Today we’d like to introduce you to Shelly Hughes.
Shelly, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I always knew I wanted to start a company. I just did not know which one yet.
As a kid, I was already moving. Selling bracelets, running a lemonade stand, getting certified in hand massage therapy to make money at my mom’s office. I was shampooing hair at a local salon before I was even legally old enough to work. Nobody asked me to do any of it. I was just drawn to it. Drawn to the speed of business, the feeling that what I did actually moved something, that my effort had a direct connection to the outcome. That pull never went away.
I majored in marketing and international studies, found my way into advertising, and spent years inside business startups, agencies, and content production companies. That 360 view of how businesses actually grow shaped everything about how I think. I loved the people I worked with. I learned from every room I sat in. I was often the youngest person at the table and I soaked up everything I could.
What I kept seeing, across every environment, was the same pattern. Companies doing genuinely good work, throwing money at marketing when that was never the real problem. What got them to where they were was not going to get them to where they wanted to be. They had built an incredible growth story. What they needed was a growth strategy. I started saying that internally. Pushing back when I thought we were selling clients things that weren’t going to fix the foundational problem they had. The pushback was not always welcome. I got quieted more than once. Put down enough times that my confidence, which had always been one of my strengths, genuinely took a hit.
Eventually, I stopped saying it only in rooms where it was not wanted and started writing it publicly. I launched a blog called Nolia Roots. Made my thinking on business, leadership, and marketing visible. Shortly after, I was called in and fired. The claim was that I had violated a noncompete I had never signed. But I remember sitting in that room and feeling something unexpected. Not devastation. Relief. A weight I had been carrying for longer than I realized just dropped. And I wasn’t going to dare fight it.
A few weeks later, on a warm Monday morning, I launched Nolia Roots as a business. That Thursday, my husband and I found out I was pregnant with our first son.
None of what followed was easy, and I could not have gotten through any of it alone. My husband, my parents, my friends, my team, clients who believed in me before I had much to show them. I took one week of maternity leave with my first child. Some clients did not even know I was pregnant. One who did told me directly she planned to squeeze everything she could out of me and let me go once I gave birth. I filed that away. Between that chapter and this one I had a second child, this time with three weeks off, and I went through thyroid cancer. I am good now. But each of those moments taught me something about clarity. About knowing what you want, being willing to pay the price for it, and building something that can stand on its own regardless of what is happening around it.
What I launched that week and what I am still building today is the kind of firm I wished had existed. One whose leadership invites pushback rather than punishing it. A team of individuals who take ownership of their own mistakes before casting blame anywhere else. I had a goal to build the most human-centered, values-aligned strategic company in the world; and not as a talking point but as an operating standard, in how we choose clients, how we build our team, and how we show up inside every engagement.
Nolia Roots is a revenue and growth firm working with companies between $15M and $150 who have hit a ceiling and cannot see clearly enough yet to know why. We identify what is actually slowing growth across sales, marketing, operations, and leadership; make the real issues visible; and help leadership build a path that makes commercial sense before anyone spends more money on the wrong problem.
The companies we are most drawn to are doing work worth scaling. Businesses whose growth creates something beyond revenue. Whose products and services improve something real. Those are the clients we show up for with everything we have.
That drive has been there since the shampoo tub. It just finally has the right container.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
One of the biggest misconceptions about business is that once you start gaining traction, things suddenly become easier or feel more certain. In reality, every stage just introduces a new set of challenges that force you to grow into a different version of yourself and your business.
The beginning was hard but it was also clean. When you are starting from nothing, the cost of a swing and a miss is low. You have no track record to protect, no team depending on you, no clients who have built their plans around your availability. Fear is present but so is freedom.
The harder season was the middle.
Two kids. Thyroid cancer. A business I had worked too hard to break and a young family I loved too much to shortchange. Every decision had weight on both sides. I could not blow it up and start over. I could not pause. What I could do was hold it together, adapt, and keep moving at whatever pace the season allowed (some slower than others).
And we did move. We reworked the team. We reinvented how we operated as the economy shifted and the market changed around us. Maintenance mode was never flatness. It was a different kind of hard work, quieter, less visible, but real. The difference was I was not building at the pace I was wired to build. For someone like me, that is its own kind of loss.
I made a decision early on that the circumstances were never going to be my excuse. The economy shifted. The world changed. I had another baby. Those things were real and they affected us. But there is a difference between being shaped by what is happening around you and using it as a reason to stop taking ownership of your outcomes. I was not going to let hard seasons become a story I told about why I didn’t grow the business intentionally over those few years.
Eventually, I looked around and realized the important things were safe. My health was back. My kids were good. My family was solid. The business had survived everything I had put it through and everything life had thrown at us.
I gave myself permission to build again. Not carefully. Not halfway. All the way.
The real obstacle was never the cancer or the kids or the timing or the economy. It was the fear of breaking something I had worked too hard to lose. Learning to hold that fear without letting it make decisions for me, that is probably the most important thing I have figured out so far.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Nolia Roots is a revenue and growth firm that helps business leaders create purposeful growth. We work alongside organizations that have reached a point where what got them here is no longer enough to get them where they want to go next. Together, we create the clarity, alignment, and direction needed to move the business forward with confidence. We help brands cut through the noise, clarify who they are, and build a commercial strategy that actually align with the business they are trying to become.
What makes us different is that we don’t approach growth as isolated tactics or as purely consultative. We look at the full picture, ready to get our hands dirty. This includes leadership, operations, culture, messaging, positioning, customer experience, and long-term business goals, because growth does not exist in a vacuum.
Internally, we operate by a set of values we take seriously: extreme ownership, diversity of thought, and a firm belief that you can build something profitable without compromising how you treat people. We don’t create unnecessary chaos, expand scope for our own benefit, or tell clients what they want to hear. We tell them what is actually true, facilitating those uncomfortable conversations about what’s stalling their growth.
At the end of the day, I want people to know that Nolia Roots is not interested in helping brands become louder. We’re interested in helping them become clearer, more intentional, and more connected to the people they are trying to serve.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I think one of the biggest things I wish I had understood earlier is that clarity matters more than confidence.
A lot of people think you need to have everything figured out before you start, the perfect plan, the perfect brand, the perfect timing. But most of the people I know who have built meaningful businesses started before they felt fully ready. You learn by doing, adjusting, failing, and continuing anyway.
I’d also tell people not to confuse movement with progress. Especially in entrepreneurship, it’s very easy to stay busy all the time while avoiding the things that actually move your business forward. I spent a lot of time early on thinking I needed to say yes to everything, be everywhere, and constantly prove myself. Over time, I realized that focus is far more valuable than constant motion.
Another thing I wish I knew is how important it is to build a business that actually aligns with your values and lifestyle design. A lot of founders unintentionally build businesses they secretly resent because they’re trying to follow someone else’s blueprint for success. There’s so much pressure to scale quickly, look impressive online, or operate a certain way. But if your business requires you to abandon yourself to sustain it, eventually it catches up to you.
I’d also encourage people to stop being so afraid of failure. At Nolia Roots, we openly talk about mistakes all the time because failure is usually where the real learning happens. Some of my best decisions came directly after things didn’t go according to plan. I think people would grow faster if they stopped treating failure like an identity and started treating it like information.
And lastly, I’d say: don’t underestimate the importance of the people around you. Skills can be taught. Strategy can evolve. But surrounding yourself with people who are honest, accountable, collaborative, and willing to grow alongside you changes everything. The right people make hard seasons survivable and meaningful seasons even better.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://noliaroots.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shellyhughes_?igsh=bDFybnVtaGx0a2Zh
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1Ex1E6SA7c/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-hughes
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@noliaroots5103?si=dyMbdR97Hk-Sakr3
