimizing media mix for a beach destination, the next you’re on a call trying to figure out if “travel” is even a word we’re allowed to use in an ad anymore.

And here’s the part nobody expects me to say: it was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, professionally and personally.

With every client in survival mode, I had to get scrappy in ways eight years of steady growth had never demanded. I learned faster, questioned assumptions I’d been running on autopilot, and figured out how to help destinations market themselves with essentially no budget and zero certainty anyone would show up. I spent that time trying to help my industry hold on, one client and one absurdly modest campaign at a time — because if tourism marketing was going to come back, somebody needed to keep the lights on until it did.

And on a much more personal note: our first daughter, Penelope, had just been born. In any other version of this timeline, I’d have been back on a plane to a conference within weeks. Instead, the entire world stopped, and I got to be home — actually home, not “working remotely between flights” home — for far longer than I ever would have planned. I didn’t choose that trade. The pandemic chose it for me. But I’ve never once regretted the time it handed back.

Tourism marketing came back, obviously. It always does. But I came back to it a little scrappier, a lot more grateful, and with a newborn who’d gotten more of my undivided attention than any career plan would have allowed.

The Quit (aka walking away from my job that was my identity)

Fast forward three more years – Last summer, I quit. It was a surprisingly emotional decision. Not because of a single bad day, but because I needed a breather — to be a mom for a while, to stop optimizing someone else’s business for a minute, and to figure out what was actually next.

I did not have a five-year plan. I had a toddler, a six-year-old, and a lot of quiet.

Here’s the part I still can’t fully explain, and I’ve stopped trying to: my decision to start Parli & Co. lined up, almost too perfectly, with two of the most talented, most respected colleagues of my career, Austin Martin & Jessica Kaplan, being in a position to join me. I didn’t offer either of them stability. I offered chaotic direction, a lot of passion, and a vision that lived entirely in my head and was genuinely hard to put into words out loud.

They said yes anyway. The three of us built it. We’re all in.

Our goal is simple: bring boutique-agency marketing back — real strategy, senior talent, real attention — to our clients, our friends, and the people we actually love working with.

What We’re Actually Building

Parli & Co. is intentionally a small team. But “small team” and “small talent pool” are not the same thing. The Collective in our name isn’t decoration — it’s the model. We pull from the best people we’ve worked with across our entire careers: strategists, creatives, editors, specialists we’ve vetted for years, brought in project-by-project as the work requires. No bloated bench, no overhead padding your invoice, no junior staff cutting their teeth on your budget.

That’s the whole trick. Custom, intimate marketing partnerships. Senior strategy. A collective built on relationships instead of headcount. Top-tier work, honest customer service, and brands we genuinely feel good standing behind — and when something doesn’t work, we treat it as a lesson, not a liability.

People ask me what the “vision” for Parli & Co. is, expecting something that sounds better on a pitch deck. I’ve said the real answer out loud more times in the last few months than I can count, and it’s never gotten more complicated than this:

I just want to do good work for good people.

It really is that simple. Everything else — the strategy, the AI-forward execution, the senior-only staffing, the freelance collective — + we sprinkle all of that with confetti and glitter.