The Real Story Behind Leigh B Creative
There's a version of this story I could tell you that sounds very polished. Creative Director. Major brand clients. ESPN. A decade of design experience leading to a thriving business.
That version is true. It's just not the whole truth.
The whole truth is messier, scarier, and honestly a lot more interesting.
Where It Started
My career began as a Graphic Designer running a creative art department in the heart of Montrose in Houston, TX. I loved the work deeply. I got to create every day, and over time the projects got bigger.
One I'm especially proud of: designing keepsake plates for ESPN's Super Bowl 50 party in San Francisco. The client pushed me to try something new, so I incorporated gold leafing into the design, which sounds beautiful until you realize our team was making every single piece by hand. I had to engineer a way to make something visually unique that could actually be produced efficiently at scale. That kind of creative problem solving, where art meets execution, is exactly what I live for.
Super Bowl 50 San Francisco ESPN
We also made beautiful keepsakes for special moments in our customers lives. Creatively, I was doing things I was genuinely proud of.
But loving your work and your work being enough are two very different things.
As a single parent, I was running the math every month and the math wasn't working.
Something had to change.
The Turn
Around that same time I made a decision that had nothing to do with business and ended up changing everything. I joined a Roller Derby League.
I came in fresh out of a toxic relationship, looking for something that was purely mine. What I found was a community that slowly rebuilt my confidence from the ground up, and a woman named Breanna Gunn, derby name Gunnz & WhammO, who would become one of the most important people in my professional life. As our friendship grew she became my sounding board, my resume reviewer, my business mentor before I even knew I needed one.
She helped me see that what I had wasn't just a skill set. It was a vision.
The Leap
About ten years ago, social media marketing was barely a defined profession. Businesses were scrambling to figure out how to show up online and most of them were doing it badly, not because they weren't smart but because nobody was offering them real creative strategy paired with real design skill.
They were getting one or the other, never both.
The turn came from an unexpected place. Breanna offered me a job helping her with Pinterest management. I had never heard of such a thing, but she believed in what I could do and paid me $500 a month to figure it out. It wasn't glamorous. It was a start.
From there she referred me to other business owners, and slowly my experience grew, my portfolio grew, and so did my confidence that this was actually something real.
Photos above are from my early days in business featuring my very first business card and co-working space!
For most of that first year I was running two lives in parallel.
Full time Creative Director by day, building my business by night, and raising my son somewhere in between. I was finishing client projects late into the night after he went to bed, managing deadlines on both sides, and quietly tracking one number every single month: was my business income getting closer to my salary?
My son and I co-working at one of our favorite brunch spots in Montrose! He was such a trooper.
The day those two numbers matched, I made the decision to quit.
No dramatic moment. No lightning bolt. Just the math finally saying what I already knew in my gut: it was time.
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't terrifying. But I'd also built enough inside myself on that roller derby track to know that fear wasn't a reason to stop.
What I Built
Leigh B Creative was born out of my desire to keep working with small businesses and fill a gap that was needed: beautiful branding, engaging content, and real social media marketing strategy.
Not generic. Not templated. Not a package you could get from anyone else.
Everything I know today I learned by doing, and yes, by making mistakes. Imposter syndrome, analysis paralysis, building something entirely outside my comfort zone, I've lived all of it. What carried me through was integrity in the hard moments and the willingness to keep showing up anyway.
Today I've worked with over 100 brands across the US and UK. Using my 3 Step Social Media Marketing Conversion Framework, my clients see an average 43% increase in revenue, traffic, and brand awareness. I've helped businesses scale their product sales, hit $100k for the first time, and keep growing beyond that.
The results are real. But so is the way we get there, which is together.
Who I Am Beyond the Work
I still skate. My derby name is Amazon and I earn it.
If I could live in any fictional world it would be Amphipolis and I would absolutely be Xena: Warrior Princess.
I built this business for people who have something worth talking about and just need the right person in their corner to help the world see it.
If that sounds like you, I'd love to meet you.
