What's the Score: Guest, Nicole Hagedorn.

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Nicole Hagedorn
Founder and Principal, Davis + Harper Brand Strategy and Creative

Nicole Hagedorn is a business and brand strategist and the founder of Davis + Harper — and she has a question she likes to ask: if you sat the CEO, the head of sales, the head of marketing, and the CFO of the same company in a room and asked them who their best customer is and how they talk to them, how many different answers do you think you'd get? In her experience, usually four. And that's not a marketing problem. That's a business strategy problem.
After five years at an agency she lovingly calls her "career bootcamp" and eleven years on the Fortune 500 side, Nicole now works exclusively with C-suite leadership at mid-market companies — typically between $10M and $180M in revenue — who are growing fast but where the strategic foundation underneath hasn't kept up. She starts with the business itself: where it's going, how leadership is making decisions, and whether the company's internal story and its market reality are actually aligned. From there, she carries that clarity all the way through to positioning, messaging, and creative direction — built into the business strategy, not bolted onto it, and handed off in a form teams can use immediately. Her signature engagement, the Brandsformation, is a focused two-to-three-month process, and she takes on only two to three clients at a time — because the work requires real attention, and so do the people she works with.