At sixteen, Margaret Murphy learned the first rule of entrepreneurship from a season without corn dogs. The owner of her small town’s drive-in could not operate it that summer. Murphy, her brothers, and their father stepped in. They kept the place running, paid themselves, and made enough for Margaret to buy her college books. It was not a unicorn, unless the town menu had one. It was a useful beginning: a problem appeared, a team formed, and somebody took responsibility for opening the doors.
That instinct would travel with her through a long Minnesota marketing career - sixteen years at Carlson Marketing Group, the building and sale of Denali Marketing, and the presidency of Olson. By the time she left Olson in late 2016, she had spent a quarter-century learning how service companies grow, merge, and occasionally bury the customer beneath a handsome pile of departments.
Then she did something unusually disciplined for an ambitious executive. She stopped.
The useful silence
Murphy called it an adult gap year. She traveled. She ran her first and, by her own account, only half-marathon. She set up in Minneapolis’ International Market Square and met with roughly 150 people. The point was not to perform reinvention for an audience. She had finished an absorbing chapter and wanted enough quiet for the next one to become legible.
“I needed to give myself time for my soul to catch up with my body.”Margaret Murphy
Six months in, she spent four days alone in Palm Springs. She returned with ten pages on where the agency market was failing. The firms she saw were mostly vertical by design: creative agency, media agency, digital agency. The labels made selling easier. They did not reflect the way a person encounters a brand. A customer can move from an ad to a website, an email, a store, a service conversation, and a loyalty program without pausing to admire the vendor map.
The opening was hiding in the seams. Murphy imagined a company organized around customer experience rather than professional tribe. She spent the remaining months testing and developing the idea, then quietly founded Bold Orange in late 2017 and announced it in January 2018.
Her advice from that chapter is pleasingly free of incense: “Action changes everything.” Good ideas, she has argued, should not be discussed until all their oxygen is gone. Make something happen. The gap year mattered because it led to a decision.
A career built in the gray
Murphy did not arrive at that decision as a novice. Her career at Carlson began despite an initial rejection letter. She stayed for sixteen years, became senior vice president of client services, and led a division with more than $225 million in revenue. The scale taught her strategy, operations, and the management of complicated client work. The rejection may have been administratively tidy. Her subsequent career was a more persuasive reply.
She left Carlson to co-found Denali Marketing, where she served as managing partner and president. Denali built a culture that was ranked the best small-company workplace in the region, then sold to Olson. At Olson, Murphy became president and chief operating officer. She helped expand the agency, oversaw three acquisitions, and stayed through its sale to ICF International.
There is a pattern here. Murphy repeatedly works where disciplines, people, and ownership structures meet. She says Bold Orange gets energy from the gray, the territory where a business problem refuses to be merely creative or technical. Her preferred phrase is “applied curiosity.” Curiosity alone can collect exquisite questions. Applied curiosity has deadlines.
The integrated model found traction. By early 2025, Bold Orange had more than 150 employees and had passed $30 million in annual revenue. Its clients have included Polaris, Great Clips, eBay, Red Wing Shoes, Great River Energy, Target, and Citi. The company’s work stretches across experience strategy, design, performance media, marketing automation, technology, analytics, and content. These are many nouns, but Murphy’s thesis is singular: organize them around how a customer actually experiences the brand.
The orange part matters
Company names are often the first tax a founder pays on everyone else’s patience. Murphy approached hers as a compact statement of intent. She had long loved the word “bold” because it suggested courage, strength, and action. But boldness without a purpose felt incomplete.
Orange had been her favorite color for about a decade. She noticed it less in clothing than in rooms, art, textiles, and photographs. It carried warmth and energy. More important, it was a blend of red and yellow. Her new company would blend things too: strategy with analytics, marketing with technology, brands with communities.
A two-word operating manual
Bold supplies the courage to choose. Orange supplies the instinct to combine. The work happens in the overlap.
This makes Bold Orange less a name than a management instruction. A client problem should not be bounced between specialist desks until it loses the will to live. Different capabilities should meet around it. The courage is in having a point of view; the humility is in admitting that no single discipline owns the answer.
The language around the company has room for mischief. Murphy describes its people as “professionally sassy.” In one April Fools’ announcement for a many-pocketed “DeskVest,” she declared that the company does not do crappy swag. The joke lands because it also reveals a standard: details communicate care, including the supposedly unserious ones.
Culture with a job to do
Murphy says talent is everything, then makes the phrase do actual work. Her definition of great talent includes people who are curious, driven, smart, collaborative, intentional, and appropriately sassy. Her test for a service business comes down to two forms of sentiment: employees who believe in the company and clients who choose it again, then recommend it.
“There isn’t a day I don’t wake up and try to lead.”Margaret Murphy
This is not the upholstered version of people-first leadership. Murphy writes about accountability, constant market change, difficult management, and the days when she leads well alongside the days when she does not. The phrase above her office is direct: “We inspire, we develop, and we empower.” She has said it was a commitment made at launch and a way to repay the mentors who did the same for her.
That ethic has moved beyond the company. Murphy joined the Twin Cities PBS board in 2022. She also chaired the board of RaiseRight, the gift-card fundraising platform that grew from Bold Orange’s early acquisition of Great Lakes Scrip Center. The platform’s model turns ordinary purchases into funds for schools, teams, bands, and other community groups. The connective tissue is not difficult to see: marketing, media, and fundraising are all systems for moving people toward participation.
Choosing the next chapter
Recognition accumulated as the company grew. Bold Orange ranked as the Midwest’s fastest-growing agency in 2023. Murphy became a two-time EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Heartland finalist, a TCB 100 leader, a Most Admired CEO, a Marketers That Matter Innovator, and, in 2026, a member of Inc.’s Female Founders 500.
Awards are tidy moments. Building is not. In August 2025, Bold Orange secured a strategic investment from Beringer Capital as its first investment partner, Mountaingate Capital, exited. Murphy said her team had proactively sought and chosen Beringer. The plan was to invest in capabilities and talent while remaining independently led, particularly as data and artificial intelligence changed the mechanics of customer relationships.
It is the familiar Murphy move at a larger scale: do not wait passively for the market to decide your next chapter. Study the shift, choose the partner, keep the operating thesis intact. Her stated aspiration is national growth, but the interesting constraint is cultural. Scale must not turn “human connection” into a phrase displayed in reception and contradicted everywhere else.
The practical lesson in Murphy’s story is not that every executive should fly to Palm Springs and emerge carrying ten prophetic pages. The geography is optional. The pause is not. A career produces knowledge faster than it produces perspective. Sometimes the next company is hiding inside the accumulated irritations of the previous ones, waiting for four quiet days and an honest pen.
Murphy began with a drive-in that needed an operator. Decades later, she saw an agency market that needed an integrator. In both cases, the opportunity was less glamorous than useful: bring the pieces together, make the experience work, and open the doors. Corn dogs were merely the pilot program.