Creative Marketing Operations · Lake Bluff, IL

Ashling Struve builds the structure behind growth.

Develop the idea. Build the campaign. Prove it worked. I run marketing as a department of one across three service brands — combining brand storytelling and campaign execution with the CRM administration, automation, and reporting systems that turn a marketing push into measurable pipeline.

CREATIVE Develop the idea

Brand voice, messaging, and campaign concepts that translate technical services into stories customers actually respond to.

EXECUTION Build the campaign

Multi-channel content across social, email, web, and sales enablement — each brand keeping its own distinct voice.

SYSTEMS Prove it worked

Dashboards, automation, and CRM data quality that show leadership exactly what's driving pipeline — and what isn't.

Selected work

Case studies from running marketing for United Services by Permaco — a family-owned restoration company operating three brands: United Services, 1-800-BoardUp Chicagoland, and Dr. Energy Saver NE Illinois.

Analytics

Multi-brand marketing intelligence dashboards

Leadership had activity but no visibility. I built a formula-driven dashboard suite in Excel — COUNTIFS/SUMIFS engines tied to year selection — covering lead sources, job outcomes, revenue opportunities, and year-over-year performance across all three brands. Marketing conversations moved from "we've been busy" to "here's what's working, and here's what it's worth."

BUILT WITH · Advanced Excel · Formula-driven architecture · Monthly summary + live touch tracking
Automation

Lead-intake automation

Job-intake emails were being logged by hand. I built a Power Automate workflow that parses intake emails into a SharePoint-based log automatically — reducing manual entry and making CRM data consistent enough to report on.

BUILT WITH · Power Automate · SharePoint
Analytics

Fire Department Intelligence Dashboard

A standalone dashboard correlating field-outreach touch activity with emergency call volume by fire department — including the data-quality cleanup that made the correlation trustworthy enough to guide relationship-development priorities.

BUILT WITH · Excel · Data cleanup & entity matching
Insight

Lost-job analysis → operational fix

Digging into lost-job categories revealed that intake response time — not marketing reach — was the leading driver of lost opportunities. The finding turned into a targeted improvement for the call-center process. Sometimes the best marketing fix isn't a campaign.

OUTCOME · Marketing data driving an operations change
Enablement

Sales & marketing operating system

Created the resources that align sales and marketing around one process: an eight-phase sales process, a weekly Level 10 sales meeting framework, a tiered client-development strategy, and repeatable customer review and referral procedures.

BUILT WITH · Process design · Training materials · Meeting frameworks

Creative work

The other half of the job: making three service brands sound like themselves.

Three brands, three voices

Ongoing content across social, email, and web for a restoration brand, an emergency-response brand, and a home-performance brand — each with its own audience, tone, and calls to action.

Translation as a craft

Turning technical services and real customer needs into clear, approachable messages, campaign concepts, and visuals people actually understand.

Campaigns from idea to follow-through

Leadership ideas and market opportunities turned into executable campaigns — message and creative materials built together with the tracking and follow-up behind them.

Bespoke Brand Solutions

Freelance brand development, creative direction, and practical marketing strategy for small businesses — tailored to each client's personality, audience, and goals.

The toolbox

A marketer who understands what's under the hood of the systems she runs.

Technical foundation

MIT — Full Stack Developer Certificate

Full-stack web development training from MIT. It means integrations, APIs, websites, and marketing platforms aren't black boxes — when a system needs configuring, connecting, or fixing, I can work at the level where the problem actually lives.

Working stack
  • CRM administration
  • Power Automate
  • SharePoint
  • Power Apps
  • Advanced Excel
  • Marketing automation
  • Email & web marketing
  • Social media
  • Agile & PM foundations

About

I started in the agency world — production coordination, quality assurance, and operations at rabble+rouser, a Denver brand studio, where I learned how good creative actually gets made: on schedule, on brief, and checked twice before it ships.

Then came seven years of full-time parenting across the UK and Illinois, with freelance creative and marketing projects running through it all. Rebuilding a career after a break teaches you resourcefulness in a way no job ever has.

Today I run marketing end-to-end for a three-brand services company — and I'm at my best in scalable growth environments where lifecycle strategy, process clarity, and data-driven decisions beat reactive activity. My favorite compliment from leadership: the bridge between the systems and the people who use them.

Also true
  • B.A. Geography, University of Denver — with GIS coursework, the original data-driven mapmaking
  • Certified makeup artist — creative direction you can hold a brush to
  • Fluent in translating between marketers, salespeople, and spreadsheets