Ellie Hearne: How a Culture-First Consultancy Quietly Outgrew Its Own Growth Crisis

Ellie Hearne left a job she loved because the culture was wrong for her — and then turned that same obsession with culture into a consultancy that works with some of the world's best-known companies. As the founder of Pencil or Ink, a New York-based firm founded in 2016, she helps founders, executives and senior teams make culture and strategy work together, drawing on more than 15 years of experience in leadership coaching, facilitation and strategy consulting (Pencil or Ink, 2025).

Her client roster includes leaders at Apple, Google, LVMH, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, Spotify and Uber. Alongside client work, she teaches AI, innovation and executive strategy at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Her story matters to women building service businesses because it is a case study in doing the opposite of what the playbook says: saying no, staying small on purpose, and letting profitability — not headcount — define success.

Table of Contents

• From St Andrews to New York
• Culture Eats Strategy — And Ellie Hearne Built a Business On It
• The Growth Crisis That Redefined Pencil or Ink
• Inside the Culture-First Method
• Teaching AI and Innovation at Oxford
• What Her Story Means for Women Founders
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Conclusion
• Sources

From St Andrews to New York

Ellie Hearne was born in Ireland and raised in Scotland. She earned a Master of Arts in International Relations with first-class honours from the University of St Andrews in 2007, after also studying at Washington College in Maryland on a Dean's List (University of St Andrews Alumni, 2025; IdeaMensch, 2025). She did not set out to run a company. Her early career ran through nonprofit communications — more than four years of it — before she moved into the private sector as a consultant for London's Addison Group, a WPP company, and later became VP of SNP Communications' New York office (IdeaMensch, 2019).

Between 2011 and 2016 she worked independently in London and New York: writing strategic communications plans, drafting speeches for senior leaders, coaching entrepreneurs and refining how organisations message their audiences. That freelance decade gave her the credentials, but two structural barriers held her back from founding sooner. As she later put it, as a U.S. visa holder for much of her career she could not easily have become self-employed, and maintaining access to healthcare outside a traditional employment arrangement is notoriously hard (Nasdaq, 2022).

The idea for Pencil or Ink came from a client who suggested she start her own firm. She launched a few months later — belatedly, she admits, but the delay let her plan properly and gave clients and partners a heads-up that built momentum around the launch (IdeaMensch, 2019).

Culture Eats Strategy — And Ellie Hearne Built a Business On It

The trigger for the founding was cultural, not commercial. Hearne loved the people and the work ethic of her last role, but blurred lines between life and work proved unsustainable once she became a parent. Culture did not just drive her out the door; it defined what her new company would sell (Nasdaq, 2022).

Pencil or Ink approaches everything through the lens of communication, and through the intangibles that communication carries — trust, accountability, clarity. The pitch is deceptively simple: get to know how an organisation actually works, help define and enhance its strategy, then partner with its leaders to improve performance. In her own words, "people don't remember what you say — they remember how they felt when they were with you."

It is a philosophy that echoes the management literature she cites. Asked in 2025 which book had given her the most value, she named Jane Dutton's Energize Your Workplace, about how high-quality connections fuel everything from performance to resilience, alongside Peter Drucker's line that culture eats strategy for breakfast (IdeaMensch, 2025). "Culture is not a buzzword," she says. "It's a lived experience shaped by the quality of our interactions."

The Growth Crisis That Redefined Pencil or Ink

Like many first-time founders, Hearne accepted the standard definition of growth: revenue growth, client-list growth, headcount growth — because she assumed a small business grew by becoming a large one. Three years in, she had a long client list, healthy revenue and a new employee. Outwardly, growth. Inwardly, a crisis.

Hiring meant investing weeks and months training a colleague in client-facing work instead of doing the work herself. Margins narrowed, then disappeared; she eventually stopped paying herself. Clients, she realised, wanted to work with her, not with a less-experienced practitioner taking a different approach. She let the employee go — and, in her account, business improved almost overnight (Buffer, 2022).

What followed was a deliberate shrinking that produced the opposite result. Hearne shifted from an agency model to a consultancy: a one-woman operation supported by a part-time contracted administrative assistant. She stopped saying yes to everything and narrowed the offer to three services — leadership coaching, team workshops and offsite facilitation — referring everything else out. She also stopped competing on price, admitting she had previously been "sloppy about pricing and often charged too little" (Buffer, 2022).

The numbers followed. In the three years after the reset she reported that revenue and profit grew exponentially, and that she was bringing home three times what she made in her last employed job. Today all of her business comes through referrals or previous clients — and, notably, few of those clients date from the "say yes to everything" era (Buffer, 2022).

A second insight sealed the model. When companies approached her for coaching or facilitation, asking why revealed a pattern: they were not really buying a coach or a facilitator. They were trying to fix their culture in order to deliver on their strategy. Coaching and facilitation were only the means. That reframing let her tailor every engagement — a company-wide culture analysis for one client, one-to-one coaching for an influential leader at another — instead of selling a fixed menu (Buffer, 2022).

Inside the Culture-First Method

Pencil or Ink sells three services: one-to-one leadership coaching for founders, executives and senior leaders; workshops and offsites, from lunch-and-learns to multi-day retreats; and speaking keynotes on AI, leadership, strategy and influence. Before any learning-and-development engagement, the firm partners with the organisation to understand how it works and where its internal strengths and opportunities lie — through conversations, company-wide interviews, or widespread personality profiling (Pencil or Ink, 2025).

That profiling has a formal backbone: Hearne has been accredited in Insights Discovery for over a decade, bringing behavioural insight to her coaching and facilitation work (Pencil or Ink, 2025). A typical month, she told her alma mater, involves facilitating a leadership retreat, leading a handful of workshops on communication and team effectiveness, and coaching several leaders (University of St Andrews Alumni, 2025).

The client list spans industries and sizes — from fast-growth startups to Fortune 500 companies — and includes Apple, Braze, Bustle Digital Group, Google, Kickstarter, Lincoln Center, LVMH, Marriott International, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Pfizer, Societe Generale, Spotify and Uber (Pencil or Ink, 2025; LinkedIn). Differentiation is the operating principle that holds it together: being clear about what the business does not do lets her say no quickly, with confidence, and often to refer a prospect to a better-suited partner (IdeaMensch, 2025).

Teaching AI and Innovation at Oxford

About five years after founding Pencil or Ink, Hearne returned to university — this time to Oxford's Saïd Business School — to study organisational leadership, earning a postgraduate diploma with distinction. The unexpected bonus was the chance to teach alongside her job (University of St Andrews Alumni, 2025).

She now leads the teaching team for the Oxford AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme as Head Instructor, a role she previously held for the Oxford Strategic Innovation Programme (Pencil or Ink, 2025). Her public writing on AI is deliberately grounding: in "Making Sense of AI" she argues that leaders do not need a sweeping AI strategy to begin, but a frame — three repeated questions about what must not be compromised, where small improvements could genuinely help, and what the organisation is actually for (Pencil or Ink, 2025).

The traffic between the two roles runs both ways. Techniques taught to executives at Oxford get applied to her own consultancy, she told Nasdaq — and the work she does with founders and boards feeds straight back into the classroom (Nasdaq, 2022).

What Her Story Means for Women Founders

Three lessons travel well from Hearne's experience to any woman building a service business.

• Growth does not have to look like expansion. "In my 30s: growth doesn't have to look like expansion. You don't need a big team to do meaningful, well-compensated work," she says. Reducing headcount was the first step on her highest-growth trajectory — in impact, revenue and client satisfaction alike (IdeaMensch, 2025; Buffer, 2022).
• Listening precedes talking. The one habit she recommends to everyone is active listening: in almost all contexts, being present and audience-focused yields a better result (IdeaMensch, 2025).
• Ambition and parenthood are not a binary. She rejects the framing that a woman must choose between being ambitious and being present — while conceding the caveats openly: it takes boundaries, self-discipline and, in her words, the luck and privilege of an excellent co-parent plus good schools and childcare within reach (IdeaMensch, 2025).

Hearne is candid about the failure behind the framework: she left a particular job too slowly, trying to make it work long after she knew it was not the right fit. The lesson was to listen more closely to internal cues and to redefine success more personally — and the surprising upside was the room it created to start Pencil or Ink (IdeaMensch, 2025).

Outside the business she serves as President of the University of St Andrews American Foundation, sits on the board of the Scottish Government's GlobalScot business ambassador programme, and previously served on the board of Accountability Lab. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family — born in Ireland, raised in Scotland, and, by her own account, a New Yorker at heart.

Her path sits alongside others we have profiled, from conscious leadership coaching to scaling and then deliberately shrinking a consulting firm, and it echoes our guides on communication in women's leadership and building a personal brand as a female founder.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Ellie Hearne's route from a St Andrews international-relations graduate to a New York consultancy founder was neither straight nor fast, and that is precisely the point. She spent a decade building craft, waited for the structural conditions to fall into place, and then built a business that rejects the growth orthodoxies — hire, expand, say yes — that sank her first attempt at scale.

For women running service businesses, the Pencil or Ink model offers a testable proposition: narrow the offer, price it properly, understand the client's culture before prescribing anything, and let referrals do the marketing. A decade on, Hearne is still in business, still solo by design, and teaching the same ideas to executives at Oxford. Restraint, it turns out, can be a growth strategy.

Sources

• Pencil or Ink — About Ellie Hearne (accessed October 2026)
• IdeaMensch — Ellie Hearne, Culture & Strategy Consultant (published August 2025)
• Buffer — Growing My Business Too Fast Caused Me to Redefine Growth Entirely (31 May 2022)
• Nasdaq — Connecting the Dots: How Leadership Expert Ellie Hearne Is Harnessing Culture to Drive Strategy (11 November 2022)
• University of St Andrews Alumni — Culture, strategy, leadership (13 May 2025)
• Pencil or Ink — Making Sense of AI (accessed October 2026)