The Sisters Who Ran a Healthcare Agency Without an Office - and Sold It in Ten Years
Barbara Pantuso and Lisa Reid started a remote healthcare agency before remote was cool, sold complex science as clear stories, and cashed out to Supreme Group ten years later. Here is how they did it - and what a small shop can steal from the playbook.
In 2014, two sisters looked at the healthcare advertising business - the long hours, the crowded floor plans, the burnout dressed up as commitment - and decided to build the opposite. Barbara Pantuso and Lisa Reid launched Nimble·Works with no office and a single hypothesis: great work can happen anywhere, anytime, outside the confines of a traditional agency. Six years before the rest of the world discovered the mute button, they were already running a distributed company.
The other bet was about subject matter. Healthcare, biotech and medical technology are where marketing usually goes to drown in jargon. Nimble·Works pointed itself directly at that problem: take the hard science and the hard tech, and make it something a human being can actually follow. The agency described its sweet spot as the place where "high science" meets "high tech" - and it built a business out of translation.
The two founders came at that from complementary angles. Barbara Pantuso arrived from SYP Partners with an entrepreneurial, strategy-first background; Lisa Reid came out of McCann Health with the creative and copywriting craft. They had worked together at a healthcare agency before, noticed their strengths did not overlap so much as interlock, and decided to build something on that fit. Being sisters is the detail people remember, but the working partnership is the part that mattered - one could shape the business case while the other shaped the words.
SCIENCE
TECH
↑ THE OVERLAP IS THE WHOLE BUSINESS
Selling clarity in an industry full of noise
Most agencies pitch reach. Nimble·Works pitched understanding. Its work covered the unglamorous middle of a health company's life - brand strategy and positioning, messaging, customer decision-journey mapping, creative storytelling, animation and video, websites, apps, UX design, internal activation workshops, and analytics. The through-line was a claim the founders repeat often: they bring clinical and technical depth, a "systems view of healthcare that allows us to see how and where clients' solutions fit."
That systems view is the actual product. A biotech company with a genuinely novel diagnostic does not primarily need a louder ad. It needs someone who can explain where the thing sits in a doctor's day, a payer's math, and a patient's decision - and then say it in plain language. That is what a science-fluent agency sells, and why a 20-person shop could sit across the table from far larger clients.
The range of work reflects that. Nimble·Works covered strategy and diagnostics, digital-health platforms, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, rare disease, value-based care, virtual care and wearables - the full spread of what "the future of healthcare" now means. A brand launch for a diagnostics company and an internal-activation workshop for a device maker are very different assignments, but both come down to the same skill: deciding what is true, what matters, and how to say it so the audience acts.
Who actually hires them
For a boutique, the client list runs surprisingly blue-chip. Over the decade Nimble·Works built long relationships with Philips, Novartis, Amneal, DayTwo, Exact Sciences, Takeda, HOYA Surgical Optics and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, spanning pharma, diagnostics, medical devices and digital health. When it launched its sister agency in 2023, GE HealthCare and Clario signed on early.
Bars indicate relative prominence in public references, not spend.
"You don't know until you try. Try at least once."Barbara Pantuso, Co-Founder & CEO
The remote-first bet, and why it aged well
Nimble·Works was not remote because of a crisis. It was remote because the founders thought the office model produced burnout without producing better work. That let them hire specialists wherever the specialists happened to live, and it kept overhead low enough that a small team could take on large accounts. Headquarters, for the record, is Hudson, New York - a town of fewer than 6,000 people, not a Manhattan tower.
Two agencies, on purpose
In 2023 Nimble·Works did something most founders never consider: it started a second agency. Vital·Works, led by co-founder Lisa Reid with managing partners Kristy Carabello and Sara Zaccheo, was aimed at clients working at the intersection of clinical and technological innovation. The quiet logic underneath it is conflict management - a separate brand let the founders serve competing accounts without stepping on client confidentiality. Structure became strategy.
This is the part a small business can copy directly. When a single brand can no longer hold every client you want, a second one can - and it can carry its own positioning, its own team, and its own confidentiality wall. It is cheaper than turning work away.
There is also a values thread that runs alongside the commercial one. Nimble·Works is women-owned and women-led, and it took on work with a public-good edge - its collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation centered on health equity, the unglamorous project of making care reach the people who usually get less of it. Pantuso has framed the ambition in plain terms: women founders, she has said, get to build "the industry we all want to live and work in." For an agency, that is not a slogan so much as a hiring and client-selection filter.
The business model underneath all of this was refreshingly plain: project and retainer engagements billed to healthcare and life-sciences clients, with a lean, distributed team keeping overhead down. There was no venture round, no growth-at-all-costs mandate, no roomful of junior staff to feed. That discipline is part of why the numbers worked - a specialized shop that stays small can charge for depth instead of competing on volume, and it can walk away from work that does not fit.
The ten-year exit
On May 7, 2025, Supreme Group acquired both Nimble·Works and Vital·Works - its eighth acquisition - and kept the founding team in place. The stated rationale from the buyer was speed: what the founders brought, in Supreme Group CEO Tom Donnelly's words, was "a blend of deep strategic thinking and the ability to execute quickly." For Nimble·Works, the appeal ran the other direction - plugging a boutique into a platform with the AI and analytics muscle that creative shops increasingly need.
"Leveraging Supreme Group's powerful platform of agencies will enable us to bring AI-informed insights and enhanced digital capabilities."Barbara Pantuso, on the acquisition
Read the timing and it looks less like luck and more like a call. As AI began reshaping how creative and analytics work gets done, a specialized independent had two options: build that stack alone, or join a group that already had it. Nimble·Works chose the second, from a position of strength rather than distress.
Where it fits - and where the model strains
In the market, Nimble·Works sits opposite the large healthcare networks - the IPG Health / McCann Health, Publicis Health and Ogilvy Health machines - along with data-heavy players like Real Chemistry. The boutique's advantage is depth and speed; its natural ceiling is scale. That ceiling is exactly why a platform acquisition makes sense: some capabilities, particularly heavy analytics and AI infrastructure, are hard to build at 20 people.
So where would this playbook not work? The specialization that made Nimble·Works valuable also narrowed it - a shop this deep in healthcare cannot easily pivot to consumer packaged goods. The remote model rewards senior, self-directed specialists and can be harder on people who need in-person apprenticeship. And the founder-sister partnership at the center is not a template you can hire for. The lessons travel; the exact conditions do not.
"You just can't predict everything. Things will go wrong."Barbara Pantuso
The honest summary is unfashionably boring: pick a narrow lane, go genuinely deep, keep the team small and senior, build real trust over years, and know when to plug into something bigger. Nimble·Works did that for a decade in a corner of marketing most people never think about - and it worked well enough to get bought.
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