By the time Elexis Schroder began reconsidering how much of her company's work should depend on her personal involvement, she had already accomplished something that many entrepreneurs spend their careers pursuing. She had built a respected marketing communications agency, earned the trust of nationally recognized consumer brands, developed an award-winning team, and established herself as a leader whose expertise was sought well beyond her own organization.
In 2025, the Denver Business Journal recognized Elexis as an Outstanding Woman in Business, honoring her accomplishments as a business leader. The following year, she received the Public Relations Society of America's national Women of Impact Award for Agency Excellence, recognition reserved for communications professionals whose work and leadership are advancing the industry.
Her company, SchroderHaus, has earned an equally impressive reputation. In 2026, PRSA Colorado named the firm Best Agency in the Boutique/Small category, adding to an extensive collection of awards for the creative campaigns and strategic communications programs developed by her team.
These achievements tell the story of a founder who has spent more than a decade turning her professional convictions into a highly regarded business. Yet what makes Elexis especially interesting is that she hasn't allowed those accomplishments to convince her that she has finished learning.
During her conversation with Aggie Chydzinski and Cristy O'Connor on the Badass Women in Business Podcast, Elexis reflected on the decisions that have shaped SchroderHaus, the people who have helped make it successful, and the leadership changes she is making as the agency enters its next chapter.
At the heart of that conversation is a challenge familiar to many accomplished founders: How do you preserve the extraordinary standards that built your company while developing other people who can lead with the same confidence and judgment?
For Elexis, the answer begins with understanding what made SchroderHaus successful in the first place.
Building an Agency Around a Different Set of Priorities
Long before founding SchroderHaus in 2015, Elexis had established a substantial career in marketing and communications. She began her professional journey in New York City at FleishmanHillard, where her work included major consumer brands such as Tide, Dannon, and Knorr Foods, before returning to Colorado and spending nearly nine years helping a Denver agency develop its natural and organic products practice.
She later moved into an internal marketing role at a food manufacturing company, gaining firsthand experience with the business challenges that clients face beyond their communications needs.
Those experiences provided more than technical expertise. They gave her a perspective on how agencies could become more valuable partners to the organizations they served.
Elexis had always been interested in how teams worked, how decisions were made, and what organizations could accomplish when people were encouraged to challenge conventional approaches. Even as a young Starbucks employee, she found herself identifying opportunities to improve employee satisfaction and workplace performance.
As her career progressed, she became increasingly convinced that agencies could operate with greater flexibility, move more decisively, and become more deeply involved in helping clients achieve meaningful business objectives.
She also wanted the freedom to choose clients whose missions reflected her own convictions.
Her commitment to the natural and organic products industry developed through both professional experience and personal circumstances. A serious health diagnosis earlier in her career deepened her interest in the relationship between health, the products people consume, and the broader impact businesses can have on communities and the environment.
Rather than viewing those interests as separate from her professional ambitions, Elexis made them central to the agency she wanted to create.
The decision to become an entrepreneur came with remarkable timing. On the same day she left her job to establish SchroderHaus, she discovered she was pregnant.
She had no clients, an entirely new business to build, and an unexpected set of personal responsibilities to consider. Although her initial plan was to operate independently as a consultant, she soon realized that working alone would deprive her of something she genuinely loved: collaborating with talented people and helping them develop their potential.
What began as an individual consulting idea evolved into an agency built around a team, shared values, and the belief that the quality of relationships matters as much as the quality of the work.
Eleven years later, the results of that decision are evident in the clients SchroderHaus attracts, the industry recognition it has earned, and the people who have developed their careers within the organization.
An Award-Winning Reputation Built on Results
The client roster at SchroderHaus reflects the credibility Elexis and her team have established in a highly competitive industry.
The agency has worked with brands including Justin's, Horizon Organic, Kettle & Fire, Clipper Tea, Minor Figures, and Applegate, helping them communicate their differentiation, build consumer awareness, and strengthen relationships with customers and other stakeholders.
For Elexis, effective marketing has never been simply about generating attention. She believes the most valuable communications work begins with understanding what makes a company important to its customers, why its products deserve consideration, and how its story can support broader business objectives.
That philosophy is reflected in the agency's work across public relations, influencer engagement, social media, product launches, strategic partnerships, and integrated communications.
The results provide a useful illustration of what SchroderHaus has accomplished.
In the agency's publicly reported 2026 award-winning work for Justin's, a social media program involving 138 posts and 50 influencer collaborations achieved an average engagement rate of 5.91%. Another Justin's campaign supporting the launch of Crunchy Peanut Butter generated more than five million in potential audience reach, according to the agency's reported results.
For Minor Figures, SchroderHaus helped activate the brand's Dairy Disloyalty campaign across North America through influencer partnerships, community organizations, and paid social media, generating more than 1.1 million paid impressions and an estimated 2.5 million in potential earned reach.
The team's work has also extended beyond traditional brand awareness campaigns. When Kettle & Fire opened its first self-manufacturing facility, SchroderHaus coordinated event planning, stakeholder engagement, and media relations, helping secure regional and industry coverage that communicated the business significance of the expansion.
For QUINN, a targeted product launch campaign supporting a limited-edition offering at Costco generated approximately 4.96 million impressions and nearly 19,000 Instacart clicks, according to the agency. SchroderHaus reported that the campaign contributed to the product's subsequent expansion into another Costco region.
These examples, documented in Elexis's account of the team's PRSA Colorado award-winning campaigns, demonstrate the range of commercial challenges the agency is equipped to address.
They also explain why its reputation has grown beyond that of a conventional boutique public relations firm.
SchroderHaus brings together strategic brand positioning, creative communications, media relationships, digital engagement, and an understanding of consumer behavior to develop programs designed around clients' business objectives.
Its work has accumulated numerous regional industry honors, including recognition for integrated communications, influencer marketing, social media, and media relations.
For Elexis, these awards are meaningful not simply because they validate the agency's capabilities, but because they recognize the collective expertise of the people she has spent years bringing together.
The distinction matters because one of her greatest accomplishments as a founder is not just the quality of the work SchroderHaus produces. It is the team she has built to produce it.
A Leader Who Measures Success Through the People Around Her
When Elexis discusses SchroderHaus, she speaks about her employees with the same enthusiasm she brings to discussing successful client campaigns.
She enjoys celebrating their accomplishments, watching them develop new capabilities, and creating opportunities for people to move into greater responsibilities. She is equally comfortable acknowledging that she tells her employees she loves them, a level of personal warmth that may be unusual in some professional environments but feels entirely natural to her.
That affection does not translate into relaxed expectations.
SchroderHaus operates around values that include delivering exceptional work, genuine care for others, curiosity and courage, and what Elexis calls radical accountability.
Employees are expected to take ownership of their commitments, continue developing their skills, and contribute to the success of their clients and colleagues. The company reinforces those principles through hiring practices, regular team meetings, accountability conversations, and investment in professional development.
Elexis also believes that high performance and an enjoyable workplace should coexist, an attitude that became abundantly clear during our discussion of two SchroderHaus employees walking around the office together inside a dachshund costume.
The conversation quickly evolved into an amusing debate about the dog, its proper identification, and whether it might qualify as organic, which tells you almost as much about the personality of SchroderHaus as its formal company values.
Elexis doesn't believe that professional excellence requires people to abandon humor, creativity, or genuine relationships.
Her approach to developing talent has also been recognized outside the company.
In 2020, ColoradoBiz named Elexis among its Top 25 Young Professionals, highlighting her work building a company around purpose-driven brands and her commitment to developing opportunities for others.
At the time, she was also co-hosting quarterly Women in Food events that brought women at different stages of their careers together to learn, collaborate, and build professional relationships.
Her influence has continued expanding through industry speaking engagements, including a presentation for PRSA Colorado on the strategic integration of influencer engagement.
These activities reveal something consistent about Elexis's leadership. She is interested not only in what she can accomplish personally, but also in creating environments where other people have opportunities to succeed.
That philosophy has become increasingly important as her agency has grown, particularly because developing talented employees is different from developing leaders who can exercise independent judgment.
When Exceptional Standards Need to Become Shared Judgment
One of the most substantive moments in our podcast conversation came when Elexis described how her own leadership expectations are evolving.
She readily acknowledges that she is a perfectionist who wants the work leaving SchroderHaus to be exceptional. After spending more than two decades developing expertise in marketing and communications, she has a well-established understanding of what excellent work should accomplish.
Her employees know those standards, respect them, and want to meet them.
But Elexis has begun recognizing that their loyalty can produce an unintended consequence. When employees become highly focused on satisfying the founder's expectations, they may give too much weight to how she would personally approach an assignment rather than independently evaluating what the client actually needs.
She explained that her senior leaders are learning to shift their attention toward the client's objectives and the business outcomes the work is intended to achieve.
With her characteristic humor, she described the transition as learning to put the client first rather than "Mama Bird."
It's an observation that carries particular weight coming from someone who has built a business recognized for the quality of its work.
Elexis isn't questioning whether excellence matters or suggesting that standards should become less demanding as a company grows. She's examining how those standards can become more deeply embedded in the organization so that employees can exercise sound judgment without needing her personal approval at every stage.
That requires a different kind of leadership from the founder.
During a company's early years, the owner often serves as the primary decision-maker, quality-control authority, strategic advisor, and relationship manager. Those responsibilities may be necessary when the business is small, and the founder's experience often provides the consistency that allows the organization to establish its reputation.
As the company matures, however, that knowledge needs to become a capability shared across the team.
For Elexis, this means developing leaders who understand not only what exceptional work looks like, but why certain decisions will better serve a client, protect the company's reputation, or create a stronger business outcome.
It also means accepting that capable people may approach a problem differently from how she would have handled it herself.
There is a significant difference between delegating responsibilities and developing people who can make consequential decisions. The former may improve a founder's schedule, while the latter strengthens the organization.
Elexis's willingness to examine that distinction demonstrates the kind of leadership maturity that becomes increasingly important as a company grows.
Her standards helped establish SchroderHaus's reputation, and now she is focused on ensuring those standards become part of the organization's collective expertise rather than remaining dependent on her personal involvement.
The Courage to Choose the Right Business
Elexis's strategic discipline is also evident in how she thinks about clients.
Her desire to work with organizations that contribute positively to people and the planet has been central to SchroderHaus since its founding, but maintaining that focus wasn't always easy.
During the first year, when financial uncertainty made every potential project attractive, Elexis accepted assignments that didn't align particularly well with the work she ultimately wanted the agency to pursue.
Those decisions created an important lesson when a CEO she respected offered her an opportunity to serve as an interim marketing leader. It was precisely the kind of strategic assignment she wanted, but she had already committed her available time to other projects.
She couldn't take it.
That experience reinforced her understanding that every new client relationship carries an opportunity cost, particularly for a service business where employee capacity and leadership attention are finite resources.
It also strengthened her conviction that client selection needs to reflect more than the immediate revenue opportunity.
Today, Elexis evaluates prospective partners based on their business objectives, the quality and integrity of their products, their broader impact, and the way they treat the people around them.
Her willingness to hold those standards has occasionally meant making difficult decisions, including ending a client relationship because the behavior involved was inconsistent with the culture she wanted to protect.
As she explained during the podcast:
"If I'm allowing that kind of behavior, what does that signal to my team?"
For Elexis, the decision to protect her employees reflects a broader understanding of what company values are supposed to accomplish.
An agency cannot credibly promote genuine care and mutual respect internally while requiring its employees to tolerate relationships that contradict those principles.
The same judgment applies to strategic opportunities. Growth can be attractive, but not every client, service, or project contributes equally to building the business the founder wants to own.
Elexis has learned to evaluate opportunities against the company's long-term positioning and the needs of the people responsible for delivering the work.
This is not simply a lesson about turning down business. It is an example of how experienced founders develop the confidence to distinguish between revenue that supports their strategy and revenue that distracts from it.
Her Influence Extends Well Beyond SchroderHaus
Elexis's professional accomplishments are only one part of the contribution she has made to her industry and community.
She has consistently used her experience and relationships to support organizations addressing issues that matter deeply to her, particularly those involving the natural products industry, environmental responsibility, and access to healthy food.
As a board member of Naturally Colorado, Elexis contributes to an organization dedicated to strengthening Colorado's natural products ecosystem through education, industry connections, and opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop and grow their businesses.
Her involvement reflects an understanding that the success of individual companies is connected to the strength of the industries and communities in which they operate.
She also serves on the board of Metro Caring, a Denver organization working to address hunger both through immediate access to nutritious food and through efforts to confront the economic and social conditions that contribute to food insecurity.
Metro Caring's approach recognizes that providing food to people experiencing hardship is essential, but that lasting progress also requires addressing the circumstances that make people vulnerable to hunger in the first place.
Elexis's commitment to these organizations is consistent with the philosophy that inspired SchroderHaus: businesses and institutions can pursue strong outcomes while also contributing meaningfully to the communities they serve.
Her philanthropic commitments are especially notable because she makes them alongside the responsibilities of running an agency, raising a family, mentoring employees, and maintaining relationships throughout her industry.
She speaks openly about the difficulty of making room for everything that matters to her, but those competing responsibilities also help explain why she is reconsidering how the next stage of her company should operate.
She doesn't simply want SchroderHaus to become larger. She wants it to continue producing work she believes in, creating opportunities for her team, and allowing her to contribute in meaningful ways beyond the agency.
The Next Chapter of an Accomplished Founder
Eleven years after founding SchroderHaus, Elexis is continuing to identify opportunities for the agency to expand its reach and capabilities.
She sees potential to work with a broader range of purpose-driven organizations beyond natural food and beverage companies, while deepening services that connect strategic communications more directly to consumer purchasing behavior and measurable business outcomes.
She's also exploring how additional leadership capacity and strategic partnerships can strengthen the agency's ability to pursue new opportunities without requiring her to personally carry every responsibility.
Hiring her first vice president represents a significant step in that direction, as does her growing willingness to invest in operational support and develop greater independence among the people responsible for managing clients and delivering work.
These decisions are not a retreat from the ambition that helped her build SchroderHaus. They reflect a more sophisticated understanding of what the company will need if it is to continue growing while preserving the standards that made it successful.
The challenge of leading an established business is different from the challenge of starting one.
In the beginning, success often depends on the founder's willingness to make decisions quickly, manage competing responsibilities, and personally ensure that the work meets expectations. As the company develops, those same responsibilities need to become distributed across an organization with the capability to operate confidently and consistently.
For Elexis, the next stage is about building on what already works exceptionally well while creating more opportunities for other leaders to contribute their expertise and judgment.
Her considerable achievements provide a strong foundation for that evolution.
She has built a business recognized nationally and regionally for excellence, earned the trust of influential consumer brands, developed a distinctive culture, and contributed her time and expertise to organizations working to create positive change.
Perhaps most importantly, she has continued demonstrating the willingness to challenge her own assumptions about what the company needs from her.
That quality may ultimately prove just as valuable as the experience and instincts that helped establish SchroderHaus in the first place.
What It Means to Keep Growing After Success
Near the end of our conversation, Elexis reflected on the decision to leave a comfortable professional position and build something of her own.
"Just because something is comfortable doesn't mean it's the place you should be."
At the time, that realization gave her the confidence to pursue an entrepreneurial ambition that hadn't yet taken shape. More than a decade later, it offers an equally relevant perspective on the decisions she is making as an established business owner.
She has already proved that she can build a company around her convictions, attract outstanding clients, develop talented people, and earn recognition from her professional peers.
The next chapter requires a different kind of ambition, one that involves continuing to develop the leaders around her and trusting them to uphold the reputation she has worked so hard to create.
For women who have spent years building successful businesses, Elexis's experience offers an important distinction between maintaining personal control and preserving the principles that make a company valuable.
The goal is not to become less demanding about quality or less invested in the organization's future. It is to build a company where excellent judgment, accountability, creativity, and client service are shared capabilities rather than qualities dependent on the founder's constant involvement.
Elexis Schroder's accomplishments demonstrate what is possible when a founder combines conviction with creativity, strategic discipline, and a genuine commitment to people.
Her willingness to keep evolving demonstrates something equally important about long-term leadership: success does not eliminate the need for change, and sometimes the most valuable thing an accomplished founder can do is create the conditions for other people to become exceptional.
For business owners approaching their own next chapter, her story raises a question worth considering: What could your company accomplish if the standards that made you successful were fully owned by the people you've brought together to carry it forward?
Listen to Elexis's Full Conversation
In this episode of the Badass Women in Business Podcast, Elexis Schroder joins Aggie Chydzinski and Cristy O'Connor to share the story behind SchroderHaus, the unexpected circumstances surrounding its founding, and the decisions that have shaped its growth over eleven years.
From choosing clients and developing a values-driven culture to building stronger leaders and redefining her own responsibilities, Elexis offers an unusually candid look at what it takes to lead a company after the early entrepreneurial challenges have given way to an entirely different set of opportunities.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Explore SchroderHaus, learn more about its award-winning client work, and connect with Elexis Schroder on LinkedIn.
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