The traffic manager left. Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl was the intern. In the space between those two facts, a career began to acquire its shape. She was studying at Centenary College in Shreveport on a volleyball scholarship, spending a summer at Mangan Holcomb & Partners. When the job opened unexpectedly, she took over. A summer placement had become a reason for other people to depend on her.
It is a pleasingly practical origin for the president and CEO of the agency now called mhp.si. The first assignment puts the practical work of an agency at the center of her story: somebody has to take responsibility when a colleague leaves. Vogelpohl later remembered loving the pace and atmosphere of the business. An agency had given her an opening; she found that she wanted to stay.
She planned to move to Fayetteville after college. Before leaving, she agreed to another conversation with the executives from her internship. They asked her to run a small office in northwest Arkansas, where her work included J.B. Hunt and Walmart. In 1999, she returned to Little Rock as director of public relations. By 2001, she was vice president.
A score was always being kept
Vogelpohl’s account of her early life gives that willingness to take responsibility a sporting context. She grew up in a family business and had two older brothers. She followed them into games where the expectation was to keep up. Being a girl provided no exemption from running, catching or making the shot. She described athletics as an education in discipline, cooperation and communication, as well as competition.
At Centenary, those habits had a formal setting. She was a four-year NCAA Division I letter-winner and graduated magna cum laude with a business communications degree. Academic work and team commitments occupied the same college years. Later, when explaining what had shaped her business life, she returned to the experience of playing alongside other people and being accountable to them.
Golf supplies another family connection. Her father, Ed Tallach, had been a PGA professional in the mid-1970s. Vogelpohl described growing up on a small public course in Bismarck, Arkansas. As an adult, she played charity tournaments and occasional outings with clients and family. Her published golf account places the game alongside work and relationships, rather than in a separate compartment marked leisure.
The family jokes have survived the job titles. She and her husband, Carl Vogelpohl, met while they were at different colleges and married in 2000. Asked in 2017 about working together, she answered with the compact diagnosis “Too many chiefs.” Their shared undertaking was parenting. Her observation that there are no second attempts at it gives the joke a serious companion: leadership at home has its own consequences.
Coffee with the next department
Vogelpohl’s advice to a new intern is more specific than the usual encouragement to work hard. In the agency’s 2025 internship material, she urges students to investigate as many disciplines as possible, whatever subject they are studying or specialty they think they want. She suggests approaching department directors for coffee, lunch or a conversation after work. Her prescription has a calendar and a beverage attached.
“Explore all areas. You might spark a new passion or path!”
Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl, advice to agency interns
That advice fits the breadth of her own work, which has included copywriting, public relations, crisis communications, business development and strategic planning. An agency puts those disciplines close enough for a curious newcomer to discover how they connect. Her suggestion asks the newcomer to use that proximity. Choosing a specialty need not mean spending the summer pretending the rest of the office has nothing to teach.
The internship program also names people who have made the transition to permanent jobs: an analytics specialist, an account strategist, a designer and a content project specialist. Vogelpohl’s own beginning appears among those examples. For someone arriving at the bottom of the organization, the chief executive’s history can make an ordinary assignment look worth examining more closely.
Little Rock was never the limit
Outside the agency, Vogelpohl served as president of Rotary Club of Little Rock, known as Club 99, in 2013-2014. It was the club’s centennial year. She was its fifth woman president, leading an organization whose local identity had long been connected to a much larger international network. A hundredth birthday gave the club a reason to examine who would carry it forward.
Vogelpohl wanted the celebration to help recruit the next generation. She also had little patience for the idea that Rotary amounted to a lunch gathering for older men. Her account emphasized the range of service opportunities and the possibility of returning year after year to different work. The recurring meal might be on the schedule; the useful part was what members could organize together.
Her Rotary involvement subsequently included chairing an international branding initiative. The assignment put an agency professional in a worldwide service organization’s communications conversation. The geography changed, but the underlying problem was familiar: people need to understand an organization before they can decide how to participate in it. Little Rock was a place to begin that work, with connections extending well beyond the city.
The honor, then the offer
The Women’s Foundation of Arkansas named Vogelpohl its Woman of the Year in Business in 2017. In her accompanying interview, she credited family members, mentors and colleagues who gave her opportunities on the strength of her performance. She wanted young women to have comparable openings. The award was recognition; the expressed ambition concerned who might follow.
In September 2020, she announced that the agency would provide pro bono marketing and mentorship to women-owned businesses receiving foundation grants. The offer gave the relationship a practical next step. Grant money helps a business operate; communications advice can help explain that business to the people it needs to reach. Here, a professional connection became an offer of professional work.
Her own recognition widened. PRNEWS included her among its 2020 PR People of the Year. Ragan honored her in the Leaders category of its 2021 Top Women in Communications awards, noting mentorship, gender equity work and support for the agency’s diversity and inclusion committee. Junior Achievement of Arkansas later included her among its Legacy Award recipients, another link between business leadership and opportunities for younger people.
“I call the agency business the ultimate team sport.”
Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl, 2020
A company can stay put and still change
Vogelpohl became agency president in 2010, the year MHP joined forces with Team SI. The combination brought established advertising and communications work together with digital marketing. By September 2020, the firms were announcing a more integrated operating structure and a shared website, with work for clients across the United States and Canada. Vogelpohl added the CEO title as part of that arrangement.
David Rainwater, her business partner and predecessor as CEO of the MHP entity, moved toward selected clients, strategy and mentoring. The change distributed responsibilities across people who already knew the business. It also formalized collaboration that had preceded the announcement. Her description at the time emphasized shared ownership, resources and values before the companies officially shared a brand.
By 2023, the agency’s work encompassed 128 client relationships, from large companies to smaller businesses, nonprofits and government bodies. That year, Vogelpohl was honored in the Agency Leaders category of PR Daily’s Top Women in Marketing awards. Its account also described the content studio’s response to short-form social video. The company she had entered as an intern was learning the habits of audiences watching on different screens.
More people at the table
The next name change came in July 2024, when MHP/Team SI became mhp.si. Alongside the refreshed identity came changes in ownership. Whitney Burgess Scales and Julie C. Robbins became shareholders; Lannie Byrd and Kristen Nicholson had bought or were buying shares. Rainwater was moving into an executive counsel role. The shorter name arrived with a wider conversation about who would lead.
Vogelpohl credited earlier leaders for preparing a succeeding generation. She recalled a period when her public relations expertise, Rainwater’s media knowledge and Chip Culpepper’s creative advertising experience formed a core group capable of running an agency. Then she acknowledged that this way of thinking also had to evolve. Experience had helped build the business. Its future required additional people to hold responsibility.
That is the consequential detail in a rebrand otherwise easy to reduce to a new logo. A name can be changed on stationery. Ownership involves people with a continuing stake in the work. Vogelpohl’s long tenure makes the decision especially resonant: someone who once received an opening was now helping shape the arrangements through which others would inherit responsibility.
Imagination has an obligation
In January 2023, Vogelpohl joined the panel pool for the National Advertising Review Board, the appellate body in the advertising industry’s self-regulatory system. Panel members supply independent peer review intended to support truthful, accurate advertising. Her name also appears in the announced 2026 pool. Making communications persuasive and asking whether their claims can withstand examination are related professional duties.
Her response to the original appointment put integrity at the center of the work. That emphasis matters in a career spanning advertising and public relations. Attention can be earned through an arresting idea; confidence in a business depends on what happens when somebody looks more closely. The review role gives that principle an institutional setting beyond her own agency.
Inside mhp.si, the next generation continues to take shape. A July 2026 announcement introduced Lee Perlman as creative director and promoted Chris Bell-Davis to associate creative director. Bell-Davis had joined in 2022 to help launch the content studio. Vogelpohl praised his understanding of how audiences consume content and the perspective he would bring to the agency’s future.
In September, she was again talking about another person’s development, this time Nicholson’s recognition as a PRSA Woman of Impact. Vogelpohl singled out the environment of trust and access Nicholson creates for colleagues. There is a recognizable thread from the intern who stepped into a vacancy to the executive praising someone else for making room. After three decades, the next opening still matters.