The Hot Dish Leadership Team is pleased to welcome Kelly Lainsbury as its first-ever Director of Creative Operations. Kelly brings over 15 years of marketing and creative operations experience to her new role. She’s passionate about building rock star teams and ensuring an efficient creative process, with the goal of completing client projects on time and within budget. Keep reading to get the dish on Kelly.
What exactly is Creative Operations?
“Creative Operations handles how the team at Hot Dish Advertising works together on a day-to-day basis, across all departments,” says Kelly. “Creative Operations is very specific to a creative department or agency and brings all the different pieces of this type of business together.” In her new role, Kelly will be working to create, maintain and improve operations and processes for the agency as a whole.
A lack of efficient workflow was previously identified as a pain point in the agency through employee surveys and weekly EOS L10 meetings. Thanks to these established internal feedback processes, the Hot Dish Leadership Team was able to identify the issue and solve it by hiring Kelly for this role. “Her background was a great fit for our entrepreneurial agency,” says Hot Dish President Jen Campbell.
How did you get started?
“I’ve always been curious about how things work,” says Kelly. “I’m very analytical, and I like to truly understand why we do things the way we do them. If something isn’t efficient, I like to simplify it.” Her past positions as a Senior Director of Creative Operations and as an independent strategic consultant provide a solid foundation for the job she’ll be doing at Hot Dish as she works to drive operational excellence within the agency through cross-functional collaboration.
Which part of working at Hot Dish has you most excited?
Before officially joining the team, Kelly worked as a contractor for Hot Dish. Simply put, “I like the people,” says Kelly. “I’ve always gravitated toward working with creatives.” She also loves the focus Hot Dish has on providing franchise marketing support, a unique industry niche.
What do you like to do for fun? Anything you want to share about your family?
“I love to cook,” Kelly says, a passion that no doubt springs from the many years she spent working in the food industry. Prior to her creative operations jobs, Kelly worked for food guru Andrew Zimmern and was a member of Macy’s Culinary Council, producing four cookbooks for Marshall Field’s/Macy’s during her time there.
Kelly is also a mom to three college-aged kids and a dog mom to Bruno the Sheepadoodle. Crime podcasts are a not-so-guilty pleasure, and she’s always on the lookout for a good one.
Settle the debate: Is a hot dog a sandwich?
“No.”
And there you have it. Welcome to Hot Dish, Kelly. We’re so glad to have you on the team!
All about Hot Dish
Hot Dish Advertising is a full-service franchise marketing agency headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We’ve been ranked a top franchise supplier by Entrepreneur magazine for six years running, including a #1 in category ranking the last two years in a row. Through our award-winning FranFocused™ + BrandFocused strategy, we drive impactful results and ignite success for our clients.
