Who Is Devon Hayes at Elevation Marketing™?
Devon Hayes is a co-principal at Elevation Marketing™, where she helps service-based businesses cut through noise, build durable visibility, and convert marketing into a measurable business asset.
With nearly two decades of experience spanning construction, engineering, finance, and digital strategy, Devon brings a grounded, no-nonsense approach to leadership that prioritizes transparency, ownership, and long-term impact. Her work reflects a belief that marketing should serve real people, solve real problems, and leave clients stronger than when they started.
Devon Hayes is a seasoned marketing leader with decades of experience spanning construction, engineering, finance, and digital strategy. Her background gives her a rare ability to translate complex services into clear messaging that resonates with real customers, not algorithms alone. Known for her direct communication style and sharp problem-solving instincts, she approaches leadership with a focus on ownership, accountability, and long-term value—for both clients and her team.
What Does Devon Do at Elevation Marketing™ Day to Day?
Devon splits her time between hands-on client work and building the systems that keep her agency running smoothly. On any given day, that can mean overseeing projects, clearing priorities in ClickUp, handling client communication, or stepping into sales and business development conversations.
Roughly half her time is spent directly supporting client strategy and execution, while the other half is focused on strengthening internal operations by refining processes, hiring, and setting up the team to scale without chaos. The throughline is oversight and accountability, making sure work moves forward efficiently, and clients feel supported without unnecessary noise.
What Makes Devon’s Approach Different From Typical Agency Leadership?
Devon leads with transparency and education in an industry that often relies on jargon and vague promises. She is intentional about helping clients understand not just what is being done, but why it matters and how it connects to real business outcomes.
Rather than defaulting to one-size-fits-all solutions, she emphasizes listening first and tailoring strategies to each client’s marketing goals and constraints. That approach builds trust over time and positions Elevation Marketing™ as a true partner rather than simply a vendor.
What Does Devon Find Most Rewarding About the Work?
For Devon, the most rewarding part of the work is watching people grow—both within the Elevation Marketing™ team and inside the businesses they support. Internally, she values seeing team members take ownership, identify problems, and develop solutions on their own.
Externally, she is motivated by the tangible impact the work has on clients, especially when improvements show up in how a business operates day to day. Much of that impact happens quietly and without fanfare, but long-term client trust and retention signal that the work is making a real difference.
What’s the Hardest Part of Running a Service Business?
One of the biggest challenges Devon faces is that the work behind successful marketing is invisible. A single deliverable may look simple on the surface, but it often represents hours of strategy, coordination, technical execution, and quality control across multiple people and tools.
When performance metrics lag or results take time to materialize, communicating the value of that behind-the-scenes effort can be difficult. Devon never resorts to jargon and approaches this challenge by prioritizing clarity and honesty, explaining nuance when it matters, and setting realistic expectations about how different markets, competitors, and conditions affect outcomes.
How Does Devon Build Trust With Clients?
Devon builds trust by being direct, responsive, and consistent in how she communicates. Rather than hiding behind reports or inflated metrics, she focuses on explaining what’s working, what isn’t, and why.
That honesty sets expectations early and prevents surprises later. At Elevation Marketing™, this approach shows up in clear ownership of assets, open conversations about performance, and a willingness to say when a particular tactic isn’t the right fit. Over time, that consistency turns working relationships into long-term partnerships rooted in mutual respect and confidence.
Why Did Devon Start Elevation Marketing™?
Devon didn’t set out to start an agency for the sake of entrepreneurship. The decision grew out of frustration with environments that valued profit over people and a growing realization that her skills were better suited to building something of her own.
After leaving the construction and engineering world, she briefly moved into finance, drawn by a higher salary and the promise of stability. What she found instead was a culture that felt restrictive and misaligned with her values, especially compared to the collaborative, problem-solving environments she had experienced earlier in her career.
At the same time, former colleagues began reaching out for help. Leaders at Vertex Engineering, a firm with highly specialized and complex services, struggled to find marketers who truly understood their business.
Devon stepped in to support key initiatives on a freelance basis, quickly realizing how rare that kind of institutional understanding was. Mortgage loan officers from her finance role soon followed, asking for help navigating marketing compliance and visibility challenges. Those early requests made something clear: There was a real need for marketing leadership that combined industry fluency, operational awareness, and plainspoken communication.
On January 1, 2014, Devon made the decision to take that work full-time and formally commit to building Elevation Marketing™. From the beginning, the goal was not rapid scale or flashy growth. It was to create a business rooted in transparency, asset ownership, and long-term value. That foundation continues to shape how the agency operates today.
How Did Devon and Amanda Joyce Become Business Partners?
Devon’s partnership with Amanda Joyce didn’t start as a formal business decision. It grew naturally out of mutual trust, shared values, and years of working together before fully committing to the same company.
The two were introduced through Devon’s husband, Cody, and began collaborating when Amanda supported Elevation Marketing™ with content work in its early days. Over time, that collaboration deepened into a small joint venture called DNA Media, where their complementary skills became impossible to ignore.
While Devon continued to operate Elevation Marketing™ and Amanda ran Niche Media Group, the overlap between their work kept expanding. They found themselves aligned not just in execution, but in how they thought about clients, ethics, and long-term value.
The turning point came when Amanda realized she wanted to go all in rather than splitting her energy between separate ventures. The decision to merge wasn’t rushed. It was informed by years of trust, shared wins, and navigating challenges together.
Bringing the businesses together under one roof allowed both leaders to focus on what they do best. Devon’s strengths in strategy, operations, and big-picture problem solving pair naturally with Amanda’s perspective and approach, creating a balance that strengthens the agency as a whole.
Beyond the business mechanics, the partnership is grounded in a genuine friendship and a shared life experience, which has helped them navigate growth, loss, and change without losing alignment. That foundation is a major reason Elevation Marketing™ has been able to grow steadily while maintaining its values.
How Did Devon’s Military Background Shape Leadership Today?
Devon’s leadership style is rooted in her time in the U.S. Navy, where she learned early how to operate in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. After joining the Navy out of high school, she trained as a radioman before the role evolved into a more technical IT and communications position.
She worked as a network administrator responsible for shipboard communications, satellite systems, and secure data transmission aboard the USS Frank Cable, a submarine supplier based in Guam. The role required precision, accountability, and calm decision-making, especially when handling classified systems and critical infrastructure.
Beyond the technical training, the military instilled habits that still shape how Devon leads today. Clear communication was not optional. Processes existed for a reason. Problems had to be solved quickly and directly, often without perfect information. Devon also led specialized responsibilities, including heading the ship’s Radiological Condition (RADCON) communications team, which reinforced the importance of preparation and trust under pressure.
Those experiences carry into her work today in how she approaches responsibility, decision-making, and accountability. Devon values directness, expects people to take ownership of their work, and believes that clarity prevents most problems before they start. The military also shaped her resilience and thick skin, especially as a woman working in male-dominated environments.
What Career Experiences Prepared Devon to Lead an Agency?
Devon’s path to agency leadership was shaped by time spent inside industries where execution, accountability, and margins matter. After completing her degree at CU Denver, she worked as a business manager on large-scale infrastructure projects with Mass Electric, a subsidiary of Kiewit.
That role exposed her to complex operations, tight timelines, and the reality of managing budgets and stakeholders on high-dollar projects. From there, she moved into accounting and business development roles at Krista Construction, gaining firsthand experience with how service businesses operate behind the scenes.
Her transition to Vertex Engineering expanded that foundation. As marketing director for multiple divisions, including construction services, environmental, and air quality, Devon worked with highly technical offerings that could not be reduced to surface-level messaging.
Success depended on understanding the work deeply enough to explain it clearly, a skill that continues to define her approach today. A brief detour into banking further clarified what she did not want, reinforcing her preference for industries where trust, expertise, and long-term relationships outweigh short-term wins.
Each chapter added perspective. Construction taught her operational discipline. Engineering demanded precision and clarity. Finance highlighted the cost of misaligned incentives. Together, those experiences prepared Devon to lead an agency built around transparency, practicality, and respect for how real businesses run.
What Is Devon Most Proud Of So Far?
Devon is most proud of the consistency and discipline behind Elevation Marketing™’s growth. Since joining forces with Amanda, the agency has sustained year-over-year growth of roughly 19 percent, a pace that reflects steady execution rather than short-term wins. That growth matters not as a vanity metric, but because it signals trust from clients who stay, expand their engagements, and refer others over time.
Another milestone that stands out is Devon’s appearance on the Contractor Evolution podcast with Breakthrough Academy. The conversation brought Elevation Marketing™ to a wider audience of service-based business owners and sparked dozens of discovery calls.
Many of those conversations never turned into clients, but they still resulted in real help: identifying broken websites, visibility issues, or missed opportunities that owners could act on immediately. Devon considers those quiet wins just as meaningful as signed contracts.
More broadly, she takes pride in building a company that does right by people. Helping business owners solve problems, even when it doesn’t directly benefit the agency, reflects the values she set out to build from the beginning.
For Devon, success is measured not only by revenue or recognition, but by the cumulative impact of showing up consistently, telling the truth, and leaving businesses better than she found them.
What Goals Is Devon Setting for Elevation Marketing™ in 2026?
Looking ahead, Devon’s focus is less on rapid expansion and more on reinforcing trust at scale. A key priority for 2026 is making Elevation Marketing™ more visible as a source of clear, reliable guidance in an industry crowded with noise.
That includes sharing more knowledge publicly through blog content, social media, and the agency’s podcast, not as thought leadership for its own sake, but as a way to help business owners make better decisions before problems escalate.
Internally, Devon is focused on refining processes that have grown increasingly complex as the agency has scaled. Content operations, in particular, are an area of continued investment, with an emphasis on simplifying workflows without sacrificing quality.
She is also committed to ongoing education for the team, ensuring skills evolve alongside changes in search, visibility, and buyer behavior. Another major goal is deepening Elevation Marketing™’s hybrid agency model by further integrating AI and automation into standard offerings, especially around SEO and answer-engine visibility. For Devon, success in 2026 means building smarter systems that protect both clients and the people doing the work.
Partner With the Proven Leaders at Elevation Marketing™
Devon Hayes approaches partnerships the same way she approaches leadership: directly, thoughtfully, and with a clear understanding of what businesses actually need to grow. She works best with companies that value transparency, long-term thinking, and collaboration over quick wins or shortcuts.
Companies that choose to work with Devon aren’t looking for a vendor to disappear behind reports. They’re looking for a strategic partner who will ask better questions, challenge assumptions when needed, and stay accountable to real business results. That mindset shapes every engagement, from early conversations to long-term strategy, and it’s what defines how Devon builds relationships that last.
If you’re looking for a marketing partner who treats your business like a business, reach out today and start a conversation grounded in trust, clarity, and mutual respect.
