Marie Powell’s art degree helped prepare her for the creative demands of running her 15-year-old advertising firm, Brew Agency, which has created campaigns for clients that include Delgado Community College, The Boot and a new state-funded nonprofit.
But, as Powell’s Baton Rouge-based venture has grown, she has had to learn on-the-job the business skills required to run a company that now has more than 10 employees and annual revenues of more than $1 million. For help, she’s turned to networking groups and training opportunities like the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and the CEO Roundtables organized by the Louisiana’s economic development agency.
But, Powell said, she found something uniquely helpful after joining the local chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a global, peer-to-peer network designed to help business founders learn to be better leaders and grow their companies.
Powell joined the group in 2021 and, four years later, became president of its Louisiana chapter, which includes more than 80 local business owners, some of them among the region’s most high-profile startup founders. The group includes Franziska Trautmann, co-founder of the recycling company Glass Half Full; Conway Solomon, whose tech company WRSTBND was acquired by a huge entertainment company two years ago; and Christa Cotton, owner of the El Guapo brand of cocktail bitters and syrups, which just made it onto Walmart shelves.
In this week’s Talking Business, Powell explains how Entrepreneurs’ Organization works, why she signed on to lead it and how the group’s business accelerator program is designed to create future members.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You’ve run the Brew Agency for more than a decade. What is one of your notable campaigns?
We ran the public launch of LA Wallet, which made our state the first in the U.S. to fully launch a digital ID. At the time, no one knew what it was. There were zero users. We had to get the public and businesses to understand how it worked and that it was a legally accepted form of identification. To date, over 75% of Louisiana drivers use the app. We were responsible for strategy and execution of the initial marketing campaign.
What is Entrepreneurs’ Organization and how did you get involved?
EO is a nonprofit, global community of nearly 20,000 members in more than 80 countries. There are individual and regional chapters. We’ve got about 90 people in Louisiana, all with businesses that make at least $1 million in annual revenue.
Running a business is hard. It’s not for the faint of heart. EO offers a community and support system for business leaders to learn and grow together.
How and why did you join?
I got involved because I was a business owner and was looking for a community and network of other business owners that I could talk to. I was recruited by Mark Lewis, who runs the CEO roundtables for Louisiana Economic Development.
No one ever really taught me how to run a company. I just knew how to do the work and slowly got clients and continued to grow.
I started doing a variety of different networking groups, but there is nothing like EO, which focuses on the whole of the entrepreneur. It’s not just about business strategies, growth, HR and legal issues. It actually gets into the personal side of the entrepreneur as well.
EO produces local educational events, and members have the option to attend big national and international gatherings, but it sounds like the most important work happens at your regular “forum” meetings. What are those about?
There are usually seven or eight members in a forum and within that group we share experiences, talk about the highs and lows and share what’s going on in our personal lives because, as entrepreneurs, our business lives kind of bleed into everything that we do. We take the work home with us.
There’s training that’s involved. They teach us how to communicate. We don’t give advice; we don’t tell each other what to do. But we share experiences that resonate.
It sounds like therapy.
We say it’s not therapy, but it’s therapeutic. And we say forum is a gym, not a spa. You’re there to work, and the stuff we talk about, it’s pretty deep. You’re with these people once a month for years.
Why don’t you give advice?
Most people, and especially entrepreneurs, don’t like to be told what to do. They know their company better than anybody else.
It’s a leadership skill to be able to have a conversation with somebody and have them express what they’re going through and then not immediately give advice.
What’s the EO vibe? Who joins?
If you are the smartest person in the room, you don’t belong in EO. If you are somebody who can use every circumstance and every situation to learn and grow from the people around you, that’s a good fit.
Confidentiality is hugely important. We’re talking about very personal things about our businesses, so trust and respect is essential. We’re all a little eccentric. Everybody’s got big personalities and are somewhat fearless. I think that’s a commonality among people who start businesses and are able to be successful.
I think the median age is probably in the early 40s, but there also are younger people and there are certainly some that have approached retirement and that have even sold their businesses.
Do you talk about challenges that are specific to being entrepreneurs here in Louisiana in 2026?
We talk about anything and everything that’s relevant to our businesses, including tariffs, other issues and how we’re working to get through them.
Within one forum, there may be people that have very different political views, might have very different religious views, might have very different styles of communication. But all the things you think we might disagree on, all that goes out the window and we really just truly connect on a fundamental level.
