At the beginning, the office was Leslie Licano’s living room. The first two employees worked around her kitchen table. An agency can buy a conference table later; first it needs somebody willing to sit down and do the work. In 2009, Licano and Lauren Ellermeyer decided to build Beyond Fifteen Communications around a proposition they believed other agencies were neglecting: substantial communications work accompanied by close, attentive service.
The domestic setting makes a tidy origin story. The more interesting story concerns what happened when doing the work herself stopped being enough. Licano had built a career around words, judgment and execution. As a founder, she would have to learn how to let other people exercise those skills without keeping one hand permanently on their keyboards.
The writer changes sides of the desk
Long before the agency, there was a child who liked reading and making things out of language: stories, poems, essays and plays. Licano initially tried journalism. She found herself drawn toward writing with more room for creative positioning, and eventually toward the businesses whose stories reporters might tell. Public relations offered a practical outlet for that appetite.
She credits Nancy Trumpfeller, her high-school language arts and speech and debate teacher, with encouraging the idea that a passion for words could become a living. It is an unusually specific debt of gratitude in an industry inclined toward abstract talk about influence. A teacher’s encouragement precedes the client presentation, the campaign and the title on the door.
Her preparation also included a bachelor’s degree in communications, with an emphasis in public relations, at California State University, Fullerton. She worked on the communications team at real estate brokerage Sperry Van Ness and became a senior account executive at Echo Media Group. Writing, developing concepts and securing media coverage put her close to the daily mechanics of making a business intelligible to other people.
That background helps explain her view of the job. A company knows what it sells. A journalist needs a reason to care. The communications practitioner has to find the point where those two interests meet, then write a sentence that survives contact with a busy editor.
A partnership with an unusual calendar
Ellermeyer and Licano did not begin as lifelong friends. Their business relationship came first; friendship followed. Licano has described Ellermeyer’s ease with new people and her leadership in business development with obvious affection. The partnership gives different strengths somewhere useful to go.
Their joke is that Licano runs the company on even days and Ellermeyer on odd days. The agency’s leadership page carries the corresponding presidential titles. It is a pleasingly elaborate solution to the problem of having two capable people in charge, requiring neither a constitutional convention nor an argument over whose name appears first.
“We both contribute and make decisions together.”Leslie Licano, on her partnership with Lauren Ellermeyer
Behind the joke lies an operating question that would keep returning: how much authority can be shared? Starting a company with another person means accepting that a good decision may arrive in somebody else’s voice. Growing a team requires making that concession repeatedly, including when the person speaking has joined the business much more recently than its founders.
The message outlives the medium
Beyond Fifteen’s name refers to the familiar Andy Warhol idea of fifteen minutes of fame. The business is concerned with what comes afterward. A brief burst of attention may be enjoyable; turning that attention into something a client can use requires follow-through.
The founders saw a way to combine their traditional media experience with social media management. As the agency developed, that work widened into digital advertising, search, content and influencer marketing. The central skill remained translating a client’s message for an audience. The routes multiplied.
In a 2024 radio conversation, Licano recalled the earlier trade’s physical routines: press kits delivered to newsrooms and releases sent by fax. She described the later progression through social media, paid targeting and search. Each new channel introduced another way for a person to encounter the same business, ask a question and decide whether to proceed.
Her explanation makes the jargon of integrated marketing reasonably concrete. An advertisement can introduce a company. A useful article can answer the question that follows. The website must make sense of both. If those pieces tell incompatible stories, buying more attention only sends more people toward the disagreement.
A conceptual view of the journey she describes, rather than a measured sales funnel.
Making room for the smaller assignment
The agency has also adjusted how it sells its work. In 2018, Licano said the ongoing retainer arrangement did not suit some smaller startup clients. Beyond Fifteen developed a project-based alternative, allowing younger businesses to pursue public relations and social media goals without signing up for a continuing engagement.
That is a modest change with an important consequence. The contract itself can determine which businesses get through the door. A company may need communications help before it can responsibly commit to paying for it month after month. Offering a contained project gives both sides a chance to work together at a scale they can understand.
Her advice on email campaigns carries a similar preference for the approachable. In 2019 she advocated brief, straightforward narratives about real people, rather than promotional self-congratulation. The recipient has a life outside the campaign. A message has to earn a little of that person’s time.
The founder receives an edit
Licano’s account of management includes an uncomfortable correction. An early 360-degree review revealed that she was taking on too much and intervening too often, limiting her team’s progress. The person responsible for helping the business advance had become part of the obstruction.
For someone whose professional value includes spotting what needs changing, leaving another person’s work alone can be difficult. There is always another revision available. A founder can improve one piece of work while making it harder for everyone else to finish the next ten.
Her response was to work on delegation, setting direction and making herself available without owning every detail. Annual 360-degree reviews became part of the agency’s process. Employees gained a recurring opportunity to give feedback upward as well as receive it.
By 2025 she described a remote workplace that judged contribution through results and allowed flexibility in how people managed their time. This places an obligation on leadership too: the desired outcome has to be clear enough that people can pursue it without constantly asking the founder to translate.
“A little bit of trust and a lot of letting go”Leslie Licano, describing her shift toward delegation
The small things that make a workplace
Some of Licano’s more revealing management details are cheerfully ordinary. In 2020 she described a bell rung for a strong media placement or a significant social milestone. There were celebrations when a client signed, a monthly award chosen by colleagues and occasions for the team to gather outside its usual work.
The bell is an appealing piece of equipment for a communications agency. Much of the work happens in documents, inboxes and conversations. A result can otherwise pass through the room as quietly as another notification. Here was permission to make a little noise.
She also described professional development budgets, training and opportunities to learn alongside more experienced colleagues. These are practical commitments: time and money allocated before the employee has necessarily acquired the next skill. They ask the employer to tolerate the possibility that an investment in a person might eventually benefit another employer too.
That combination of celebration and instruction fits a business built around producing work for others. The client gets the finished campaign. The people who made it need some recognition of their own, and a reason to believe that their next assignment will teach them something.
A puzzle with people in it
In 2025, Licano described coming from a working-class family, supporting herself through college with jobs and starting the company as a single mother. It gives the kitchen-table beginning more weight. Building a business was accompanied by responsibilities that did not disappear when a client deadline arrived.
She also offered a quieter clue to her temperament: she enjoys crosswords, riddles and logic puzzles. She sees a related satisfaction in arranging marketing’s separate pieces so that a press release, website, advertisement and social strategy reinforce one another.
There is a useful limit to the puzzle analogy. People will not stay in the squares assigned to them. Clients change direction. Employees identify opportunities their managers missed. The founder who wants the whole arrangement to work must be willing to move a piece she thought was settled.
What staying power looks like
There are concrete markers along the way. By late 2019, Toyo Tires’ Instagram account, launched by Beyond Fifteen in 2012, had reached a million followers. The agency’s tenth-anniversary account paired that milestone with the expansion of its services and work for clients ranging from smaller businesses to established brands.
Licano’s own work has received multiple PROTOS Awards. Her career has also taken her back toward the classroom: Cal State Fullerton named her among the alumni speaking at its 2019 Communications Week, and she appeared on an Association for Corporate Growth Orange County marketing panel in 2023.
The latest chapter includes CPS Products and TalentForce joining the agency’s portfolio in the first half of 2026. For TalentForce, Beyond Fifteen reported building a brand and digital presence on a 90-day deadline. It reported six published articles within 45 days and estimated potential reach above 182 million impressions. Those are publicity measures; they do not establish how many distinct people read an article or became customers.
Agency-reported campaign figures, July 2026.
That July announcement also recorded Mackenzie Martin’s return as senior client advisor after an earlier stint at the agency. For a business that talks frequently about relationships, a returning colleague is a particularly apt development.
Licano’s stated ambition is to keep the company closely held and attentive to its people and clients. Scale has its attractions; so does being able to recognize the people doing the scaling. The kitchen table has served its purpose. The harder, continuing task is making room around it.