On Our Own Terms

Almost 20 years ago, after spending most of my career at agencies owned by the large holding companies, I made the decision to join Sullivan—an independent, woman-owned business. If I’m being honest, the fact that it was woman-owned didn’t significantly factor into my decision at the time. Instead, I was drawn to Sullivan’s unique approach to branding and marketing. Sullivan was building something the market didn’t yet know to ask for.

That origin story, not unusual among women who have founded companies, contains a lesson that goes well beyond gender. It’s a lesson about what happens to a brand when it’s built without a blueprint, when it can’t rely on institutional momentum or inherited credibility, when it must earn trust one relationship at a time.

The companies that endure, and the brands that genuinely mean something to the people they serve, are seldom the ones that launched with the loudest claim. They’re the ones that were built from a clear point of view. That had something real to say and found honest ways to say it. That treated their clients, employees, and communities not as audiences to be managed, but as relationships to be earned.

Women-founded businesses have long modeled this approach, not because it is innately feminine, but because the conditions under which they were built demanded it. Without the cushion of assumed authority, you find other foundations. You build around values. You invest in culture. You learn to articulate your purpose in ways that people actually believe, because you can’t afford for them not to.

This is, not coincidentally, what great branding does. At its best, brand strategy isn’t about projection; it’s about excavation. Uncovering what an organization genuinely stands for and giving it a form that resonates in the world. The firms and founders who have done this most durably are those that started with something true.

As more women have founded, funded, and led companies—and the numbers, while still disproportionately low, are meaningfully growing—the broader business culture has started to catch up to something women-owned businesses understood early: that humanity is not a soft value. It is a strategic one. That inclusive cultures aren’t just the right thing; they produce better work. That the relationships you build inside a company are inextricable from the relationships you build outside it. And there’s clear ROI in having women at the top. Over the past 10 years, female-led companies delivered 384% returns compared to 261% from male-led companies according to NGCP.

Women’s History Month offers a moment to take inventory and mark progress. What emerged from necessity turned out to be a masterclass in what durable brands require: a genuine point of view, the courage to articulate it clearly, and the discipline to build every relationship as if it can’t be taken for granted. That’s not a soft value, but a strategic one. And if the last two decades have taught me anything, it’s that the organizations willing to lead that way don’t just build better brands. They build better businesses.