Sanja Komljenovic quit Nike at 30. The same day she left, a team she had worked with at Nike US Football contracted her as a freelancer.
A few months later, Nike Basketball hired her too.
A secret fear a lot of us have when we think about leaving corporate is that the moment we quit, we’ll lose the credibility we spent years building, burn bridges with our team, and make every future interaction with our old bosses and coworkers weird.
Sanja carried that credibility with her. She’d spent more than eight years working in sports, first leading digital marketing at the LA Clippers and then at Nike Basketball. Her coworkers had already watched her drive complex creative projects forward, maintain a high bar, and get things done.
Her first offer when she left corporate was simple: keep doing the work her former colleagues already knew she could do well. Her former employer became her first client, and former peers and people who had once reported to her became some of the people hiring her.
That freelance work eventually became ONA Creative, the agency Sanja has now grown to more than 20 people. In addition to Nike, ONA has worked with Nike, Meta, Amazon, Ulta, US Soccer, NWSL, and Footlocker.
I asked Sanja about everything that happened between leaving Nike and running an agency of that size, and I loved how transparent she was about the reality and the tradeoffs. She works constantly. She had to learn finance and operations from scratch, pitch work she realized she couldn’t deliver alone, and figure out how to grow without letting the quality of the creative work slip.
We talked about:
How she decided which parts of her corporate career she could package and sell on her own
Why her former peers and direct reports became some of her earliest clients
The project that pushed her from independent freelancer to agency founder
What running a 20+ person creative agency actually looks like (and how it started)
How ONA now generates 50 to 100 inbound leads a year
How she uses LinkedIn and AI for marketing without outsourcing her judgment or taste
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“There is no perfect job”, and how she chose a lane anyway
Hannah: A lot of ambitious people struggle to pick a lane. How did you land on digital marketing in sports?
Sanja: My career path has mostly been taking advantage of the opportunities in front of me. I knew I wanted to work in sports when I came out of college. I studied sports management and thought I might run a team one day. Later, I thought I wanted to run Nike Basketball. Then I quit and started my own business.
I paid attention to what I liked doing and what I was good at. I kept going in that direction, working hard, and trying to get better. I’ve never been someone who constantly thinks the grass is greener. I try to make the thing I already have work really well.
Hannah: How do you avoid constantly looking at another job or career and assuming it would be better?
Sanja: You have to know what you like about the work you like. Every job will have something you don’t enjoy. There is no perfect job or role. Everything is a trade-off, and you have to decide which trade-offs you’re willing to make.
I work all the time. That’s a trade-off I made to build a successful career and apply a level of attention to my work that other people may not want to. I’ve benefited from that in some ways, and there are gaps in other parts of my life.
You have to pay attention to what makes you happy, rather than what society tells you should make you happy.
How she decided which parts of her full-time job to take fractional
Hannah: What led you to leave Nike, and how did you decide which parts of the job you could sell on your own?
Sanja: I wasn’t happy with the day-to-day work, and I didn’t love living in Portland. I was good at driving projects forward, getting things done, being strategic, and maintaining a high quality bar. I wanted to keep those parts.
The part I didn’t like was the politics. I’m direct and blunt. I don’t have much of a poker face, and it’s difficult for me to act a certain way when I don’t agree with something. Having to play a role to get ahead was making me unhappy.
When I quit, another part of Nike hired me as a freelancer. There was a gap on the team, and someone who had known and mentored me for a long time said, “I could hire an agency person, but I think you’re going to do this job better.”
A few months later, the Nike Basketball team I had worked on needed a freelancer. The outside agency I had partnered with while I was there said, “Why don’t we hire Sanja?”
I was able to keep the work I liked while leaving behind the parts of corporate life that weren’t for me.
Your future clients aren’t always (just) your bosses
Hannah: It would be easy to hear your story and assume Nike hired you because you had made yourself irreplaceable.
Sanja: That’s a misconception. A lot of people can do every job. It’s uncommon to be the absolute best at something, especially when you’re leaving only a couple of years into a role.
The lesson for me was that your relationships aren’t only up. They’re down and sideways too.
Many of the people who hired me after I quit had reported to me in some capacity or had been my peers. Occasionally, it was someone senior. Most of the time, people hired me because they thought, “I like working with you. You know what you’re doing. You seem competent. Let’s do this.”
Hannah: In corporate jobs, people spend so much energy managing their boss and skip-level relationships. Your story shows how large the rest of that network can become.
Sanja: Yes. Your reputation really does precede you.
The project that turned her freelance work into an agency
Hannah: When did freelancing become an agency?
Sanja: About six months in, my initial contracts were ending and I had an opportunity to pitch a startup.
The project required work I couldn’t do myself. I wasn’t going to handle community management, take the photos, write every piece of copy, and deliver the rest of the project alone.
I put together the pitch, and I later found out they had been planning to turn me away. After I presented it, they said, “We need to hire her.”
Then I had to find freelancers and other people who could help me deliver it. That was when it moved from Sanja consulting independently to Sanja delivering work with a team.
My network mattered again because I needed to know people who could do the work. I also had to train someone to do things like posting on social.
Hannah: What does the agency look like now?
Sanja: We have more than 20 people. I run the company as CEO and executive creative director. We have a managing director, a director of operations, an executive producer, creative directors, designers, copywriters, account leads, project managers, and producers.
We started very creative-heavy. As we grew, we had to build the account and operations disciplines so I wasn’t trying to manage every client relationship and every piece of work myself. The operations role helps us standardize and preserve institutional knowledge so we don’t recreate the wheel for every project.
Our work generally falls into a few categories: brand strategy; campaigns from strategy and creative ideation through production and post-production; talent and influencer work; and some experiences.
How she scaled from one freelancer to a team of 20+
Hannah: Your first clients came through relationships. Is that still how ONA generates business?
Sanja: It still is. Nothing gets you work like good work.
I get around 50 to 100 inbound leads a year. They don’t all convert, but we also grow within the organizations we already serve. Once someone sees that you’re good, they want to give you more business.
The bottleneck is figuring out how to scale while keeping the work good. You’re only as good as your last thing. You can have a lot of past work to point to, but if the current work starts suffering, you’ll start losing clients.
Hannah: What became harder when you went from working inside a company to running one?
Sanja: When you’re on your own, it’s all on you. Any one job can be manageable. Doing all the jobs well at the same time is difficult.
You have to market yourself, do the client work, handle legal and finance, and make sure the business stays profitable. Thousands of businesses fail because they run out of money. People will tell you to hire this person and that person, but the more you can own and understand yourself, the better.
I’m bullish on individual contributors who can go left, right, up, and down. They save the company more money than having a specialist for every function, and I often think the work is better.
How she uses AI to grow without outsourcing her taste
Hannah: How do you use AI inside a creative agency while protecting the taste and human judgment clients are paying for?
Sanja: I’m obsessed with AI, but I’ve trained mine to think like me.
I don’t have a lack of ideas. I have too many ideas. I use AI to synthesize my thinking and multiply work I’m already doing. You have to spend time with it so it understands you, because we can’t all go out looking the same. A piece of you has to make it into the work.
We’ve used AI in creative production when we didn’t capture something in camera and needed to improve or change the image, but we still worked with a VFX artist to make it look the way we intended.
I’ve also used it to write formulas and systemize feedback inside documents. I mostly use it for synthesis, systems, and the back end. I don’t use it to generate the creative idea for the most part. It’s not there yet for me.
The most valuable personal brand is being known by the right people
Hannah: How do you think about building your personal brand as an agency founder?
Sanja: I think about quality over quantity. My network is high-quality, and I have strong connections on LinkedIn and social media. When I share our work or tell stories about it, I end up on the radar of the people I want to reach.
I don’t want to be famous for being famous. I want to be known for being smart, having good taste and judgment, understanding business, and providing something valuable.
ONA is a B2B business. A large audience of general consumers isn’t necessarily helpful to me. I need to reach CMOs and other people who might hire us. Once you know how you want to show up and who you need to reach, you can choose the right platform and type of content.
My business started growing much faster when I began talking about it on LinkedIn and social media around 2020. People hadn’t known what I was doing.
It helped that I had already built a book of business, case studies, and work I could show. Then I could go out and talk about it.
Start with what you’re building, who it serves, and why you want it
Hannah: What’s your advice for someone who wants to turn their corporate experience into something of their own?
Sanja: Figure out what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it. Make sure you’re rowing in the right direction.
Then you do have to try different things, because you won’t know what works until you do.
Understand your target customer. Who are you selling to? Who do you care about? What are you doing to get in front of them? That could be social media, events, an email list, a newsletter, or something else. The channel depends on the person you need to reach.
We often talk about a corporate career as the thing you leave before entrepreneurship starts.
ONA started long before Sanja quit Nike. Its raw material was the reputation she had already earned, the colleagues who had watched her work, and the judgment she had built inside the jobs she eventually outgrew. Her former employer became her first client because people there already trusted her to deliver.
If you’re still in corporate and want to build something of your own, pay attention to the work you want to keep, the people who trust you, and the problems someone may eventually pay you to solve. Your company may start before you quit.
Connect with Sanja on LinkedIn, explore ONA Creative, and listen to her conversations with marketers and founders on Brand Camp.