Serena Mastin’s mother had a business proposal. Her daughter had spent years giving her energy to other people’s companies. Perhaps, her mother suggested, she could put some of that effort into her own. Mastin was unconvinced. Mothers, after all, are seldom disinterested assessors of their children’s potential. Then came the persuasive part: “If not for yourself, then do it for me.” Pulse Marketing began in 2013. Her mother named it, too.
It is a pleasing origin for a company in the persuasion business. Before the strategies, websites and advertising campaigns, there was a mother who understood her audience. The name she chose placed a human concern inside a commercial proposition: businesses need a way to connect with people. Mastin would spend the following years working out what that meant in practice.
The phone call before the business cards
One of Mastin’s early career openings arrived on a telephone she was being paid to answer. She was working at a distribution center when a temp agency called, looking for the hiring manager. The recruiter ended up recruiting Mastin. She went to an interview during her lunch break, got hired and moved to the corporate office of Hot Topic as a receptionist.
She retold that episode in an April 2026 podcast conversation. Its appeal lies in the smallness of the opening. No elaborate entrance, no grand announcement. A conversation offered a possibility, and she took it. There would be larger marketing responsibilities later, but the first important change in this account came through answering a call and agreeing to go somewhere new.
Her subsequent corporate work included sales and marketing leadership at K. Hovnanian Homes from 2001 to 2008, then Kisco Senior Living from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, she joined Partners In Leadership as vice president of marketing projects. The industries differed; the recurring assignment was to help an organization explain its value to the people it hoped to reach.
Those dates describe a professional life already well underway before entrepreneurship entered the picture. Mastin brought experience of working inside organizations to the problem of serving them from outside. She had also accumulated relationships with other business leaders. She joined Vistage in 2016 and became a founding member of Peer Executive Boards in 2019, keeping a place for conversations with people facing their own management decisions.
An agency that began in the living room
Pulse’s first address was domestic. The business operated from the family living room before moving into an office. In a 2021 account of the agency’s origins, Mastin described wanting clients of different sizes to feel represented. She measured satisfaction in their progress: a business growing, an advertising cost improving, a client finding a clearer way to tell its story.
There is useful specificity in that ambition. The client does not experience a marketing agency as a list of departments. The client experiences whether the work hangs together. A website, a campaign and a social account all speak for the same organization. When they seem to have been introduced only recently, somebody has a coordination problem.
Her agency’s answer is a shared marketing team. Pulse brings together designers, writers, developers and digital specialists for organizations that need several kinds of work without assembling every role themselves. It serves both businesses selling to other businesses and companies selling to consumers. Mastin remains its founder and CEO, connecting the company’s commercial offering with her interest in stories and relationships.
The present offer includes strategy, creative design, digital marketing, website support and reporting. There is a practical sequence beneath those service labels: understand the business, decide what it needs to communicate, make the work, then examine what happened. For a founder, keeping those activities connected is a continuing responsibility. A good introduction can open a relationship; the work that follows has to justify it.
Three verbs for the difficult conversation
Inside the company, Mastin gives communication an acronym: L.U.V. Listening, Understanding and Validating. The spelling is entirely consistent with an agency called Pulse. It also gives people three actions to remember when a conversation becomes difficult, which is rather more useful than asking everyone to be excellent and hoping they agree on the definition.
Her interest in feedback extends to how employees speak to leaders and how leaders respond. She describes empathy and self-awareness as part of her management approach. Those qualities have a concrete test in an agency: can someone raise a concern before it becomes a client problem? A culture statement has a relatively easy life on a wall. A deadline gives it something to do.
In her January 2026 essay on listening, Mastin turns to the habits that interrupt an ordinary conversation. Preparing a reply while someone is speaking. Assuming a familiar complaint means the same thing this time. Offering a solution before finding out whether one is wanted. The advice is deliberately usable: let the speaker finish, ask for clarification and choose an appropriate setting for the discussion.
She asks readers to consider whether the person speaking wants support or solutions. That distinction allows the other person some say in what happens next. A manager who immediately starts fixing can miss the point as efficiently as a manager who barely listens. Mastin’s writing makes patience part of the work, even when the person in charge would rather get moving.
Another essay, published in November 2025, examines the language of ownership. Her suggestion is that leaders look at their own contribution to an outcome before assigning responsibility elsewhere. A missed deadline, for example, can become a question about whether priorities were clear. She recommends curiosity in difficult conversations and questions that help people identify what they can influence.
This gives her public writing a recognizable subject. She returns to the gap between what a person intends and what another person hears. Advertising operates in that gap. So does management. The vocabulary can become affectionate, but the underlying work is precise: understand the audience, check the meaning and take responsibility for the message you send.
The storyteller steps onto the page
In 2023, Mastin published her memoir, Exposed: You Can’t Heal When You Hide, through Heartfelt Stories. She had spent years helping organizations decide what to say about themselves. Now the decisions concerned her own life. The book added a public author’s role to a career already occupied with other people’s narratives.
Her childhood included witness protection and foster care; she has also spoken publicly about experiencing homelessness as a teenager. In a January 2026 interview, she described being reunited with her mother as a cherished childhood memory. Her mother’s determination remained important long after that reunion. The encouragement to found Pulse belongs to that longer relationship, rather than appearing as a convenient entrepreneurial anecdote on its own.
Writing continued after the memoir. She contributed to Own Your Story in 2024 and later described contributing to The Empowered Grief Journey. In July 2024, she announced a nomination for Author of the Year in the Women’s Business Awards. A nomination belongs in a different column from a win, but it marks how far her public work had extended beyond an agency’s client list.
“Listen, understand and validate.”
Mastin’s L.U.V. approach to communication
Outside those roles, her author biography makes room for creating art, exploring new places, hiking and spending time with her two children. These details bring some proportion to the executive titles. The person running the agency also wants to make things, go somewhere and be with her family. A business can occupy a life without supplying all its interests.
The question after thirteen years
Mastin has been candid about wanting a future with more room in it. In November 2024, she spoke about growing Pulse and eventually selling it, with time for workshops, writing, public speaking and philanthropy. She also expressed interest in a film drawn from her memoir and art-inspired properties that could become retreats. These were ambitions she was exploring, with the uncertainty that plans deserve.
That distinction becomes especially relevant in October 2026. An episode of Niiamah Ashong’s Outlier’s Edge frames her position as a founder at a crossroads. After thirteen years running an agency, how could she pursue a wider calling while remaining responsible to the people who helped build it? The conversation’s organizing question was whether she could do both.
It gives this story an open ending. Mastin has made a career out of helping people communicate, and her next decisions involve communicating something difficult herself. Her mother once encouraged her to invest in a business of her own. Years later, with that business established, she is considering where to put her effort next. The first conversation helped her begin. The next one concerns what she wants to make room for.