thea & her things

Thea has spent her career at the intersection of executive-level business strategy and the deeply rooted culture of the American West. The result is both a perspective and a body of work that's genuinely rare and disarmingly effective.

Her professional foundation was built in rooms where critical decisions get made. As Director of Sponsorship and Promotions for EXPO New Mexico and the New Mexico State Fair, she managed $2M+ in annual sponsorship revenue and led all partnership and promotional production for a premier, eight perf, PRCA rodeo - learning early that the western industry's greatest asset wasn't its budget, it was its community. As General Manager of the Greeley Stampede, a $5M+ event drawing 250,000+ attendees each year, she ran large-scale operations, revenue strategy, and sponsorship programming for a top performing PRCA rodeo. As CEO of United Way of Southwest New Mexico, she led organizational strategy, donor development, and community leadership under board governance, bringing the full weight of executive acumen to a mission-driven organization with high stakes and real accountability.

Across every one of those roles, the receipts added up to a single strategic conviction : organizations that win long-term aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most saturated marketing campaigns. They're the ones whose stakeholders feel more like family than customers. The ones that have cultivated something people are proud to be part of. The ones where loyalty has been unmistakably earned.

In 2015, Thea married into a ranching family and moved to the Nebraska Sandhills, where she started a family and a business, and she put that conviction to work on her own terms. She founded Cowgirls Over Coffee, a community-based brand serving ranch, rural, and western women, building it from a simple Instagram feed to a multi-platform entity reaching 80,000+ women with a monetized membership and newsletter open rates above 50%. Cowgirls Over Coffee was more than a side hustle, it became the proof of concept for everything she believed about community, identity, and that when people truly find their people, that belonging becomes the most durable brand asset an organization can own.

What sets Thea apart isn't just her experience, it's the rare combination of professional and lived experience. She holds dual degrees in Business and Journalism from the University of Idaho and thinks in both stories and spreadsheets. She’s sat in boardrooms and navigated enterprise sponsorship programming. She’s built communities from scratch and watched them become something their members couldn't imagine living without. And she’s done all of it while deeply embedded in the western, ranch and rural culture of the community she serves.

Today, Thea lives on a working cattle ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills, where she and her husband are in the active, unglamorous, deeply satisfying work of building their cow-calf and performance horse operation, while she runs her own business, and remains unapologetically committed to the work of motherhood and homemaking. She considers homemaking a craft to be practiced with the same strategy, intention, and deliberate consideration she prioritizes in her professional work. The perspective she brings to every project isn't borrowed from research or informed by observation. It comes from a life genuinely and completely immersed in this world.

The western industry has never lacked for loyalty. It has lacked for someone with the executive acumen to recognize it as a strategic asset, and the cultural fluency to develop it without losing what made it valuable in the first place.

Interested in working with me? Check out the Work With Me page.