Julie Legrand provides project management, strategic branding and tactical marketing consulting to help start-up companies lay the foundation for long-term marketing success.
Julie specializes in program management on a variety of marketing projects, including brand strategy, web and print collateral development, direct marketing and other innovative marketing promotions. Julie has nearly 20 years of marketing experience in management consulting, software development and book publishing and is able to oversee a cohesive strategy incorporating all three aspects of any marketing project: content development, art direction, and technical implementation/ print production.
Julie's client base contains companies large and small including: Streetline, Inertia Beverage Group, Edwards Educational Services, Wells Fargo, MediLogix, Hewlett-Packard, Pacific Bell (AT&T), Sprint, The National MS Society, and several others. Julie was employee #30 at OnLink Technologies which was acquired by Sieble Systems in 2000 for $600 million, and served in a variety of marketing roles including product management and Alliance Manger. She was also a manager in
Ernst Young’s Management Consulting practice where she worked primarily with high tech and telecommunications clients.
Prior to Off The Ground, Julie served as co-founder and publisher of SmartsCo, where she was a winner of the Make Mine a $Million entrepreneurship award. She was highlighted in a national TV, radio, web, and print ad campaign for OPEN by American Express, and has been featured in several publications including The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Start-Up Nation, and several others. She holds an MBA fromWashington University in St. Louis and a bachelor of arts in Political Science fromUniversity of California, Santa Barbara. Julie lives with her husband and 1-year-old daughter in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, and is active in a variety of women's business networks as well as serves on the board of Jovenes sin Fronteras, a non profit that sends youth on service trips to El Salvador each summer.
Elissa Everett 
Elissa specializes in helping businesses propel their brands forward by offering smart, practical and achievable marketing consulting.
She is a senior marketer with a passion for solutions-based products. Elissa is a quick study who plays nicely with others and a smart, strategic marketer who loves teaching others to fish, but is also not afraid to get her hands dirty. She has helped a variety of small business and start-up clients with marketing planning, vendor management, customer acquisition, loyalty, CLM, promotions, customer segmentation, analytics, SEM/SEO. She has also helped corporate clients with go-to-market strategies, customer loyalty marketing, integrated marketing communications, partnership marketing and relationship management.
Elissa’s 20 years of experience includes internet, communications, media and retail marketing at such organizations as Yahoo!, AT&T, Option Wireless, Amazon, Williams-Sonoma, HBO, Intuit, and Quokka Sports.
Elissa holds a BA in journalism from the University of Rhode Island. She and her family have recently relocated back to San Francisco after several years in Seattle.
Karie Stern
Karie brings to Off The Ground clients 20 years of experience in international marketing, branding, advertising and public relations from both the client and agency side.
Karie’s areas of expertise include financial services, health and wellness, healthcare, technology, entertainment, hospitality/tourism, food and beverage, telecommunications and corporate real estate. Karie’s past success stems from her ability to craft a unique and creative positioning for each client she works with, as well as her experience in developing integrated communications strategies that can be used to efficiently drive brand and/or corporate awareness.
Karie began her PR career overseas, working for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to build awareness of selected regions. Upon returning to the States, she worked with MC2, a marketing communications consortium, before two successful tours in account management at DDB Needham and McCann Ericksonwhere her clients included the California Milk Advisory Board (“It’s The Cheese” and the Got Milk? campaigns), Blue Shield, Westin Hotels & Resorts, McDonalds’ Monopoly, and Charles Schwab. She then moved client-side, assuming senior roles in marketing for internet startups CookExpress and Echo Networks, where she developed the ability (via prudent use of PR) to build industry and consumer awareness of brands, without significant investment. More recently, she has crafted creative and visible PR campaigns for clients such as The Monterey Bay Aquarium (radio interview tour), Papilia (international nonprofit fundraising and donor development software), Social Media Marketing Institute (social media training organization), YES Program (U.S. State Department grant program to bring Muslim exchange students to the U.S.), Equilibrio and WellnessBuddy (mobile health and wellness management system), Solanova (nutritional supplement company), Capital Defeasance Group and Grooms Wealth Management.
For the last several years, Karie has been involved in the Junior League of San Francisco and Family Service Agency of Marin. She graduated from
Newcomb College at Tulane University with a major in history.
