Nicole Hagedorn Helps Mid-Market Leaders Find Brand Clarity

Nicole Hagedorn is the founder of Davis + Harper, a business and brand strategy practice that works with C-suite leadership at mid-market companies, typically those between $10 million and $180 million in revenue. A member of the Entreprenista League, she spent more than two decades inside agencies and Fortune 500 companies before building a practice of her own. She starts not with a logo but with the business itself: where it is going, how leadership makes decisions, and whether the company's internal story matches its market reality. That starting point is the whole point.

"The brands that stay strong as they scale are just as clear on the inside as they are on the outside," Nicole says.

Here is how a long, winding career became the foundation for the practice she runs today.

Brand as the foundation, not the face

Most people picture brand as the face a company shows the world. The website, the campaign, the pitch. Nicole agrees brand lives there, and she argues it lives somewhere more important first.

Brand, as she defines it, is the foundation the whole organization runs on. It shapes who you hire and whether they stay. It determines which partnerships make sense and which ones quietly pull you off course. It is the filter a leadership team reaches for when a hard operational decision lands and there is no obvious answer. When that internal foundation is clear, the external work gets sharper. When it is not, the cost shows up everywhere: the mis-scoped hire that burns 12 months and real budget, the marketing spend that never returns what it should, the decision debated for weeks because nobody agrees on what the business stands for.

Her signature engagement, the Brandsformation, is a focused two- to three-month process. She takes on only two to three clients at a time, and she means it. "The work requires real attention, and so do the people I work with," she says.

The career that looked like a liability

Nicole did not set out to be a founder. She was type A, focused on doing things the right way, and for a long time she assumed the path was to keep climbing inside organizations because she loved the work too much to consider anything else.

She spent her first five years at an agency she calls her career bootcamp, working with everyone from local businesses to international organizations. From there she moved into Fortune 500 companies for 11 years, on both the agency side and the client side. In the five years before launching Davis + Harper, she worked specifically with mid-market companies, and that is where she began to see the pattern she now builds around.

The sheer breadth of that path felt like a liability for years. She has come to see it as the education itself. "Being able to walk into any room without already thinking I have the answer makes me a far better strategic partner than I would have been if I'd stayed in one lane," she says.

The pattern she could not stop seeing

In those last five years with mid-market companies, the same situation kept repeating. These were not struggling businesses. They were smart companies making real investments in growth, and still taking a longer, harder road than they needed to.

Underneath almost every case was the same thing. Not a logo problem, not a campaign problem, but a foundational clarity problem quietly making everything more expensive than it had to be. Watching it happen again and again began to feel like something she had a responsibility to address. Davis + Harper became the way to do that work on her own terms.

Her clients are CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, COOs, and other senior leaders at companies that are already growing and want to keep going. She has worked across hospitality, professional services, SaaS, healthcare, aesthetics and beauty, luxury goods, first response, nonprofit, transportation, manufacturing, and finance. "The industry changes. The pattern doesn't," she says.

What she wants other founders to know

What surprised Nicole most about building a business was how much of the challenge is mental, and how universal that turns out to be. Early on, looking at other founders who seemed to have clarity and traction, it can feel like everyone else found a door you are still searching for.

What she discovered through the relationships she has built, including in the Entreprenista League, is that the honest version of the journey sounds a lot more like hers than she expected. "I didn't expect how much it would help just to know you're not alone in it," she says. Her advice reflects that. Do not wait until everything is perfectly defined before you start showing up, because the clarity comes from the doing. Learn the parts of business you have avoided, which for her were business development and sales. And stay yourself. When her nerves spike and she feels herself slipping into "corporate Nicole," she takes a breath and reminds herself that everyone in the room is just a person.

What's next for Davis + Harper

Nicole is getting more intentional about community in her professional world, something she says she never prioritized before. That means small-group conversations with leaders, more partnerships with fractional executives and advisors who serve the same companies she does, and more guest speaking and podcast appearances.

She has recently been welcomed as an advisory board member through a Small Business Development Center, where she works directly with growing small businesses. She has also launched two new offerings alongside the Brandsformation: the Foundation Risk Assessment, a diagnostic session for leaders who want to see where strategy and brand are out of step, and the Strategic Brand Partner, a monthly advisory relationship for senior leaders who want a trusted strategist to pressure-test their thinking. Longer term, she wants Davis + Harper known as the practice mid-market leadership teams call at the moments that matter most.

You can follow Nicole on LinkedIn, learn about her work and engagements at davisandharper.com, and connect with Davis + Harper on LinkedIn.

If Nicole's approach to building brand clarity from the inside out resonates, the Entreprenista League is a community of women founders who value connection, shared experience, and practical business insight as they grow. Learn more about the Entreprenista League right here.