Missouri founder offers a triple shot of bold business, distilling branding for small ventures

Editor’s note: The following story was produced through a paid partnership with MOSourceLink, which boasts a mission to help entrepreneurs and small businesses across the state of Missouri grow and succeed by providing free, easy access to the help they need — when they need it.

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HERMANN, Missouri — Even tiny teams deserve strong branding, said Marie Newell, a rural-Missouri graphic designer who specializes in building brands and digital marketing for small businesses; on top of that, she’s involved with her husband’s whiskey distillery and operating a coffee roastery.

Marie Newell, Neat + Nimble, Lionheart Whiskey Co., Clout Coffee

“We work for a lot of small businesses by choice,” said Newell, who set aside her successful corporate career in January 2021 to give Neat + Nimble her full attention. “I really enjoy working with small business owners who don’t necessarily have time to learn a lot about marketing — but they know it’s so important for their business to survive — and being a really good resource for helping explain it very simply, making it very approachable and a lot less scary for them.”

But it’s not just through her experience working in-house for Columbia’s top brands or Neat + Nimble clients that Newell has seen great marketing and strong branding pay off, she notes. She’s been doing it 20-plus years, guiding her parent’s independent motorcycle shop, Chariots of Fire Customs, LLC, since she was a teenager. She’s able to push boundaries and go beyond the average client’s comfort zone with Lionheart Whiskey Co., which she runs alongside her husband, Clayton Newell — along with the coffee company, Clout Coffee, she owns with her husband and a couple of friends.

Newell’s always been driven to share what she knows and support others as they grow, she shared. She taught adult education classes for several years at the Columbia Area Career Center in the evenings before becoming a parent required a change. After freelancing part time for many years, Newell left a full-time director position at a local university in January 2021 to give Neat + Nimble her full attention as it grew. The virtual agency offers a variety of ways to assist clients, depending on their needs, budget and how they want to interact with their brand and marketing, serving clients both in and beyond Missouri’s borders.

“We’ve always offered quite a few workshops and hands-on consulting and training where we can step in and help someone figure something out and get something set up and then send them on their way,” she explained. “But we also do a full-service agency approach, where we’re just doing it all for them so they can focus on their zone of genius.”

Anticipating how artificial intelligence might change the graphic design and marketing industries, Newell is diversifying her business and building her personal brand as a thought leader and consultant, she noted. She recently gave her keynote talk — “The Three Cs in Success” — at Global Entrepreneurship Week — Kansas City where she spoke about culture, craft and cashflow and how they all are vital to success as an entrepreneur.

“Skills in all three areas are needed to be equally great for an entrepreneurs to stay in business, honestly, and succeed and scale,” Newell said. “As business owners, it’s really easy to focus on the thing that we’re good at and lose sight of the things that are maybe not our strengths. So remembering that we do need to work on all three sides of the triad really helps.”

Lionheart Whiskey Co.’s lineup of spirits

More businesses on tap

Around the same time that she branched out on her own, her husband, Clayton, was working on starting his own business, Lionheart Whiskey Co.

They moved from Columbia, Missouri, to Hermann to launch the distillery. It opened in summer 2022 within a historic downtown building that a friend purchased to renovate. Because the business doesn’t yet have its own still, they contract out distillation. However all the proofing, finishing and bottling is done on-site and they handle their own distribution.

“We started with routes going between St. Louis all the way down to the Lake of the Ozarks area up to Columbia,” Newell noted. “Then we popped over and started in Kansas City and are spreading back toward our other routes right now. So we’re in a bunch of different retail establishments where people can buy bottles even if they’re not near Hermann.”

The distillery also has a tasting room where it offers tasting tours; plus, it features a menu of seasonal cocktails, flights and neat pours.

“The tour experience involves storytelling and an explanation of our location and how historic the building is, as well as our origin story and a tour of our production area,” Newell said. “Then we bring the group back up to our tasting room and go through a guided flight as well as teaching them how to make the perfect Old Fashioned.”

When Lionheart first opened, only two whiskies were available. So Clayton Newell found a barrel-aged coffee out of Omaha, Nebraska — Clout Coffee — to help stock the shelves along with a myriad other whiskey related accoutrements. The coffee company’s then-founder later approached him about taking over the business after personal matters required her to move on.

“She presented the idea a second time and said something to the effect of, ‘Hey, I know that this isn’t necessarily on your plan of things to do, but I really think that this would be a great fit for you,’” Newell recalled. “‘You’re already a distillery. We use barrels to age the coffee beans in. And you have all these skill sets and things that are already set up in your own business that would really lend itself to this.’”

Marie Newell and her husband, Clayton, pose with friends who all own Clout Coffee; courtesy photo

The husband-and-wife team knew that if they were going to take on another business, they would need to find partners to take on part of the load, Marie says. So they approached friends Alicia and Brian Jett about buying it together. And after doing their due diligence, the two couples took over Clout Coffee in late 2023.

“We’ve had Clout for about a year,” Newell added. “January will come up as our anniversary for the first roast in Hermann, and it has slowly grown.”

Alone together

Managing three small businesses is an impossible task without the right support network, Newell shared.

“It’s important to have a community around you that is going through some of these same things and having some of these similar experiences to feel like you’re not alone when it gets really hard,” she explained.

When she started to evolve from solo freelancer to leading a team at Neat + Nimble, she reached out to the Missouri Women’s Business Center in Columbia, she noted, where she got support with finalizing her business plan and access to coaching.

“The coaches were a great sounding board as I was working through the beginning stages as a business owner instead of a contractor,” she continued. “They had tools I may not have otherwise had access too that could be used for planning and projections.”

Newell also started to build her network of fellow entrepreneurs through a professional networking group, workshops she taught at the business center and through time spent at the REDI Hub co-working space, she said.

“Spending time every week in that space while I was away from my home office doing my networking, I got to know lots of different entrepreneurs who were definitely in startup mode or in the beginning stages of their business,” she added. “Doing all of that alongside other entrepreneurs who are in a very similar situation, I just felt like I had a lot of support. You feel like you’re not doing it alone.”

Since then, Newell has developed a strong network within her new hometown of Hermann where there’s a strong community of women business owners, she notes. She currently serves as the vice president of her local chamber, as well as serving as a volunteer for several events and committees throughout the year.

“Leaving my corporate career working in-house for one brand at the top of my industry to step into a new role serving my many clients has been incredibly rewarding,” she said. “As a multi-business owner I’m able to relate to their challenges and help guide them using my experience and talents. It’s so different from the life I once led, and yet, it just feels right — like it’s what I’ve always supposed to do.”