Today we’d like to introduce you to Mel Bell.
Hi Mel, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
After fifteen years in marketing, I knew two things for certain: I was done with the W-2 path, and I wanted to build something I owned.\
So in March 2025, I launched GRIT Marketing Co., a fractional marketing agency specializing in storytelling. I work with founders and C-suite executives to capture, optimize, and amplify their story by channel in a way that actually drives pipeline. I’ve gotten to do that work alongside businesses in a variety of industries: nonprofit, county government, B2B SaaS, fintech, construction, manufacturing, and AI. Early stage to growth stage.
What I didn’t see coming was company number two. I’m also co-founder of Alpine Anchor, where we’re building the agentic operating system I wish I’d had the day I started GRIT. The best part is I get to build it in public — using it to grow and scale both companies, and showing the work as I go.
I never pictured myself owning and building two companies (especially not at the same time), but here I am.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No. And I named the company GRIT for a reason.
Grit is a metaphor for both life and business. When you start and scale a company, there are going to be days where it flops. Where you mess up, or the thing you built just doesn’t do what you thought it would. That’s not the exception, that’s the job. Grit is the discipline to keep pushing through the hard days and keep your eyes on the finish line anyway.
And here’s what changed how I operate: when you accept that adversity is just part of building a business, it stops happening to you and starts happening for you. We learn more from the games we lose than the ones we win. Winning feels good but losing actually teaches us something.
The biggest struggle caught me off guard, because it was self-inflicted. I left a high-demand career where I’d spent years working 70, 80-hour weeks. And when you leave to build your own thing, there’s this story you tell yourself about freedom. But what I actually did was work myself out of one intense schedule and rebuild the exact same one, except now I owned it.
In year one, I chased the metrics I was used to tracking, the same ones I track for clients. And I crushed them. I exceeded my own expectations. But I did it by sacrificing the very things I left to gain: time, freedom, flexibility. I hit every number and lost the plot.
So going into year two, I ran an audit on myself. I’ve gotten a lot more intentional about building a business that lets me do the work I love and live a life I love too. Turns out that’s the harder metric to hit.
On the Alpine Anchor side, the challenge is simpler to name. Building two companies at once is just hard, because every hour is a choice between them. Every new GRIT client is either more hours added to the week or hours pulled straight off the platform. Both can be true, and that’s the tension. We want to be heads-down building Alpine Anchor so we can scale it. But the services work is what funds the build, and it doesn’t pause while we do. Even my co-founder feels it. The good news is I’ve got a partner I trust completely, we’re aligned on what matters, and the early support from people who want to help build it has been real. That part isn’t the struggle. It’s the fuel.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about GRIT Marketing Co. / Alpine Anchor?
GRIT Marketing Co. is a fractional marketing practice that specializes in storytelling. I work with founders and C-suite leaders to capture, optimize, and amplify their story by channel in a way that drives pipeline. The thing I’m known for is leadership as a go-to-market strategy: founder-led marketing, executive-led growth, putting the people at the top of the company out front as the brand.
What sets me apart is simple. I don’t just hand you a strategy and wish you luck. Strategy without execution is just expensive advice. I do the work.
And the proof is GRIT itself. I’ve done zero cold outreach. No outbound, ever. Every client has come to me because I practice exactly what I preach: I post as if I’m my own client. I run the newsletters, the posts, the founder-led content for my own company that I’d run for any client. The business I’ve built is the case study.
The thing I’m most proud of, though, is my role as cofounder of Alpine Anchor. We’ve built an operating system that runs our entire business. But that’s not what makes me passionate about it. Our mission is to inspire the next generation of business owners. And it’s already happening: we have people who believe in the platform and our philosophy so much that they’re building entire businesses around it, providing services to implement and customize the system for their own clients.
That’s the part that gets me out of bed. I believe the world of work is changing. We’re entering an era where high-caliber talent doesn’t have to choose between one W-2 and the next. They can take their expertise and build something of their own. That’s what I did. That’s what my cofounder did. And now I get to help other people do the same.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I don’t believe in luck. And I know that might sound cynical.
When I was a freshman in college, I walked onto the Division I women’s soccer team at the University of Colorado. No scholarship, no guarantee of earning one either. But what looked like a tryout was really months of showing up every single day before it, working to earn a paid spot that the coach couldn’t promise me. Three days into the season, he gave me a scholarship. From the outside, someone might call that lucky. It wasn’t. It was everything I’d put in long before anyone was watching.
That’s been the pattern of my whole career. There was no luck in my injuries, or in the path that ultimately led me out of sports and into marketing. No role I’ve ever landed came from luck. Every single one came from hard work, discipline, and the relationships I’ve invested in along the way. I’ve made a conscious effort to never burn a bridge, to invest in the people who invest in me.
Here’s what I actually believe: if you set intentions and stay disciplined about reaching them, you put yourself in rooms and around people you never could have planned for. People assume that’s luck. It’s not. It’s just what happens when you do the work and take the risk instead of sitting at home hoping something finds you.
The same goes for being generous with what you know. When you share freely instead of treating every exchange as transactional, you lay a foundation that runs deeper than any single deal. And what grows out of that isn’t luck. It’s the harvest of seeds you planted along the way.
So if there’s a version of luck I believe in, it’s that one. You can’t be afraid of failure, and you can’t wait to be chosen. You set the goal, you do the work, and you put yourself in the position for good things to happen. That’s not luck. That’s grit.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gritmarketingco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gritmarketingco
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melgritsmarketing/
- Other: https://horizonplatform.ai/
