Hera Hub is excited to share Startup Stories from our members in honor of National Entrepreneurship Week. Each day this week we will interview incredible business women from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. Our goal is to share our members’ wonderful stories with the public.

Leah Prehn is the cofounder of Office of Awesome. Office of Awesome offers transformative strategies that you simply can’t find anywhere else.

“We’re not a marketing agency, we’re not a bunch of freelancers, we’re brand producers—meaning, we take what an organization has and we make it a lot more awesome.”

Leah has been a member of our Mission Valley, California location for more than four years. Here is Leah’s Startup Story:

I came from the world of copy and content. I watched businesses play the SEO game and jump into social media both feet first. What I saw was a lot of nonsense material flooding the market that ultimately was not going to help anyone – including the business. Google agreed with me and developed better algorithms.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve honed the craft of designing brands through language. At the same time, I partnered with Rebecca Tall Brown in order to bring smart strategy into the branding process to create transformative solutions for businesses that are doing great work.

Our clients do awesome work and typically they’re so focused on their work, their customers, their service, their marketing often gets put on the back burner. They are in the business for the right reasons, they are experts at their crafts, leading their industries, coming up with amazing products and solutions.

And because they’re not talking about their work to the full capacity, their sub-par competitors have the advantage. We plug the hole in those boats by getting them a marketing strategy – we call it a Brand Architecture. And we transform those brands to make them real, relevant, and recognizable, in order to make their businesses grow.

1. Don’t be icky.
No one likes to feel bad during or after a project, so we make it a point to honest, up-front, and as accommodating as possible. You’ll find our clear expectations refreshing, so the process feels good from start to finish.

2. Err on the side of “doing what’s right.”
Every project has its nuances, and clients needs vary as much as the clients themselves. While we do our best to set out clear parameters for work and educate our clients on how we work and our fees, there are always things that come up that are unexpected. In these situations, we look at our responsibility to the client and determine whether or not scope has changed, communication wasn’t clear, or some other cause for confusion. In these situations, we intentionally err on the side of doing what’s right for our clients. After all, we’re working together because we want to see you succeed — and we walk that walk in our work.

3. People first.
Projects come and go, relationships are forever. Our clients are the people that we work with, the projects become a combination of both of our passions. By serving our clients first, we know that the projects we create together will be that much better, brighter, and successful.

4. Play for the end game.
We love taking on new, never-done-before projects that allow us to learn and grow along with clients. Sometimes that means starting slowly on smaller projects and growing into a more meaningful partnership. Not being ready for a full branding and marketing experience doesn’t mean we wouldn’t love to talk to you. Come as you are, and we’ll help you figure out the right next steps.

We kept calling the work awesome, the clients awesome, and dreaming about an Office of Awesome. It’s what worked all along so we kept it.

Watching brands evolve and grow from our work, succeeding beyond what they thought they could and in the right direction.

Focus! It’s a startup and there’s a lot going on. We are continually having to stop and refocus our efforts in the right direction.

To be able to train other marketing service providers how to work strategically – and how to build their own Office of Awesome.

Think hard about whether you want to run a business – and all that entails – or work for a company with great benefits and flex time. I think a lot of people are surprised at just how much goes into running their own business and the flexibility is often far less than working for someone else.