Marketing Happy Hour - How to Monetize Your Corporate Marketing Experience | Allie Hartman of Creator Partnerships Lab

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

In this episode, we sit down with Allie Hartman, founder of Creator Partnerships Lab, who spent 16 years building influencer and creator marketing programs for brands like Dr Pepper, Snapple, Core Hydration, BaubleBar, and more before leaving her comfortable corporate role in April 2026 to go out on her own. Allie walks us through the career arc that took her from the Ad Council to Ogilvy to Keurig Dr Pepper, what finally pushed her to make the leap, and how she built Creator Partnerships Lab around a simple but powerful idea — that most brands focus on finding the right creators and completely underinvest in the infrastructure that makes those partnerships actually work. She breaks down the biggest misconceptions brands still have about influencer marketing, why relationship-first thinking will always outperform one-off posts, what fractional consulting actually looks like day to day, and the mindset shift she credits for finally getting clear on what people would pay her for. If you have ever thought about leaving corporate, monetizing your expertise, or building something of your own — this one is packed with honest, practical insight.Key Takeaways:// The infrastructure underneath the content is where most brands fail. Briefs, measurement frameworks, contracting standards, usage rights, approval processes — these are the things that make creator relationships actually work. Most brands skip all of it and wonder why their influencer marketing is not producing results.// Purpose is the intersection of your values and your expertise. Allie credits a Jay Shetty framework for giving her the clarity she needed to build her business. Once she understood that her purpose was to take 16 years of specialized expertise and make it accessible to as many people as possible, everything else clicked into place.// Start with the problem, not the product. Allie built her Creator Partnerships Operating System after listening to a creator friend complain about a brand that had no idea how to work with her. She identified the problem, realized she could uniquely solve it, and built the product from there.// Fractional consulting is the future of work for senior operators. Companies do not always need every senior role full time — their needs are cyclical. Fractional consulting gives brands access to director and VP-level experience at a fraction of the cost, and gives operators the autonomy, flexibility, and purpose alignment that corporate rarely provides.Learn More About Allie and Her Business: https://www.creatorpartnershipslab.com/mhh____Join the MHH Collective! The MHH Collective is a community for marketers and business owners to connect, ask real questions, and grow their careers together. Join for access to live Q&As with industry experts, a private Slack community, and ongoing resources: https://www.marketinghappyhr.com/mhh-collectiveSay hi! DM us on Instagram and let us know what content you want to hear on the show - We can't wait to hear from you! Please also consider rating the show and leaving a review, as that helps us tremendously as we move forward in this Marketing Happy Hour journey and create more content for all of you. ⁠Join the MHH Collective: ⁠Join now⁠Get the latest marketing trends, open jobs and MHH updates, straight to your inbox: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our email list!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow MHH on Social: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to Marketing Happy Hour, a weekly podcast helping marketing professionals and entrepreneurs build better strategies and hit career goals. I'm Cassie and I'm Allie. We're marketers and your host through these unfiltered convos with your peers and experts in the space. Let's dive in. Grab your favorite drink and let's get to this week's episode. Today we are joined by Ali Hartman, founder of Creator Partnerships Lab. So excited to have Allie here. We had a great conversation last week off record just around her journey and everything that she's accomplished so far. And just so stoked to share that with all of you. There's a lot of learnings and lessons about career, about marketing strategy, et cetera, that we're going to dive into. But, Ali, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you guys so much for having me. I am such a fan of everything you guys are building and the community that you have for people in marketing, which is just so needed. And so thank you guys for everything. And thank you for having me. Oh, thank you. You're so sweet. Thanks for being along for the journey as well and being a part of it. We're so appreciative to you and everyone else. So thank you so much. What's been in your glass? Tell us what are you enjoying lately as we dive in here. We'd love to know as we kick off. Love the question. Love a theme. And what's been in my glass lately has been green wine, which I recently discovered at a wine. tasting over the summer and so I've switched my normal go-to of a New Zealand Savagnon Blanc for green wine because it has a similar profile like a dry almost citrusy flavor

so that that's been my new go-to. I am literally looking this up. I've never I've never heard of this. It's not actually green it is a white wine variety. Okay. They use like younger grapes I believe but it's Interesting. That sounds so good. That's amazing. Sorry, as my ESPN notification goes off. I don't know if you guys heard that. But, okay, Vino Verde. I love this so much. I'm definitely going to have to try this. I love orange wine too. So this is just another, you know, color of the rainbow to test when it comes to wine. I love it. I love it. That's amazing. Well, Allie, let's get into it. I, again, would just love to know more about your career. journey. Let us know how did you get to where you are today? Yes, happy to walk you through the timeline. I started my career at the Ad Council. Actually, when I was still finishing up my undergraduate degree, I went to CUNY Baruch in Manhattan and so had the opportunity to start working part-time while I was finishing up my degree, which was a little ambitious of me, but I've always been, you know, an overachiever and very hard worker. And it was just such an amazing experience. It was such a

wonderful team to really immerse myself while being still so young and green in my career within specifically the corporate communications function. When I graduated with the advice of some mentors, I decided to shift over to an agency setting. And so it was first at Ogilvy and then Hunter, where I really got to immerse myself in the world of brand public relations and influencer marketing and really build a lot of that expertise. I always knew I wanted to go back in house though. I just loved that experience at the Ad Council and being just such a business, nerd. Fun fact, I went to a business camp in high school because I was just, they taught you like how to read the Wall Street Journal about stocks, the stock market. And so I've just always known

that I wanted to be in that type of environment. And so going in-house just allowed me to really expand my business acumen and get exposure to so many different pieces of the business, like legal and finance, procurement, operations. And so eventually did want to go in-house. And I had a really great decade in various in-house roles where I often came in as a builder. And by that I mean I was oftentimes the first PR in-house hire for an organization. So I did this at companies like Babelbar, Nuts.com, and Precision Nutrition, which is a healthy lifestyle coaching and nutrition certification company. And after that, I decided to then shift over going back to more of my food and beverage roots to curate Dr. Pepper. And I was there for the past,

four years leading the integrated social and communications function for their cold portfolio of beverages. So that included household names like Dr. Pepper, Canada Dry, Snapple, 7-Up, buy, and core hydration. And so I managed 10 to 12 brands at a time, multi-million dollar budgets, really focused on bread public relations, creator marketing, talent and entertainment. And it was such a fantastic opportunity and experience. But as you sort of saw throughout my career, I've always had the fortune of being so close to fellow builders and founders and entrepreneurs. And I always had that spirit within me. And I knew eventually I'd want to go out on my own in some capacity. And I finally made that jump earlier this year in April of 26. I left behind my very comfortable job that I loved

to start my own business. And so ever since then, I've been working on creative partnerships lab, which really has been the launching point for a portfolio career for me. And so, It encompasses a couple of things, one of which is fractional consulting. So I come as a fractional consultant primarily for food and beverage businesses and growth stages to provide that senior level, you know, in my case, director, VP level, council across brand public relations and creative marketing. So that's more of a one-to-one offering that I have. And the second is I'm currently putting final touches on the Creator Partnerships Operating

System, or CPOS, which is my one-to-many offer. So it's a way for me to take my 16 plus years as an operator building creator and transfer that expertise through education tools and templates to others who are looking to get started with influencer marketing. So it's been a really amazing and rewarding experience for the past five months. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit more about your career. It's completely illustrious. and I think the listeners will be really excited about your experience.

And I think specifically, I'd love to dive into just the leaving corporate. I think we hear that a lot from different listeners who are thinking about making the jump, but they're feeling really afraid. And I would love to hear from you kind of, what was the scariest part of making that decision for you? And how did you navigate that fear? It's a great question, because it definitely was made. one of the biggest ones was probably the salary or the stability that a salary provided.

And having that just wake up one day and I wasn't getting paid, right, to just be there, right? Sort of like, that's what happens when I have a full-time salary. And that was pretty scary, especially because when I first left, I didn't have any clients lined up. I hadn't completed building my program yet. So it was still very much in building stages. and, you know, in hindsight now I look back and think about how fortunate I was, I was able to get my first fractional client in June, and then I'm actually about to finalize a contract with a second client, which is really exciting. And for me, has been sort of the, really the reinforcement that I'm on the right path,

that I'm truly aligned with the work that I'm doing and that I made the right step. But, yeah, five months ago, definitely was not having all of the reassurances that I have now. I think what really helped was speaking to mentors, people who had been on this journey with me at different points and stages, people who knew me so that on the days where I didn't have the confidence to, you know, know that I can do this and stay away from the job boards. You know, they, you know, they always believed in me. And having that, I think, was really important and valuable to, you know, even on the hard days. Absolutely. And I love the sentiment around leaning around the people that you have built networks with and then. like that, they're all a part of your career journey in some way or another. And I think we sometimes forget it feels very isolating, but it is actually an opportunity to open up and let people in and let them help you and motivate you because they are, you know, they are mentors and people

that you've connected with throughout your career. So I love that sentiment. I imagine, too, that how you're defining success has changed since leaving corporate because now you're really on your own kind of metrics and timeline and things like that. And so what does success look like for you now? You're so right. As I think about my, a lot of some of my closest friends today, we started as co-workers. And so there's definitely something to be said there, right, for the people that you meet along the way, whether it's a formal mentor or a new friend. They definitely can help carry you. And how I think about success has definitely shifted. I think when you're in corporate, there are all these external markers for success, right? Your title, your salary band,

you know, and there's key moments around these, right? Your quarterly goals, you know, your performance review, you know, what you're posting on your LinkedIn about, you know, what you're accomplishing, right? So there's all these external markers and external validation, which is great. And I very much being like the competitive, ambitious, hardworking person I am, am all for it. But success definitely looks different today. I definitely celebrate more of the smaller wins than I did before because I now have seen how these smaller wins add up to a bigger win and so it's so important to celebrate those and if every day could look like something different it could be like someone emailed me because you know they read my sub sac article and they learned

something new from it that really helped them either save money or time which for me is a huge win it could be getting my daughter off the bus every day when she gets home from school because now I have the ownership and flexibility over my schedule and getting to be a more present parent has also been incredibly rewarding and another great metric of success for me absolutely love that thank you for for sharing. And I think one of the other things that is top of mind for us during this conversation is thinking about how you monetize the experience you already have and what you've built versus feeling like you have to start your career over from scratch, right? So how did you figure out what parts of your corporate experience people would actually pay you for when you're kind of setting up creative

partnerships lab or even just your personal brand? I love that question because it's something I struggled with for such a long time. I think there's a lot that goes into it. So for me, a place that I really started was I actually heard Jay Shetty talk about your purpose. And it's aligning your values with your expertise. And like that to me just gave me so much clarity because before I heard that, I, you know, purpose always seemed kind of like something that wasn't something I really bothered to think much about. I didn't feel like I had a purpose. Like I know what I'm going. at, I know what I want to do, I know that I'm driven, and I want to make a lot of money. And like, you know, I was kind of like, you know, purpose well figure it out along the way.

It wasn't something that I really spent a lot of time on, you know, maybe being the daughter of an immigrant. Like, I was just kind of raised without really thinking about what's my purpose in life? But once I heard that, it really kind of clicked for me. And so for me, you know, one of the things became really obvious, right, which is my expertise. I've just spent the past 16 years, almost 20 years building this career around these, this really unique set of skills, which is brand PR and influencer marketing. And so it's something

that I uniquely can do, I think selfishly, like better than a lot of other people. And oftentimes I think we also don't give ourselves enough credit because you're doing it every day. And oftentimes, you're surrounding yourself with other people who do it. So you're like, oh yeah, I'm one of a million. You're really not. What you do, what you bring to the table is actually way more unique and special than you give yourself credit for. So always take a moment to like step back and get the big picture because I think that will help you. And then the other piece is, again, like, you know, how can I really take my expertise and put it in a place that I'm adding value to others? And for me, it was really thinking about, you know, if I work in corporate, I'm helping one company,

which is great. You know, we have an agreement and I can really take a lot of my expertise, but I've sort of gotten to this place where I want to help as many people as possible. And I want to take what I know and share it with as many people as possible. And so leaving a traditional corporate setting and starting my own business and having this portfolio career really allows me to help so many more people and to really democratize my experience in a way and I think when I thought about okay now I have like my purpose what I'm trying to do my mission and so how do I create how do I monetize that and so for that piece I really thought about what are the problems I'm uniquely qualified to solve and what are the different places and spaces in which I can do that

And so it starts with listening, as do so many marketing campaigns, right, social listening. In this case, just listening to peers to the industry. You know, I'm sure as an expert, people are reaching out to you all the time, whether it's in your organization, outside your organization, to ask you questions. You know, for me it was always about scale, volume, budget efficiencies, integrated models. And so thinking about, well, I'm really good at answering these questions that people seem to have. And so how can I create a product that I can then sell to serve that need? And so that was really the equation that I had created to take my skills and not feel like I had to walk away from them, but feel like I'm really carrying them with me and monetizing them in a way that creates stability for myself and my family. Such helpful advice, Allie.

Thank you so much. I think a part of this conversation, too, is the question about how do you tailor your experience? or kind of message your experience based on all these different things that you've done over time. I know that can help with that confidence of being able to stand up and speak specifically and clearly to what that value is that you bring. So I'm just curious, like, what advice do you have for tailoring your experience without completely rewriting that professional identity that you have over and over again? Yeah, it's a great question. And for me, I think the place that most marketers go, is consulting, right? It's like, oh, I'm either working full-time for an agency or for a company,

or I'm consulting. Those are kind of like the options. There are some exceptions, but by and large. And so for me, consulting always felt a little risky because I could have a client today, not have a client tomorrow. I can have a client for three months and then not have a pipeline and have another client after that. And so for me, that's where the portfolio career really came in. have another opportunity, another source of income that was connected to my skill set, where it really felt complementary to each other. And so that's where I came up with the creator partnerships operating system. And it really clicked for me back in January of this year. I was having drinks with an old co-worker who became a creator. And she was complaining,

so I was listening, right? She was complaining about a brand deal that she was doing and how the brand, you could tell that they had never worked with creators before, or they were just really bad at they didn't know how to negotiate, they didn't know what usage race they needed, and she felt like it wasn't her job to teach them. And that, you know, she was not feeling really confident that they were going to be happy with anything she delivered because they didn't even know what good looked like. And so for me, light bulbs went off and I was like, I can solve that? Like, can I talk to them? Can I help them? Like, help me help you by helping them. And so through that conversation, I decided to build an operating system, taking my 16 years of experience, working across so many

different businesses, so many different kinds of businesses, whether it's direct to consumer, food and beverage, fashion, right? Taking all of these different pieces of the puzzle and creating a general operating system that is primarily focused for CPG brands that help answer all these questions that these brand people have, such as, you know, I actually met a woman last night. She owns a healthy snack company, and I told her what I do, and she was like, creators. She sent me a quote for $7,000 for one real. And I was like, oh, like, asking her questions, like, you know, well, what did you think about that? She was like, oh, it was too much money, all these things. And I was like, you know, and so I started breaking out with her,

well, how many followers did she have? What was her engagement? She couldn't answer any of these questions. She just saw the rate card and was just like, oh, they're crazy for asking for so much money. And I was like, well, if you thought that this creator could drive $8,000 worth of sales for you, would that be worth it? And she was like, well, yeah. But she didn't know how to build that, how to set that up, how to structure that. And so really, that was sort of where I decided to come in and create this product to solve that problem.

So that's something I would definitely recommend people think about is, again, like, what are these problems, what are these challenges, what's keeping everyone up at night, and how can I take my unique experience and help solve them? Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I'd love to dive a little bit further into the creator partnerships operating system because I think this is something that I know I've seen across my career at different companies that I've worked at is influencer marketing still kind of has this veil over it where people don't really see the value in the ROI. And I think part of what you're, the problem that

you're solving is trying to make that a little bit more transparent. And so what is that operating system mean in practice for you? And is there another example you can give to of how that, how it solves that problem? Yeah, absolutely. So lessons. And so, So the first step is education. You have to understand, well, what's the difference between a creator or an influencer or UGC? Like what do all these things mean? So really start and then starting with your business strategy.

So what are, you know, at a high level, what is my North Star? What is the action, you know, that I'm trying to take away from this program? And ideally it's the same one that you have for all of your marketing, by the way, right? It's like everyone is sort of moving towards one outcome and then every channel is empowered to do it in its own way. And influencer marketing should definitely be part of that. So really starting with your strategy. and then converting it to your marketing strategy,

then converting it to your creator strategy. And then making sure in the beginning, so before we even talk about an influencer, or look at follower accounts or anything like that, I want to understand, well, how are we going to set up the attribution for this so that at the end of the campaign, you can answer the simple question of, did this do what I needed it to do?

Yes, no, or maybe, and why. And so it really helps walk you through, and it's designed as an operating system because it allows you to instill this process into your organization. And so hopefully, as you're building it, as you're going through the work, you're building your program in real time.

And there are weekly coaching calls where you get on with me every single week and we talk about the program. We talk about the coursework, if you have questions or need clarity, we talk about the program you're building. You know, if you have questions about your KPIs, questions about a creator you're considering.

Maybe the creator, you know, is you're negotiating with them. And you have questions that you want to, you know, you want my perspective on. So I'm there to really help guide you. and support you as you build. And then at the end of it, ideally, you have your first campaign launched, and you have all the, I also provide all the templates and tools,

everything from like a usage rights navigator. You know, what rights do you need? Are you planning to amplify through paid media? If so you have to know that in the beginning, so you can build that into your contract and that's reflected in the rates you're getting from the creator. If you do it afterwards, you're gonna end up paying way more and it's gonna create a lot more headaches for you.

So little things like that, that again, like, for someone who does this every day, you're probably like, oh yeah, duh, of course. But again, you have to remember that your experience is actually unique. And someone who hasn't done this before is not going to know what to do. And so it really helps give them the full picture from start to finish. And again, once they have everything, it's up and running. There's also a community element.

So you're able to connect with peers, share resources. So, hey, if you want to do a mailer, you know, we'll share resources for different companies that you can reach out to to help you produce that mailer and things like that. Or if you're ready to scale, maybe now you're ready. to hire an agency. Now you're ready to hire in-house to really, you know, add more firepower behind this because you've built the model. You've proven it works for your business, so now you can invest more. So it's really built as like that first step for companies who are looking to get started because oftentimes these founders are early, you know,

marketing hires, they're bootstrappers, right? They launch their first website. They launch their product. They launch social media. Of course they can launch influencer marketing, right? And you know, I think the thing that really sticks with me to is that in this world of AI, information is now commoditized. So you can go to your AI of choice, whether that's Claude or ChatCTPT or Gemini and what have you, and you can ask them questions, of course. But their responses are only going to be as good as you are prompt.

And you don't know what you don't know. So oftentimes what you're putting in there has huge blinders on it and you're missing a much bigger piece of the opportunity or the strategy. And so, you know, getting the right education and the right foundation is really critical to making sure that you're set up for success and maximizing this channel in a way that AI just can't replicate. Such an awesome product. And all of this kind of ties into my next question too.

I want to talk about just kind of misunderstandings around influencer marketing, given your experience in the space, things that you've heard brands say. You know, you already kind of talked about one, for example, where a brand was being asked to pay $7,000 for a post. And there was just a misunderstanding around what was included in that. you know what that entails what you should be asking etc but i'm curious like today what are you still seeing in addition to that brands misunderstand about influencer marketing what are we missing what should we be looking for etc i think it really comes back to the basics which is that

influencer marketing at its core is the trust layer of your marketing program and the best way to maximize the trust layer is through a relationship If you pay a creator to do one post about your brand, it's probably not going to do much for your business. It's just probably not. There are rare instances where I would recommend that. Very rare. Because even with a smaller budget, I'd rather have one creator post multiple times than have

three creators post once. And it comes back to some just basic marketing fundamentals, right? How many times does somebody have to see something before they remember it? I think the average is like seven times. And so if you just post with a creator once, it's not going to break it. through. And again, the trust layers built through reps. The more reps and places and spaces that your brand is showing up authentically with this creator, you're deepening that trust level, right? They actually, their followers are actually going to start to think, you know, I think they actually

do use this. They're not just getting paid to talk about it, right? And that's what you want. That's where the magic really happens. And again, it takes time for that to happen. You know, I think a lot of brands, they, especially they have like a list of five to ten messages that they want one creator to talk about and then it sounds like an ad and they're like why isn't this working and it's because you should take those messages and that should be five posts or 10 posts not one post so that the creator can naturally you know deliver that message in their own voice in a way their audience will understand and respond to and so again I think thinking about the relationship you know I always love to send my creators like a gift for their birthday a holiday present like keep them in mind for you know anything and everything

And some of these things, you know, brands don't want to spend the money. They don't want to spend the investment to invest in those relationships. But that is what the main differences between brands who are really good at this and the brands that aren't, is that they continue to treat it like a relationship-first partnership. Yeah, absolutely. Relationships are so huge in the space and even just in marketing in general. I cannot stress that enough. It's something we talk about all the time.

So with that, I want to kind of pivot to to hear more about your fractional consulting work. I'm so curious how you structure this. I'm interested to hear kind of what your offering looks like, what you do, and why do you think it could also be maybe the future of the corporate model or brands bringing in fractional work to support some of those full-time roles that they would typically hire for? Absolutely. So I say fractional consulting pretty intentionally. And so what that means is that I get brought in as a consultant for a company as a, but, I operate as a member of the team. And so what my day-to-day looks like is very similar to if you hired me as a full-time employee.

I'm on leadership calls. Sometimes I'm managing people on your team. I'm managing agencies. I have budget allocated to me that I'm responsible for overseeing. So it's very similar to like if you hired me as a director or VP of communications or career marketing for your team. But you don't have all the overhead of a full-time hire. You don't have to pay, you know, my benefits.

you know, obviously we have a contract, but you don't have to pay my benefits. Sometimes there's like recruiting costs for the role. There's, you know, other overhead that you don't have to manage for me. And you also get me only for a fraction of the time. What I'm finding is that a lot of companies don't need every role, every senior role, full time. Their business is very cyclical. So maybe during certain times of the year when, you know, things are busier, you'll need more of that level of support.

And I can come in at 20 or 30 hours then. And then, you know, in off-season, slow seasons, you know, you could have five to ten hours of my time. So it really just meets the business where it is. And I think as a fractional consultant, I definitely believe this is the future of work. If, you know, you relate to the eldest starter, you know, hardest working, like super ambitious, very competitive. Like often, I think that corporate is broken for our model, you know, like 30 years ago, you know, you got a job out of college and you stayed with that job for 30 years. and that company took care of you. They invested in you.

They, you know, you knew you had a secure job, a stable job. Now, you know, there are layoffs happening every day. People are losing their jobs, you know, at no fault of their own. Even if they're the best performer, they, you know, go above and beyond for their company. Nothing is guaranteed anymore. And companies are tightening their belts and making it even harder for people to grow. I know I've personally experienced the bird of corporate many times. and I think being able to still work within a setting that you are just so good at operating in

and deliver the value of your expertise, but still having that autonomy, I think it's just the best of both worlds. And it's been such an amazing journey so far for me. And like I said, every day, like I wake up super excited and energized for my clients. And even some of the stuff I thought I'd really struggle with, like the networking, the building of the pipeline. And like, I love having those conversations. I try to have some every day because, again, it goes back to my mission, right, my purpose and really feeling like I'm really aligned with everything that I'm doing. I resonate with all of that so much.

So I appreciate you sharing that. This has been just such a wonderful conversation alley. Like, I think there's some really, really strong advice in here. And I'm curious as we round out the conversation today, I want to hear what's next for you. What are you hoping to build over the next year? What does that look like for you? Yes, you know, looking for folks who may need, you know, 10 to 20 hours a week for Q4, and then, you know, obviously building the 2027 pipeline focused on, you know,

launching creative partnerships operating system later this month in September. And so I'll have a bunch of founding member offers going out for that to make sure that we're getting the right people lined up and launching their programs this year, which I'm super excited about. And then just continuing to grow the entire creator partnerships lab. ecosystem. And so, you know, we have ambitions for the future to really extend the IP to other fun and cool places with the right partners. So really excited for the journey ahead. And, yeah, it's been, it's been really, really rewarding. And I definitely encourage that if you have been

thinking about this, if this is something that you want to learn more about, like, you can absolutely reach out to me. I'd love to continue talking about it and, you know, help you figure out what, what next looks like for you. Awesome. And on that, we'd, of course, love to stay tuned to all things, creator partnerships lab and everything you're building personally as well. Can you just share with us a little bit more about where we can connect with you online? Absolutely. So if you go to creator partnerships lab.com backslash m-H,

you'll find a dedicated landing page from this podcast where you can connect with me and follow me, whether that be on Substack, Instagram or LinkedIn. You can also learn more about my fractional offering as well as CPL. amazing I absolutely love that I think you're the first to create a dedicated landing page for marketing happy hour so I absolutely love it thank you amazing amazing Allie thank you so much just super stoked again to everything that you're building excited to stay tuned to all of that and please keep us posted on how we can best support you but thanks for coming and sharing your encouragement and journey with with all of us we really appreciate it yeah and thank you guys

much for the platform and for the opportunity. I'm forever grateful. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Marketing Happy Hour. If you enjoyed it, make sure you're subscribed to the show and sign up for a weekly newsletter with insights and marketing resources. We also invite you to check out the MHH collective, our community for marketers looking to connect, grow, and learn together. Check out the links in the show notes. We'll see you next time.