Erica Nonni, Nonni Strategic Marketing

Title: Managing Director

Location: New Jersey (USA)

Years in Industry:
Seventeen. My first job in the industry was at a wine shop while I was in graduate school at the London School of Economics, writing my dissertation on wine media and power. That led to an in-house marketing job with a London fine wine merchant. A few years later I came back to New York and consulted with three rather different wine and food communications agencies. In 2014 I seized the opportunity to take on a regional wine trade association as a direct client. Suddenly I needed to put a name to my business, then I had to start building and managing a team. We grew fast at the beginning, maybe a little too fast. I went through a process of learning when to say no, when to dig in, when to cut bait, how to enlist the right help to achieve business goals, as well as life experiences. I’ve had two kids in the last six years.

Nine years after founding NSM, my work (and occasionally, life!) has taken on a more even flow, but it still feels like what I imagine a dance marathon might be like: speed up, slow down, sit this one out, pause to reevaluate partners, jump in, learn some new moves, admire and cheer for others.

My Top Three Challenges to Wellness:
We talk about overindulgence and insufficient rest as challenges to wellness in our industry, but I’ve never been very good at self-restriction through guilt. I’m more effective when I focus on ‘more’: more of the tools for wellness, rather than less of the challenges.

1. More water

2. More protein

3. More friendship

4. More sleep

Ok, that’s four. Sleep is the hardest (see little kids, above), but perhaps the least important. The first three are simple. If I’m having more of them, I’m probably having less of anything else.

How I Keep It Together to Stay Well:
Exercise and the ‘ta da’ list.

As a kid in school, I strongly disliked gym class. Now the gym is one of my favorite places to be. It’s also our second office (a co-working space within a Life Time club) for my local staff. Doing something physically hard with other people, lifting heavy things, forcing myself to breathe deeply – these encounters clear my head.

I didn’t come up with the ‘ta da’ list. I don’t remember where I read about it but I’m grateful to whoever came up with it first. It’s an antidote to the to-do list. However long my to-do list is, I know I’m realistically going to accomplish maybe three or four significant things in a workday. So rather than stare at a list of things I won’t get done by the end of it, I try to make a practice of mentally naming the things I do, throughout. Ta da!

What Inspires Me:
My children, my husband, my parents, my friends. Anyone who demonstrates calm and kindness while under stress.

A Quote I Love:
More a poem than a quote - I love Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Connect with Erica on LinkedIn and on Instagram at her personal and business accounts.