Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl, principal and president of Mangan Holcomb Partners and Team SI.
Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl has been in advertising as long as she can remember. At 4, she was making commercials for the family car dealership.
“The tapes are all destroyed, so we’re safe,” said Vogelpohl, principal and president of Mangan Holcomb Partners and Team SI, the Little Rock marketing firms. The ads all ended the same way, she said: “Edward Motor Co., 600 Malvern Ave. in beautiful downtown Hot Springs.”
One spot had her dad, Ed Tallach, making his pitch in front of a Dodge pickup. The truck slowly started moving, to the sound of tiny grunts. “You see me come into frame, and I’ve got on a jogging suit and I’m straining against the pickup. He says, ‘Sharon, what are you doing?’ and I reply, ‘Dad, you said to PUSH the trucks!”
One-Take Sharon, as they called her then, was reminiscing last week while pondering her selection as the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas’ 2017 Woman of the Year in Business. The nonprofit, which promotes economic progress for women and girls, will honor her at its Power of the Purse luncheon Tuesday at the downtown Little Rock Marriott.
Interior designer Shayla Copas is Woman of the Year in Philanthropy, and Betty Clark Dickey, the first female chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, is Woman of the Year in Public Service.
“I’m pumped that Krista Bourne, regional president for Verizon, will be keynote speaker,” Vogelpohl said. “She has a great story to tell about their approach to workplace equity. It’s also cool for me because Verizon is a client.”
Vogelpohl wants a level playing field, and she practices what she preaches at MHP. But she never particularly thought of herself as a businesswoman.
“I saw myself just as a businessperson. That had to do with my upbringing in a family business; there wasn’t an after-church meal, a holiday, a birthday, you name it, when we weren’t talking about business.” Her grandmother Marie Tallach, who died this year at 100, was her mentor.
Vogelpohl’s two older brothers were athletes, and “being a girl was never an excuse to not run fast enough, catch the ball or make a free throw,” she says. A four-year Division I volleyball scholarship took her to Centenary College in Shreveport, where she designed her own major and graduated magna cum laude. “I created a business communication track, drawing from accounting, pre-law, marketing, communication and art, and now it is one of the most popular majors at Centenary. I should have named it the Sharon Tallach major.”
She interned at Mangan and has stayed for 22 years, becoming a principal in 2005 and president in 2010.
A “closet statistician,” Vogelpohl is pleased that the Women’s Foundation and the Clinton School of Public Service are studying workplace equity. “The study will benchmark where we are as a state and better define what an equitable workplace looks like, to facilitate conversations about how we progress as a state and as individual organizations.”
She said women have long dominated the PR world, but not so much the advertising side. “I did this math today, and I’m proud to tell you that our leadership structure here at Mangan Holcomb is 55 percent to 45 percent on the side of females, an exact mirror of our overall staff.” The agency has 44 women and 32 men; the executive leadership is five women, four men. “It’s an evolution, but it’s something that makes my partners — Chip Culpepper, David Rainwater and Tim Whitley — proud,” she said.”
As a mentor, Vogelpohl said, her most important relationships are with her daughter, Carson, 9, and her son Jonathan, 6. “I’m a soccer, basketball, baseball mom, big time, and I know that work-life balance is essential in an equitable workplace. We have to provide flex time and trust our professionals to live their lives and also be responsible enough to meet deadlines for clients.”
You couldn’t find a liberal-arts graduate “more passionate about shoving her daughter into STEM opportunities,” Vogelpohl said, describing the science and math-based fields that have become a major Women’s Foundation focus. But mentoring boys to understand gender equity “may be even more important,” she said, adding that her son “gets it” even at an early age.
“We were entertaining the lieutenant governor and his wife, Elizabeth Griffin, out at the farm, and Jonathan was showing her the baby goats,” Vogelpohl said. “They saw a particularly cute one, and Elizabeth asked, ‘Where’s his mama?’ Jonathan, who was about 4 then, answered, ‘I don’t know; probably at a business meeting.’”
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