Mimi Banks and the Business of Keeping in Touch

Mimi Banks kept in touch. With former colleagues, with clients, with the boss whose judgment she still carried around in her head. Years after leaving a job, she would still call, send a message, ask for advice or offer some. When she founded MB Social in 2014, those relationships gave her somewhere to begin. The question was modest enough to fit into an ordinary conversation: How could she help with social media?

She had spent 15 years at L’Oréal. She knew beauty, knew the machinery of a large company and had found work she loved leading social media for Lancôme. Now she was asking people she knew what they needed. Early projects helped her understand what the business should offer. The company took shape through the answers.

Twelve years later, Banks leads a fully remote agency from Los Angeles. Its work includes social strategy, content, community management and creator partnerships. Her own challenge has changed, too. Being useful got her into business. Giving other people room to be useful has become part of staying in it.

The assignment that arrived in her thirties

Her career began closer to the beauty counter than the algorithm. She worked at Clinique and Estée Lauder before her long L’Oréal chapter, which took her through New York and Paris. The corporate years supplied an education in how a beauty business works, well before anyone needed to worry about whether a vertical video had a sufficiently arresting first second.

Social media became her particular interest in her thirties. Janet Henderson gave her the opportunity to create social for Lancôme, an assignment Banks later described as life changing. She had been working for years; suddenly, a part of the job clicked. The experience complicates the tidy career story in which everyone discovers a calling at 21 and spends the next few decades obeying it.

She learned how to bring a beauty brand into an environment where the audience could answer back. That required content, of course, but also the work that follows publication: conversations, questions and the accumulation of familiarity. Banks had found an area she wanted to keep pursuing.

In 2014 she took a detour into Preen.Me, a startup built around beauty creators and user-generated content. For six months, she worked from an apartment abroad, learning about business development, partnerships and startup life. After the corporate setting, it was a considerable change of scenery. She followed an interest that was becoming difficult to ignore.

A business with names attached

When Banks marked MB Social’s tenth anniversary in 2024, she thanked Danya Klein and Tamar Yaniv for offering her the first consulting project. Henderson received credit for opening the door to social at Lancôme. The anniversary account reads like a business history with the people put back in.

Rebecca Sanders supplied another perspective. She had joined nine years earlier, when Banks was working solo. By 2024, Sanders wrote, the team had reached 20. Today, the agency lists Sanders as chief operating officer. The person who arrived near the beginning became part of the structure that lets the business continue.

Banks’s view of relationships has a useful lack of ceremony. In a 2020 conversation, she described herself as a connector, personally and professionally. She enjoyed bringing people together and helping businesses work with one another. There is a business-development logic to that, but she also describes it as something she likes doing.

“I believe in collaboration over competition.”

Mimi Banks

The names extend backward, too. Caroline Flandrin, her first boss at L’Oréal, taught her strategic thinking and gave her regular feedback. Long afterward, Banks still considered how Flandrin might approach a situation. A former manager can remain surprisingly present without attending a single meeting.

Nine years to the first team trip

MB Social was remote from the start. Its 2023 trip to Palm Desert was the first offsite after nine years in business. Most of the team came together for several days. They discussed the agency’s mission, philanthropy, efficiency and expertise. They also got to share the same weather.

The long wait gives the gathering its charm. An agency devoted to social connection had already spent years working through screens before arranging its own extended encounter in person. Familiar colleagues could finally occupy the same room.

Keeping that connection alive requires smaller rituals. Banks describes team brunches on camera, an accommodation to colleagues whose clocks disagree about whether it is breakfast or lunch. She also talks about trying to meet annually in person. Distributed work makes togetherness something to arrange.

The agency’s team page describes an all-female business and gives community management its own leadership role. That is a concrete expression of a priority Banks has carried through her work: somebody needs to look after the conversation once the post is published.

The founder cannot be the answer to everything

A growing team changes the meaning of help. If every decision still requires the founder, each new colleague brings another possible interruption. Banks’s experience inside L’Oréal gave her processes to bring into her own business, including clear distinctions between the person doing a piece of work and the person accountable for it.

Her June 2026 conversation with agency adviser Jason Swenk describes a business where department leaders can make judgments without sending every item upward. The 80 percent standard offers a way to discuss the uncomfortable difference between what a founder would do and what a trusted colleague does.

The number is a management guideline, rather than a measured result. Its purpose is to make room for delegation. Banks has to accept work that may arrive through someone else’s approach. A company cannot grow much independence if the founder keeps reclaiming the steering wheel.

Selectivity applies to clients as well. The same conversation describes her growing attention to working fit, payment terms and how clients treat the team. A recognizable brand name offers limited consolation when the relationship makes everyone’s day harder. The early willingness to take on projects has acquired boundaries.

The portfolio in her pocket

Banks has used her own social presence as a practical demonstration of the work. Her Instagram Stories have included shoots, projects, webinars and training. Some existing clients, she has said, bought additional services after seeing them there. Familiar customers had discovered something new about a business they already knew.

The company’s services widened as clients brought new needs. Banks’s anniversary reflection described a progression from social media management into community management, content creation and talent management. The offer could expand while the original question remained useful. A person who needed one kind of help could return for another.

Her interviews return to the difference between having an audience and earning its attention. In 2024, she explored how beauty marketing had become more responsive, with customers expecting transparency and an actual conversation. Her 2025 discussion with Lara Schmoisman put objectives, brand voice and storytelling ahead of algorithm tricks.

By October 2026, the subject included the way social platforms combine discovery, recommendations and shopping. In a conversation with her former L’Oréal colleague Carmine, Banks discussed creators, credibility and the information hiding in comment sections. The people answering a post can be telling a brand what its next piece of content should address.

She also spends time on the other side of the microphone. As a host of Beauty Is Your Business, Banks has interviewed founders about the companies they built. CeraVe co-founder Tom Allison publicly thanked her for their conversation about the brand’s origins. Asking people how they got here has become another part of her work.

The calendar keeps moving

Los Angeles became home in June 2020, after New York. Early favorites included Runyon Canyon, Malibu’s beach and her backyard. Her working day remained tied to New York hours. Geography offered the outdoors; the calendar retained its own opinion.

There is pleasure alongside the discipline. Banks has described loving travel, meeting people and exploring places. More recently, she has spoken publicly about finding love and becoming a mother on a timetable that differed from the one she once expected. Her husband, Michael Brombart, founded Community Provisions. Entrepreneurship has company at home.

The business has its own newer markers. MB Social announced finalist places for Best Social Media + Influencer Agency and Best Community Engagement in the 2026 BeautyMatter Awards. Banks said it was the first time she had entered an award. She thanked the team doing the daily work.

Her October 19 interview with Steve Preda returned to the everyday questions: supporting a growing team, making routine work more efficient and deciding where people still need to be involved. She discussed using AI for summaries and production assistance while keeping human judgment in community responses.

Her approach to making content is similarly practical. Show the product clearly. Use it in a setting that makes sense. Get close enough for someone to see what is happening, and make the sound and lighting work. The audience should be able to understand the demonstration without admiring the production budget first.

She applies the same attention to new platforms. On Reddit, her starting point is to read the conversation and understand the community’s rules before joining it. That asks something rather unfashionable of a business eager to make itself heard: patience. There are times when the most useful contribution comes after keeping quiet long enough to understand the room.

The tools have multiplied since her Lancôme days. Her working method still begins with paying attention to the person asking for something. A former colleague needs capacity. A teammate needs ownership. A customer needs an answer. Banks built a company by staying available to those conversations. Now she is building the organization that can keep them going.