TheWork:

About Our Founder: Erika Mosteller didn’t come from a world where women built companies. Growing up, the professional women she knew were teachers, and the message she absorbed was that working was something you endured rather than something you built. It took a toxic boss, a family tragedy, and her husband’s four-word push (“start your own business”) to finally change that.

She walked away from her job with no clients, no roadmap, and a master’s degree in history, then pulled $50,000 from her family’s savings account to figure it out. What she discovered was that her background as a historian and curriculum writer had given her an unusual skill: finding the single thread running through an organization’s entire body of work and turning it into a story that actually moves people. She became a certified Storybrand Guide and built Erika B. Marketing Agency into a full-service shop serving mission-oriented founders and civic organizations across her community.

But the business win almost came at a cost she wasn’t willing to pay. One year in, her daughter told her how much she missed her. Erika had shifted from being the primary parent to being a breadwinner, and she had to make a deliberate decision to reclaim both roles. She restructured her work around a core value she now holds firm: her business exists to support her family, not replace her presence in it. Bringing her kids along on the journey of building something meaningful, rather than building it instead of them, became part of the mission.

A year ago, she co-founded Here Local Media, a print magazine dedicated to telling the stories that make Dalton, Georgia worth loving. Her world has always been words, and she’s built two businesses on that conviction.

She speaks from real experience on women in business, building a company without a financial safety net or financial literacy background, integrating entrepreneurship with intentional motherhood, personal branding for founders who don’t love talking about themselves, and the brand storytelling strategies that help visionary organizations finally say what they actually mean.