Kolb Creative, Elle Kolb
SCORE mentor helps launch Kolb Creative
By Glenda Winders // Photography submitted
After she graduated from Marian University in Indianapolis with a degree in marketing, Elle Kolb took on some modeling jobs and worked in the automotive and healthcare sectors to gain background and experience. Additionally, she did part-time marketing work and slowly began to develop a list of clients.
Today she is the owner of year-old Kolb Creative, which helps businesses with strategy and consulting, social media management, paid advertising, email marketing, content creation, website development and more.
It was her own expertise that got her started, but she also had help from SCORE, a nonprofit set up by Congress in 1964 to foster vibrant small-business communities through mentoring and education.
“I learned about them when I was working with a start-up, and they were working with a free mentor service,” Kolb said. “I thought, okay, I’m going to reach out and get a mentor through there. I did that, and it was Tom Morgan, and that has been awesome.”
In the beginning, SCORE was an acronym that stood for Senior Corps of Retired Executives because it was mostly retired people who signed up to help. Now as many as 50 percent of the volunteers are still working. Their No. 1 referring organization is the Small Business Administration.
Currently there are approximately 150 volunteers in Indiana, some 10,000 across the country and in U.S. possessions. They use what they know to help start-ups as well as businesses that have hit a plateau but want to continue growing. They also help business owners with exit strategies.
“The majority of SCORE volunteers just want to give back, help and take advantage of our experience,” Morgan said. “Once we learn what a person’s needs are, we can help them based on our specific function. If we can’t help, we find another volunteer who can.”
Morgan, who lives in Carmel, has a background with Eli Lilly and Roche Diagnostics in international business development. Once he was assigned to Elle, the pair met digitally each month.
“What he really helped me with was consolidating my thoughts,” Kolb said. “When you’re starting a business there are so many directions you can take, and he really helped me get back to the basics: Why are you doing this? Who are you serving? He helped talk me through all that.”
Morgan gave her monthly assignments along with a completion deadline, which she says was helpful since a new business owner must contend with so much happening at once. They talked about forming an LLC, payroll and W-2 forms — everything it takes to start and run a business.
Morgan said that while Kolb is the expert in digital technology, he can serve as an extra pair of eyes on her website or outreach initiatives, her messaging, her tools, her financial projections, her contracts, the monthly newsletter she sends out and the way she presents herself.
While the mentors require no payment, Kolb enjoys giving back by sharing what she knows best with the group in presentations designed to sharpen their skills around digital media and now AI. She also participated in a women entrepreneur event they hosted.
According to Morgan, Kolb is doing all the right things and is well on her way to continued success with clients such as Vision Quest Eyecare in Greenwood (“My first client,” Kolb said with a smile), Herd Strategies and several others. She likes the variety of working with different fields and companies of all sizes. But she’s not ready to cut the tie with Morgan just yet.
“Once I started my business, I asked him to stay on as my mentor throughout the journey,” she said. “He’s great.”
Published in South, Indy's Southside Magazine
