Community Highlights: Meet Elizabeth Mcfadden of Novella Brandhouse

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Mcfadden.

Elizabeth, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started in the ad agency business in 1996 at the now-defunct firm Valentine Radford. At that time, VR was one of two firms in the US that were the oldest independent ad agencies. I spent four years there and it was an incredible experience. I learned branding from some of the best in the business and got to work on accounts such as Sprint, Hallmark, Bayer and Captain D’s restaurants, among others. After working for another four years for Cramer Krasselt, another large, national ad agency, I took some time off while I started a family. Two years later, I slowly got back in the game, doing freelance and eventually launching a marketing firm in 2006. My experience in the big agency world, combined with working with small businesses that needed branding led me to start one of the first virtual ad agencies in the country – Elle Marketing Communications. Later, I merged that business with a local design studio to create Novella Brandhouse, a branding-focused, full-service ad agency. As a full-service advertising firm, we develop, design and implement campaigns and strategies across all platforms. Our services include Brand Development, Naming, Logo + Identity Design, Marketing Strategy, Advertising Campaigns, Website Design + Build, Social Media + Content Strategy, Marketing Collateral, and Photography. As a business owner, I’ve been able to build a firm designed for businesses that are scaling and need branding first and foremost to drive their business and culture. Speaking of culture, as a women-owned business, I have created a supportive culture at Novella that I am proud of and would have loved to be in as a young woman and new mom early in my career.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Starting a business from scratch and then operating, growing, and scaling that business has certainly come with some struggles. Like most business owners, you don’t know what you don’t know. You make a lot of mistakes along the way, but the best thing I did was learn from those mistakes. I feel like those lessons are the ones that stick with me the most. The areas where I struggled the most were finance, partnerships, and ops. I started the business as an excellent practitioner of branding and marketing, not necessarily a business executive. I had to learn pricing, how to manage money as a business, forecasting, HR, processes, etc. The list goes on and on, but over the years, I have sought out resources, programming, peers, and mentors who could help guide me. That is the key. Knowing when, where, and how to access help.

As I reflect on challenges in my professional life, I don’t know that they are different from what other female entrepreneurs would say. When I started Novella Brandhouse, I had three young kids. If you ask any woman business owner, she probably tells a similar tale. But where I am different and how my story became one of success is that I never looked at those challenges as failures or something I couldn’t figure out. Instead, I looked at those as opportunities and ways to improve or even win. 2019 was a particularly challenging year and at one point, my husband looked at me and said, “I don’t know how you keep going.” I told him that I’m an entrepreneur and we always see the sunny side, the opportunity and the chance to make things better.

I bought my partner out of the business in late 2019, at that point, the company was in need of some serious repairs. We were fully engaged in that work when the pandemic hit 3 months later. I rallied the team and it was us against the world! We focused on our brand, our audience, and what makes us great and then we buckled down and got to work. Simply put, we hustled.

As you know, we’re big fans of Novella Brandhouse. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Novella® Brandhouse is a boutique, WBE-certified branding-focused, full-service ad agency developing brand architecture, creative campaigns and marketing strategies for organizations that are scaling or rebranding. Additionally, our in-house department, Novella Studio, creates photography and social media content that gets your brand noticed. Need to offer branding or marketing programming to your members or franchisees? License and distribute our Novella University marketing and branding course for entrepreneurs and small businesses to learn how to successfully brand and market a company or product.

Exclusively for our foodservice clients, MKA Collective is our retail brand development agency in partnership with MKA where we innovate menus, food and beverage products, strategies, campaigns and the customer experience. Here we service food, beverage and hospitality clients.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Have faith and believe in yourself. It’s probably going to feel scary, but that’s OK.

I created one of the first virtual ad agencies when high-speed internet came along in 2006, and everyone told me it was a dumb idea and that changing the traditional ad agency model would never work. The moral of the story is if you know you’re on to something, don’t let the people in the cheap seats tell you otherwise!

Very quickly, I had lots of clients who needed the expertise of a full-service ad agency but not the high overhead. I also hired other women-owned businesses, mompreneurs, etc., to be part of my virtual ad agency, then called elle marketing. Empowering other women to start their businesses when they had young kids at home. Over the years, I have worked with and created brands for women-owned/female startups and solopreneurs. I always felt like it was important to make sure they had the right marketing and branding to complete.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.novellabrandhouse.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/novellabrandhouse/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NovellaBrandhouse/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/novella-brandhouse/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@novellabrandhouse