Leader: Recognized as one of Colorado’s Top 25 Most Powerful Women; Managed steady growth and grew agency to a 13+ team from the ground up; Featured industry speaker.
Results-Oriented: Generated $3M+ in agency revenue reaching as much as a 22% profitability. Doubled the revenue of more than a dozen family-owned businesses.
Innovator: Recognized by the industry at a national level for instituting a scalable structure that reduces employee layoffs and allows for tighter cash management controls. Changed the perception of service industry through breakthrough strategies.
Jen Lester
Thinker
In 2001, Jen Lester co-founded Philosophy Communication, Inc., an award-winning, marketing and public relations firm in Denver, Colorado serving the needs of well-known clients such as Sub-Zero Group Inc., Natural Grocers, Sleep Number Corp., and Caribou Coffee Company, Inc. With 13 employees by her side, Jen has helped the agency reach $4M+ revenue and as much as 22% profitability.
Jen Lester’s visionary leadership comes from expertise honed by more than 20 years in the industry. Her primary roles in the firm are managing partner and business development where she is responsible for setting strategic goals and objectives, monitoring performance and driving business growth. Considered to be an industry early adopter, Jennifer has created an innovative scalable operational structure for the firm that addresses the drastic hiring and layoff fluctuations that plague agency workflow. Not only does Philosophy’s unique operational model adjust for extreme cash flow shifts, it harnesses the expertise of an underutilized workforce population.
Jen has built a high-performance team by hiring, developing and motivating skilled employees to achieve organizational goals and objectives. She created a unique program called Path to Leadership that begins by identifying each employee’s unique difference and sets the expectation that employees bring that difference to their client work. Through many innovative professional development strategies, Jen has created an agency culture that increases client revenue, improves client operational efficiencies and fosters exceptionally strong client organizational cultures. As a result, Philosophy’s employee turnover rate is less than 10% with a client retention of more than 90%.
Under Jen’s direction, Philosophy Communication has been recognized as a Top 250 Private Advertising and Marketing company and a Top 100 Woman-Owned Business by ColoradoBiz Magazine and a Top Advertising Agency by Denver Business Journal.
Jen currently holds a marketing board position with Daniels College of Business, University of Denver. In addition, Philosophy has provided pro bono marketing and public relations services to several Colorado not-for-profit organizations, including the Colorado Business Community for the Arts, One Club for Creativity Denver, Dress for Success Denver and HomeAid Colorado. Jen has been a featured speaker at the Appliance Service Training Institute, the National Public Relations Society of America annual conference, the University of Denver, Metropolitan State College, the Colorado Department of Agriculture, American Society of Landscape Architects of Colorado as well as many other local professional conferences.
She is a past president of the Denver chapter of The Association for Women in Communications and served on the board of the national organization. Jen was honored by the Colorado Women’s Leadership Coalition as one of Colorado’s Top Women Leaders. Most recently Jen has been recognized as a Top 25 Most Powerful Woman from the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce and as an Outstanding Woman in Business finalist by the Denver Business Journal.
In her free time, Jen enjoys spending time with her sophomorically humorous husband and cheeky girls, reading, playing tennis and baking cakes for her extremely talented and well-deserving teammates.
Jen holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota.
