Meet Melissa Dlugolecki! Marketing Agency Founder & Author of Scar Tissue
VISIONARY SPOTLIGHT
Some people walk into your life through a Zoom room and you just know you're going to learn a ton from them. Melissa is one of those people.
I met Melissa through the Mentor Collective Mastermind, where she's the marketing coach, and every single time I hear her speak I'm reminded how multifaceted her journey is: high school teacher, yoga instructor, "celery juice girl," seven-figure coach, agency owner, author, and five-time Boston Marathon runner. So for this Visionary Spotlight, I'm pulling from our conversation on the Rain or Shine podcast to bring you her story, in her own words.
Tell us about your business and how it started.
"I started as like a celery juice girl." Melissa's background is in psychology and sociology, and she spent 10 years as a high school educator before she started teaching yoga. Her students kept asking her to mindset coach them, because, as she puts it, she was "giving them life lessons while they're in downward dog."
That turned into juicing workshops, then private and group coaching for women, and within 13 months that business grew to seven figures, all organically, with no paid ads. Along the way she realized she understood messaging, marketing and branding in a way that wasn't commonly talked about. When she started coaching other entrepreneurs, that's what they kept coming back to her for.
The agency came from watching her clients hire out and get "smoke and mirrors": people who didn't really care, unclear communication, and a different contractor for every task. "Honestly, I think entrepreneurship is just about solving problems, and the bigger the problems you solve, the more lucrative you're going to be."
What's actually working in marketing right now?
Two things: volume and a cohesive brand.
"It is absolutely a volume game, and you have to let go of perfectionism." Melissa's team posts six times a day on Instagram for her alone (four on her personal account, two on her book page), and across roughly 40 to 50 clients they're producing around 60 pieces of content a day. The only way that's possible? A dialed-in system. Her advice for solo entrepreneurs is to start simple with one project board (she uses Monday, but Trello or Asana work too) holding all your assets, your ideas, what's in progress, and everything you've already posted so you can repurpose it.
And on brand, she's clear that it's so much more than a color palette or a photo shoot. "Everyone has a brand. It's just whether or not it's working for you." Your brand shows up at every stage, from opt-in to nurture, sales, onboarding, retention and referrals, and when it feels solid and consistent, it lowers the perceived risk for a buyer.
“Our rent of 2025, 2026 is being visible online.”
-Melissa Dlugolecki
How would you describe your brand?
Melissa has her team (and her clients) answer one question: if two famous people had a baby, who would you be? Her team's answer for her was Buddy from Elf and Bill Belichick.
"Elf is just this wildly optimistic, sees the wonder in things. And that is a big part of me, almost to a fault sometimes. I don't see red flags." Belichick is the other side: data-driven, process-driven, never too high or too low. "A big sale comes in, I don't get too excited. We lose a client, I don't get too down."
How did you navigate a major setback in your business or life?
In 2014, Melissa lost her daughter, Laden. They spent 99 nights at Boston Children's Hospital before Laden passed away from necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). "My whole world was rocked. My identity taken."
She's honest about how dark those days were: rolling out of a bed full of her daughter's things, putting on the same wrinkled clothes, and counting down to four o'clock when she felt it was acceptable to sit down and watch Seinfeld. Her grief counselor told her that someday she would write a book. At the time, she could barely get out of bed.
What helped her rebuild was the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold so the cracks become the most beautiful part. She asked herself how she could fill her own cracks with gold and honor her daughter through the way she lived and what she shared. Tactically, that looked like refusing to take anything personally, actually studying grief (the teacher in her came out), and building a support "team," knowing no single person could meet all her needs. Her brothers were great distractors, while her cousin's wife was the listener she needed.
She also ran the Boston Marathon five years in Laden's memory, and that's where her Friday night ritual began (more on that below).
Is social media too saturated to start now?
Melissa didn't hold back on this one. "If anyone is hiding behind 'it's too saturated,' you are looking for an out and an excuse."
Her take is that saying something is saturated means you're carrying a hidden expectation of how it should be. "For me to say it's too saturated means that I have some subliminal expectation of how many people Mark Zuckerberg should allow on Instagram."
It's a lesson she learned through grief: most unhappiness comes from expectations we never agreed to. So you can resist the wave, or go with it, and going with it means more volume and a clearer brand.
What’s something you always do?
Friday nights are silent solo nights, followed by a really good workout on Saturday morning. "I'm very introverted, believe it or not." She won't even voice note on a Friday night. The ritual started in 2015 when she was training for the marathon. Friday became her night to sit with her grief and decompress before a 10 to 20 mile run, and 10 years later it's still how she resets her nervous system.
What’s something you never do?
Make business decisions based on her feelings, and say yes to things that drain her. "If I made decisions for my business off of feelings or emotion, we'd be on a rollercoaster." On an off day she might skip the creative project, but she keeps moving, and usually her energy shifts once she does. She also says no to work she doesn't want to do and clients she doesn't want to serve. "I don't have anything in my life that drains my energy. I really don't."
What's the heart of your work?
Scar Tissue. "The book is my mission." It's a toolkit for anyone navigating something hard, whether that's divorce, an empty nest, an aging parent or pet loss, and every chapter breaks down a toxic positivity statement ("God wouldn't give you more than you can handle") and how to reframe it.
One of the chapters closes on the idea of sonder, the realization that everyone is carrying a story we know nothing about. And she's adamant the book isn't just for people in grief: "I literally told my publisher, every entrepreneur needs to read this book."
Advice for other entrepreneurs having a rough day?
"You wanna get to the next level, it's gonna be ego death after ego death after ego death." Most of the fear around a post that flopped is ego. Nobody is paying that close attention, and that's actually good news, because it means you can test, test, test.
But she's quick to add that it's a muscle, not a switch. When she first started posting about her grief, she deleted some posts and panicked. "From just reps and consistency and humbling myself day after day that I'm not that important, it really helped me." Her approach today is simple: chop wood, carry water. Do the simple things, every single day.
“I guarantee anyone listening here has a story that I know nothing about.”
-Melissa Dlugolecki
A resource that’s added value to her journey?
The book Melissa rereads more than any other. "The Four Agreements in their surface level state are so simple, but if you truly apply them in every aspect of their being, it is really challenging." Agreement number two, don't take anything personally, shows up in how she handles grief, business decisions and even compliments.
Bonus resource: Tom Brady and Bill Belichick documentaries. In her darkest days, she watched hours of 30 for 30s about the Patriots duo, not as a fangirl, but as a student of how they approached mastery.
Melissa's full story, including her agency and Scar Tissue, can be found on her website and Instagram.
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