About Us

Entrepreneurial

We love working with other entrepreneurs because we love watching businesses launch and grow.

Pro-Active

We believe today’s market conditions aren’t nearly as important – as tomorrow’s.

Solution Oriented

We believe marketing is all about promoting positives. Relevance. Relationships. Results.

Strategic & Operational

What good is a great strategy you can’t possibly execute it? Make it real, always.

Annie Ellicott is Founder and President of Leapup Marketing Solutions. Her background includes over twenty-five years of experience directing brand launches and turnarounds and marketing campaign implementations “client-side”, across entertainment, media, apparel and health service categories. With tenures at both Fortune 500 and startups, her roles have included senior leadership positions in marketing, merchandising and management consulting at the Walt Disney Company, Levi Strauss & Company, Women.com (iVillage/NBC/Universal) and American Medical International where she was part of the McKinsey & Company strategy team. Annie holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Masters in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.

What's Unique About Us

Hiring an experienced expert = ROI

 

At Women.com, our head of international once commented to me, “You know when you start consulting, it’s very competitive if you have 10-15 years experience. But when you get to 20-25 years, your clients rarely leave you. Your value increases exponentially simply because you have “been there, seen that” and have stayed current with the latest changes in your field.” He was right.

Marketing has changed dramatically even in the last 2 years. Today, you cannot afford to use yesterday’s marketing strategies or you may literally go out of business. Never trust your business’s future to anything less than an experienced player.

Here are our proof points:

  • We’ve been privileged to have worked at some pretty outstanding “training grounds” – from Fortune 500s to startups.
  • We understand business models (and even know how to read a P&L) and how marketing needs to be looked at from an investment point-of-view.
  • We enjoy connecting the marketing dots from sales to systems.
  • We are 50% “off the charts” right brain and 50% “off the charts” left brain. How do we know this? Career test results. We are strategic, write well and know design and we are also very technical and analytical.
  • We stand by our work and guarantee client satisfaction, period.

 

The Leapup Story

Once many moons ago, Annie read a sidebar blurb in the Princeton Alumni magazine. It was the story of another P.U. graduate who had been an engineer, teacher, Peace Corps volunteer and about 2 or 3 other things. She thought…”boy, he must be a fascinating guy”. He became a subliminal role model, encouraging Annie to move across sectors and functions from health care to consumer products, music and film to apparel, online publishing to travel – strategy to finance to merchandising to marketing. A decade plus ago, the next chapter unfolded when she met one of her whitewater rafting icons who happened to need some help with a venture project in adventure travel. They bonded over their common belief that travel is transformational and their common fascination with the way the internet would change marketing and the way we live – forever. With a little encouragement and a little arm twisting, her entrepreneurial passions ignited, she leaped into the fray and launched her own consulting practice naming it “Leapup”. Active. Positive. Aspirational. Inspirational.

What is that phrase “leap and the net will appear”? Believe it.