Liz Mumford | Building a Creative Work Environment

Leaving the beaten path and forging your own can lead to success — but not without obstacles. Liz Mumford, co-owner of creative agency Mabble Media, is still charting the best course.

One thing Liz believes in firmly is giving her staff a work-life balance that can help foster their creativity at work. After all, it’s the drive to be different and imaginative that sets Mabble apart.

“I see the amount of trust and peace there is on our team, which you have to have. If your brain is in fight-or-flight mode, you cannot be creative,” she says.

Liz’s empathy extends to the wider community in her beloved hometown of Reno, Nevada. “We're not the celebrity city of our state, but there are scrappy people here that fight hard for each other,” she says.

In March 2020, when COVID-19 first hit the U.S., Liz found a way to help her employees and people in the city. 

She created Wash-oe Hands (named after Washoe County), a mutual aid project that connected people with supplies, information, and long-term assistance. 

She paid her staff to run it, rather than furloughing them or laying them off. 

“We were able to get Wash-oe Hands into areas that were beyond our network, which is always really important to me. I don't want to just be helping people I know. We need to get out there and figure out who is really hurting from this,” Liz says.

However, putting so many resources into the project left Mabble Media behind as others in the industry pivoted immediately.

“People in our industry pivoted early on by dropping salaries, furloughing quickly, looking at new markets and reinvesting. And for us, we focused so quickly on Wash-oe Hands that we're really behind the curve on evolving our own business,” she admits.

“I don't regret that at all. But we are pivoting hard right now.”

That means diversifying Mabble’s client list away from hospitality and tourism, and looking for larger clients as well as the small businesses that dominate its part of Reno — and putting Mabble first.

“I'm learning to not apologize for what Mabble needs to do to survive. I think we just were a little too apologetic, to a point where we put taking care of ourselves last on the chain.”

##

👱‍♀️ Name: Liz Mumford

⚙️ What she does: Liz owns Mabble Media, a creative agency based in Reno, Nevada, that specializes in branding, marketing and design.

🎨 Company: Mabble Media

💎 Words of wisdom: “We don't have a lot of turnover at Mabble. We've tried to grow with our employees as they change in their families. I feel like that's so much more valuable to the company, to the working environment, and the long-lasting effect that our company is going to have on our employees than doing the more traditional hustle-hard marketing firm culture.”

🔍 Where to find Liz: Facebook | LinkedIn

🔍 Where to find Mabble Media: Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

##

💡 Creative types: Liz credits her staff’s artistic and diverse backgrounds — including an Emmy-winning inventor and French literature expert —  for Mabble’s fresh ideas.

💡 Ready to play: Creative people need a stress-free work environment, so Liz breaks the marketing industry mold by prioritizing her staff’s work-life balance.

💡 The real Reno: To outsiders, Reno is strip clubs, gambling, a Johnny Cash song, and “Reno 911!” But Liz says the city is changing and welcoming a wide range of small businesses.

💡 Wash-oe Hands: Rather than furlough her staff, Liz immediately put them to work on Wash-oe Hands, a project distributing resources and information to people in Washoe County.

💡 Playing catchup: As the pandemic raged on, demand for aid dipped and Liz realized Mabble Media needed her attention, having fallen behind rival companies that had pivoted immediately.

💡 Portfolio rethink: The pandemic has shown Liz that she needs to diversify the size and type of Mabble’s clients, instead of relying heavily on the local tourism and hospitality industries. 

💡 Pay it back: In the past, Liz spent surplus Mabble cash on new ideas like an investment fund, but now she’s putting it straight back into the company.

Liz Mumford:

“A lot of our clientele are small business owners, and those types of people are really creative. So even though sometimes the font choice isn't the first choice we would use, we definitely learn a lot and are inspired by their ideas.”

“We all want to help each other in a situation like this. Our team was not really getting work because our clients were putting everything on pause. We made a commitment that we weren't going to furlough or lay anyone off, so we're like, to keep you working, we might as well pay you to do this initiative.”

“We've never really had to be super into the details of our efficiency on projects — it's really hard to gauge on creative projects. It's not like it always takes five minutes to build a particular thing. But I feel like we're pivoting now to figure out how we can create some formulas of what we need our profit to be on each of these services.”

“We didn't realize how many of our clients were in the tourism and hospitality sector, and in events. We need to diversify that.”

“One thing I would not trade for anything is Mabble’s culture. When we say that someone works 30 or 40 hours a week, they work 30 or 40 hours a week. The marketing industry is not known for protecting people's boundaries. It's a pretty hustle-hard industry, and especially for moms and families, that's hard.”