Lindsay Nahmiache and the business that brought her back

Lindsay Nahmiache sold her company and then bought it back. It is a slightly awkward sequence for the usual entrepreneurial fairy tale, which tends to end at the sale. The founder signs, the champagne appears, and everyone politely stops asking what happens on Monday. Nahmiache kept going. Monday, it turned out, mattered.

She dates the sale of Jive PR + Digital to 2021. She wanted change and room to discover a life beyond the agency she had helped build. At first, the freedom suited her. Then she missed the work of creating and leading. She began building again through Veriphy Skincare. When Jive became available, she returned as its buyer.

The interesting part is her insistence that the second turn at ownership should involve a different way of leading. A familiar company could become a new assignment. For a publicist accustomed to finding an angle in other people’s businesses, this was a particularly personal editorial problem: what, exactly, should the next chapter be about?

Six years abroad. No local experience.

Long before the sale, there was another mismatch between a tidy career story and an actual career. Nahmiache, who is Canadian and based in Los Angeles, spent six years working in the United Kingdom and India. Her employers included E! Entertainment in London and Contiloe Films in Mumbai. Those are useful places to learn that entertainment is both an imaginative undertaking and a business with deadlines.

Coming back to North America ought to have made for a promising interview conversation. Instead, she encountered employers who wanted North American experience. Work done elsewhere did not count in the way she expected. The geographical range that made her résumé interesting also made it inconvenient to classify.

She took contract assignments. They accumulated. Eventually, an agency made more sense than continuing to look for an employer. Jive was founded in 2009 with Almira Bardai. The origin has none of the ceremonial grandeur of a pitch competition: Nahmiache has described beginning with a laptop in her living room, trying to pay the bills.

The clients who refused a referral

By January 2016, Jive had opened in Los Angeles, with Nahmiache heading the new operation. Existing Canadian clients were expanding into the United States and wanted their agency to accompany them. She initially recommended American PR firms. The clients came back and asked Jive to do it.

Within six months, there was a Santa Monica office and a growing American client list. The sequence is revealing. Her own return to North America had been complicated by a demand for local experience. Now clients were asking her to cross a border because they valued the experience they already had with her.

It was also a specific commercial proposition. The new office would support Canadian businesses entering the United States and serve American entertainment and consumer clients. Its services included media relations, social media, influencer programs, community management, events, and branded content. The relationship could travel even when the market changed. International expansion sounds grander than being asked twice, but being asked twice is rather good evidence of demand.

Please mind the mule

To understand the range of that work, consider her description of a communications day in 2017. It included newsfeeds, pitches, email, coffee, an 800-pound mule in a freight elevator for a Juan Valdez Coffee radio interview, and Jason Priestley on a bobsled for the Whistler Film Festival. The coffee appears more than once. This seems fair.

The mule is funny because it occupies the same list as the email. Publicity has the peculiar distinction of requiring both an idea worth repeating and someone willing to arrange its transport. A colourful concept remains a concept until the interview happens. There is a great deal of practical work between a clever sentence and a memorable morning.

Her advice to aspiring communicators was correspondingly plain: listen, ask good questions, take risks. She also singled out long-standing client relationships as an accomplishment. Some had stayed with Jive from its opening year. For all the picturesque activity, the less photogenic achievement was continuity. A client returning with another brief says something a single lively event cannot.

A different seat in the music business

In March 2021, Songtradr announced Nahmiache’s appointment as chief marketing officer. The music licensing marketplace wanted to grow in existing and new markets and broaden its international reach across music and technology. Her background brought together traditional marketing, digital work, and experience with consumer and entertainment brands.

The client list attached to her appointment included Virgin Radio, Granville Island Brewing, Juan Valdez Coffee, eOne Films, and Meow Wolf. These are quite different briefs. A film, a beverage, and an immersive art experience give an agency different things to explain and different reasons for people to care.

Songtradr CEO Paul Wiltshire pointed to her experience building teams able to serve multiple industries around the world. That is an instructive detail in a career easily reduced to colourful campaigns. The job involved scaling a business and its brands. The appointment put the agency founder inside a company whose growth she was now responsible for helping direct.

Making herself less necessary

For someone who enjoys variety, Nahmiache has developed a notably practical interest in structure. In a later conversation about strategic systems, she discussed the need for founders to withdraw from everyday operations so that a business can grow beyond them. Process documentation and a capable team give the owner room to think further ahead.

There is an obvious tension here. Founding a company rewards the person who steps in whenever something needs doing. Growing it eventually requires that same person to stop stepping into everything. A business that always waits for its founder has acquired a very expensive queue.

Her remote team has used Slack as a shared working and social space. She has also described simplifying an overcrowded collection of tools to Slack, Zoom, Google Drive, and the Entrepreneurial Operating System framework. Software administration had begun consuming too much attention. The answer was fewer tools and clearer routines. Even a communications agency can have too much communication machinery.

Her management concerns include feedback, too. She has spoken about annual 360 reviews and the difficulty of getting people to tell a chief executive what they really think. The title can make candour inconvenient. Seeking criticism is one way to keep the job from becoming a room full of agreeable echoes.

“If you aren’t a little bit uncomfortable, you aren’t playing big enough.”

Lindsay Nahmiache, on growth and systems

From the brief to the balance sheet

Nahmiache’s work now extends across advising, investing, and operating. She is a founding member of Legacy 8, an early-stage venture fund. Jive’s leadership profile describes her as an investor and board member whose agency work includes helping leaders decide what their businesses need at a particular stage.

Jive Angel Lab gives that overlap a formal home. Its model combines a lighter retainer with sweat equity and hands-on marketing support for selected founders. Public relations, influencer work, creator content, social media, and launch strategy become part of a relationship that includes an ownership interest. The agency participates in the outcome it is helping to produce.

Veriphy puts her on another side of the same table. She was a customer before becoming its owner and CEO. In February 2026, she described concentrating on Canada and the United States despite requests to expand into Europe and Asia. The business had five products. For an entrepreneur who enjoys pursuing ideas, choosing where to concentrate is a meaningful decision.

An audience young enough for a piggy bank

Her interest in entrepreneurship reaches people who are some distance from hiring an agency. Nahmiache developed Pogo Pig Savings, an app and book introducing young children to saving. She has mentored teenage entrepreneurs through TiE Global and worked with women building businesses through mentoring networks.

The Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization lists her as a California ambassador. She also co-founded the nonprofit Projecting Change Film Festival, bringing films together with talks around social and sustainability themes. Entertainment, in that project, offered a route from an emotional response to an action someone might take afterward.

These projects use different formats for a related purpose: making an idea accessible enough that another person can do something with it. A child learning about saving and a founder deciding how to launch have very different budgets. Both need an intelligible starting point. The distance between those audiences helps explain why her career keeps straying beyond a single job description.

The publicist steps into the picture

Ask for three words and Nahmiache offers “Optimistic, curious, slightly impatient.” The last one does useful work. It gives the first two somewhere to go. She has also described herself as a “positive bully,” the friend who hears about a trip or a new job someone wants one day and encourages them to move the date forward.

There are quieter enthusiasms. She enjoys puzzles and writes the next day’s priorities on a sticky note, taking pleasure in crossing them off. Her son repeatedly appears in her descriptions of what she values outside work. Her chosen good-mood song is OneRepublic’s I Lived. She also appeared as an extra in Bollywood films while living in India, a small credit in a career spent helping others attract attention.

Yet attracting attention for herself took practice. Reflecting on 2025, Nahmiache wrote about finally appearing in her company’s social content and sharing it through her own channels. After years working behind the scenes, she worried about seeming excessively promotional. Knowing how visibility works for a client did not automatically make it comfortable for her.

That admission gives the story a useful ending for now. She has crossed countries, taken contracts when jobs failed to materialize, run campaigns, joined a music company, and returned to a business she had sold. The next unfamiliar territory included the camera on her own company’s feed. Even the person arranging the spotlight sometimes needs a moment before stepping into it.