Lois Dirksen and the art of sharing the keys

An advertising executive can change a company’s language in an afternoon. Changing who owns it is a more consequential edit. In 2025, Lois Dirksen brought two longtime Level Mpls leaders, Kim Thelen and Erin Gwiazdon, into the agency’s ownership. The people already helping to steer the business would now have a stake in its future. For a brand strategist, that is an unusually concrete way to make a promise.

Dirksen is Level’s Minneapolis-based owner and CEO. Her work includes the familiar business of brand strategy: understanding an organization, finding an idea that fits, and helping it communicate. But the ownership decision supplies a useful entry into her career. The interesting question is what happens when someone who advises businesses about their identities has to make decisions about her own.

A slogan can travel light. Ownership carries responsibilities with it. Giving colleagues a place in that structure changes the relationship between their daily work and the company they are building. Read through that lens, Dirksen’s decision suggests a preference for continuity through people who already know the business. The story begins with an invitation, and the invitation has paperwork attached.

Before the brand, the response

Dirksen’s earlier career involved selling, responding and serving clients. From March 1990 to April 1994, she was director of direct response at Minnesota Mutual. She then spent just over a year as vice president of sales at Rezound International, an audiobook publisher. In May 1995, she joined ACI Telecentrics as a vice president. In August 2001, she became its executive vice president of client services.

Those job titles place her in several different commercial settings before her current agency role. They also offer a reminder that marketing careers can start far from a beautifully typeset campaign. Direct response asks whether somebody acts. Sales asks whether somebody buys. Client services asks whether a working relationship survives the next problem. Each puts an audience on the other side of the desk.

Her degree was a bachelor of science in political science from Arizona State University. The combination is appealingly untidy: political science, direct response, audiobooks, client services, branding. A career does not owe anyone a straight line. In Dirksen’s case, the documented sequence moves through businesses where communication is tied to a decision, a transaction or a continuing relationship.

The logo has company

A presentation bearing Dirksen’s name, Creating New Brands, was uploaded in July 2014. Its opening questions are wonderfully recognizable to anyone who has sat through a business discussion about branding: what if we already have a logo, and do we really have time for this? Even before the argument begins, the objections have arrived and taken seats.

The presentation distinguishes a brand’s promise from the reputation that develops when others judge its performance. It also separates a corporate identity, with its values and culture, from the features and benefits of an individual product. These are useful distinctions because a logo has limited powers. It can make a company recognizable. It cannot answer the telephone politely on the company’s behalf.

There is an operational implication in that way of thinking. If reputation depends on how a promise is experienced, then colleagues, processes and decisions belong in the branding conversation. A company’s identity has to survive ordinary work: the meeting, the delivery, the question from a customer. The presentation makes room for those realities rather than leaving the whole assignment to visual design.

That makes the later ownership decision an interesting companion to the earlier argument. A business can say it values its people. It can also make choices that give particular people more responsibility for its future. The connection is an editorial reading of Dirksen’s work, but a concrete one: ideas about identity become more revealing when placed alongside decisions about the institution itself.

A partnership with a second act

Thelen became a co-owner while serving as president and chief client officer; Gwiazdon did so as chief operating officer. These were established leadership relationships. By March 2025, the expanded ownership was public. Thelen described the intention simply: “We’re really building to be sustainable for the future.” That sentence gives the decision a horizon longer than the next campaign.

There is something quietly demanding about that horizon. A campaign ends; a business has to be ready for tomorrow. Clients need continuity, colleagues need direction, and owners have to consider what follows the work already on their desks. Making room for two existing leaders answers part of that problem through people whose responsibilities were already woven into the agency.

“We’re really building to be sustainable for the future.”Kim Thelen, on Level’s expanded ownership, 2025

A September 2025 account of Level’s recognition in the Empowering Women program described a firm with 14 employees, eight of them women. It also recorded the agency’s involvement with ADFED and The BrandLab to widen professional opportunity. Those details give the ownership story a workplace setting. The consequences are close enough to be felt across an actual team, rather than disappearing into a distant corporate chart.

For Dirksen, the question of opportunity also has a practical constraint. She has spoken about the difficulty of hiring women with prior top leadership experience in a male-dominated industry. That observation directs attention toward how experience gets created. Someone has to be given the responsibility before they can arrive at their next job having already done it.

What she notices in other people

Recommendations are miniature portraits, though often of two people at once. On Christine Wiegert’s LinkedIn profile, Dirksen praises a colleague for considering the business consequences of brand decisions and for seeing the larger picture. The qualities she chooses to notice are telling: judgment, perspective and an understanding of how marketing connects to the organization around it.

In another recommendation, she describes volunteer Susanne Holderried’s work on a new SaidianaCongo website. The account moves through choosing a platform, organizing the project, designing within brand guidelines and gathering the content. It gives project management its due. Anyone who has tried to assemble a website from several busy people’s contributions will recognize the achievement. The final page may look effortless; getting everyone to supply their piece rarely is.

These endorsements add texture to the executive biography. Dirksen pays attention to how work gets finished, who makes the process easier, and whether the result serves the organization. They also connect her professional vocabulary to volunteer work. A nonprofit website needs structure and decisions just as a commercial assignment does, even when the people involved are giving their time.

Minneapolis, with a wider map

Dirksen serves on the board of Saidiana, an organization supporting Congolese women. Her biography there records multiple trips to East Africa on behalf of WellShare International and time spent in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A 2010 annual report also lists her as WellShare’s treasurer. These are specific commitments and places, giving her public career a geography beyond Minneapolis.

Another record sits closer to home. The Young Women’s Initiative of Minnesota’s November 2017 Blueprint for Action lists Lois Dirksen among its lead investors. Together, the board role, travel and donor acknowledgment show several forms of participation: organizational responsibility, visits and financial support. They should be understood on their own terms, without turning them into a convenient promotional anecdote.

The Minneapolis agency has its own variety of assignments. A university procurement document names Dirksen as Level’s president and describes work in digital planning, advertising and media. It lists education clients including Hamline University, Trine University and Crown College. The detail is useful because it grounds the broad phrase “brand strategy” in institutions with different audiences, priorities and reasons to communicate.

Institutional work can require a particular patience. There are people inside an organization who know its history, people outside who encounter only fragments, and decisions about what deserves attention. The strategist’s task involves making those perspectives meet. Dirksen’s career crosses enough different settings to make that problem a recurring thread, without pretending that every assignment is the same.

The thinking stays in the room

More recent public comments bring the story back to the work itself. Dirksen has endorsed a model for multi-location brands that combines consistent direction with local discretion. In a separate comment, she points to the design of data, media and decision-making as a source of effectiveness. Both observations concern how a business organizes its judgment across people and places.

The balance matters because central rules and local knowledge can pull in different directions. A coherent brand needs recognizable standards. A local team encounters circumstances that a central plan may miss. Dirksen’s comments favor arrangements that accommodate both. Read alongside the ownership change, they suggest a continuing interest in where authority sits and how people can use it.

She has also argued publicly for the value of human creative judgment as technology changes. The emphasis falls on context, experience and understanding what moves an audience. It is a fitting concern for someone whose work has included response, sales and client relationships: tools can speed an activity, while deciding what the activity should accomplish remains a human assignment.

The next chapter at Level therefore has two scales. There is the daily scale of client work, ideas and decisions. There is the longer scale of an agency whose ownership now includes two additional leaders. Dirksen’s most revealing recent move brings those scales together. The people carrying responsibility for the business have been invited to help own its future. The keys have company, too.