Ever to Excel: How Heidi Sporel Built a Marketing Agency on Grace, Strategy, and Service

Heidi Sporel once put a clause in a contract that most agency owners would hesitate to write. If the client was disrespectful to her team at any point, she could terminate immediately, and the outstanding balance would still be due.

The client was the CEO of a company more than fifty years old, and he was about to award her the project. He had been sharp and dismissive with her team throughout the proposal process. When she held her ground, he told her no one had ever pushed back on him. Then he apologized.

That moment captures how Heidi, founder and principal of E2Excel Marketing, runs her business. She shows enormous grace, and she knows where grace ends and being a doormat begins.

A Name With a Story

Heidi came to Boston College as the first in her family to attend college, from a difficult home life and a household living near the poverty line. "It was a struggle," she says. "Really, really big struggle."

The school's motto, Ever to Excel, and its call to be "men and women for others" shaped her. On her first day as a freshman she met a classmate from a similar background. Years later, when the two were naming a marketing firm, they went back to where it all started. Her partner wanted to call it Ever to Excel Marketing. Heidi worried about trademark trouble with the school, so they shortened it to E2Excel.

Her partner eventually left to run his father's company, a family legacy he needed to carry forward. Heidi kept the agency growing. She is now in year 16.

Twenty Years on the Other Side of the Table

Before E2Excel, Heidi spent twenty years inside large organizations, including Sony and Western Union, working as a product manager and marketing director. She sat across from agencies of every size, including big Madison Avenue firms.

She developed a mantra she would share with agencies that came to pitch her. They could treat her as a way to hit this month's or this quarter's number. Or they could build a relationship where her success was their success. If they chose the second path, she could bring them to the next project, to her next company, or to people she knew.

The truth, she says, is that in twenty years she carried only three agencies forward with her. "The interest really wasn't revenue," she says of how most relationships worked. Today she builds E2Excel as the kind of partner she rarely found.

That shows up in how she serves clients. She doesn't hand every business the same menu of services. She asks what the client needs, then meets them where they are, on what she calls a crawl-walk-run path. A solopreneur gets baby steps. A larger company with a bigger budget gets to run.

Marketing That Starts With the Customer's Need

Heidi's strategic advice is plain. Leaders who struggle to explain their value need to step out of the leader's chair and into the customer's.

"You need to step out of your role as the leader and step into the role of your prospect or your customer. What is it that they value? What is it that they need?"

Many founders, she says, believe they have the greatest thing since sliced bread and develop tunnel vision. The questions she asks come first: What does your customer need or want? Do they even know they have that need? Once you understand them, you can shape the message, the product, and the team that serves them.

She says the same discipline applies to money. When SimCon Lighting, her first big client after she launched E2Excel, had no revenue, she had to spend limited marketing dollars carefully. Cities and towns had just received federal money for LED upgrades and saw little need for intelligent street light controls. SimCon was an unknown going up against GE and Philips.

Heidi kept telling the story. She shared every win, kept educating the market, and kept pitching industry analysts. In 2015, at a trade show in New York, a prospect walked up to the booth and said he had thought they were crazy the year before. Now he needed to talk. The company later earned recognition from Gartner and a gold Edison Award, presented at Radio City.

Grace, With Boundaries

Heidi describes her faith as something she tries to live, not just profess. She has taught Sunday school for twelve years, volunteers in a soup kitchen, and mentors student and immigrant entrepreneurs, teaching marketing classes and then staying on as a mentor.

She remembers a grandmother who thanked her for reaching a grandson who dreaded school but could not wait to come on Sunday. "This is why I do it," she says.

In business, grace can be expensive. A website client was diagnosed with cancer, and the project slowed. He kept apologizing. Heidi told him not to worry and to take care of himself, because the project would be there at whatever pace he needed.

She also volunteers her team's time. When a friend whose son lives with a rare form of epilepsy needed a website within a week for a charity event, E2Excel built it from scratch in under seven days. It became the most successful event the Tynado Foundation had held, and Heidi's team still maintains the site at no charge.

But grace does not mean tolerating mistreatment. Her pushback on the arrogant CEO reflects a conviction she shares with the interviewer: treat people the way you want to be treated, and say so when that standard is broken.

The Cost of Leading Alone

One of Heidi's longest engagements was with a brilliant engineer-founder. E2Excel served as his marketing team for twelve years, taking a company with no revenue to recognition by Gartner, IBC, and Forrester as an industry leader. Over that time she watched more than 120 people walk out the door of his sales team. He expected quick results in markets with long government sales cycles.

The company sold for a significant sum, but she believes it could have grown larger. His self-centeredness, she says, cost him. "We all come into the world the same way," she reflects. "When it's just you and God at the end, it's like: did you at least try to be a good person?"

Her counsel to founders is direct. Get out of your ego. When you hire someone for their expertise, give them respect. Build a culture where it is "not an I," but a team effort.

Creating the Future, Not Just Campaigns

Heidi is now repositioning E2Excel as a business growth agency. Years ago the market did not understand the idea. Now business owners tell her she is not just a marketing agency, that she is looking at their whole business. She has built partnerships with intellectual property attorneys, accountants, and other advisors so that when a client says everything feels like a mess, she can bring in the right help.

Her tagline, Creating the Future, is not about one or two campaigns. It is about helping owners define goals and move toward them.

Looking back, the lesson she wishes she had learned sooner came from business school culture in the 1980s, which equated worth with sixty to eighty hours a week. She says young professionals need faith or a guiding force beyond money. She is proud that her son, an investment banker, prays daily and attends church in a high-pressure field.

She also remembers her mother calling every Sunday to ask whether she had gone to church. Over time Heidi learned to answer with grace for others and for herself. "You gotta give some people grace where they are in their faith journey," she says.

Monday Morning Takeaways

Heidi's story leaves leaders with a few things to try this week:

Look at your offer through your customer's eyes. Write down what they need and whether they know they need it.

Show grace where it is needed. Identify one client, employee, or contractor facing a hard season and give them room.

Set boundaries where respect is missing. Decide in advance how you will respond when someone mistreats your team.

Honor the experts you hired. Ask what they see before you override them.

Grace and excellence are not opposites. Heidi's sixteen years suggest they belong together.