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Sara Harper: How to Build a Network That Actually Helps Your Career
The new Head of Marketing for Kohler Hospitality on building relationships that last, asking for help, finding the work that “gives you oxygen,” and why the best networking goes deeper than a conference cocktail hour.
Sara Harper and I go way back. We worked together at Loews Hotels for five years in the early 2000s, when we were both firmly in the world of hotel PR, and we’ve stayed in touch as our careers, families and lives have taken us in very different directions. So this Herstory is a little different from our usual format.
Rather than a traditional Q&A, I wanted to tell Sara’s story the way our conversation actually unfolded: two former colleagues and friends catching up, looking back at the choices, people and occasional detours that shaped a career spanning PR, marketing, entrepreneurship and leadership.
Sara recently joined Kohler Hospitality as Head of Marketing, overseeing a team of around 26 across an unusually broad hospitality and lifestyle portfolio. But what interested me most as we talked wasn’t the size of the new job. It was how often Sara came back to one thing: her network.
Not networking in the transactional, collect-a-business-card sense. The relationships she has built over decades have helped her find opportunities, solve problems, become a better leader and, most recently, figure out what she wanted from the next stage of her career.
“I’ve built a strong network,” she told me. “When I started looking for my next opportunity, I just picked up the phone and started talking to people. That’s the same thing when I’m problem solving. I like to ask for help.”
That may be the thread running through Sara’s entire career: know good people, stay connected to them, ask questions, and don’t assume you have to figure everything out alone.
From PR to Marketing
When Sara and I worked together at Loews, she was very much a PR person. After leaving Loews, though, she found herself increasingly drawn to marketing. Arthur Berg at KSL Resorts took a chance on her and hired her as Director of Marketing at La Quinta Resort.
That role opened up a much broader world. She later consulted for KSL, working on openings, golf, membership and other projects. When her husband was transferred to Sydney, Sara joined an entrepreneurial marketing agency and worked on everything from a private island in Vanuatu to BMW Mini and Unilever.
“It was a wild mix of things,” she says. It was also an education in different kinds of marketing. “Australia was really big into activations, guerrilla marketing, SMS, and street stuff. It was just a totally different way of thinking.”
When Sara returned to California, KSL called with what was supposed to be a short-term assignment covering a maternity leave at Hotel del Coronado. “I thought I’d be there for three months,” she says. She stayed for nine years.
At The Del, Sara worked through rebrands, ownership changes and a move into a more commercial structure. Eventually, she returned to the KSL corporate side and rose to VP of Marketing & E-Commerce.
As the company grew and merged, her remit expanded dramatically. At one point, Sara was overseeing marketing across around 90 assets, supported by a shared-services team spanning digital, PR, social, design, branding and account management.
“It was a big job,” I told her. “It was,” she said. “And it was fun.”
A New Chapter at Kohler
Earlier this year, Sara made another major move and joined Kohler Hospitality as Head of Marketing. Based in Kohler, Wisconsin, she leads a team of around 26 people across a portfolio that includes far more than hotels.
There’s The American Club, Inn on Woodlake, Lodge Kohler in Green Bay, Kohler Waters Spas, golf, retail and a host of other businesses across the destination, along with a resort in St Andrews, Scotland.
“There are 37 businesses,” Sara says. “We have the hotels and the stores, the gas station, the grocery store. We have a garden store, a flower store, yoga studios, an indoor tennis and pickleball facility. We have a 500-acre land trust where people can go pheasant hunting and fly fishing. It goes on and on.”
There is also a strong connection to Kohler’s kitchen and bath business, particularly through spa and wellness, where hospitality becomes a living showcase for the brand’s products and design. What struck Sara early on was the level of care.
“They want everything built so custom,” she says. “Even the bike rack at the grocery store is powder-coated the exact color.” That attention to detail appealed to her, as did the ownership structure.
“I wanted to get back into the full-service, upper-upscale, luxury kind of vibe,” she says.
There was also something familiar about joining a family-owned company. Loews, where Sara and I worked together early in our careers, was family run too, and she had always appreciated the sense of stewardship that came with that. After years working in private equity-backed hospitality, Kohler offered a different rhythm and a long-term connection to its businesses, community and brand.
“Working for a family was so cool,” she says. “The family cares, and they are personally invested in these assets.”
The shift wasn’t about rejecting where she had been. It was more about recognising what she wanted next.
“That’s What Gives Me Oxygen”
The realization that she needed a change did not happen in isolation. It came through conversations with people who knew her well.
“Some people helped me see that maybe private equity wasn’t the best fit for what I wanted next,” she says. More importantly, those conversations helped Sara identify what had been missing.
“I wasn’t spending enough time in my creative, and that’s what gives me oxygen.” That stayed with me because as careers progress, it is easy to define success by scale: bigger title, bigger team, bigger remit. Sara had all of those.
What she needed to ask was a simpler question: where was the joy?
“I had to understand where I get joy in my job every day.”
Build Your Network Before You Need It
This is where Sara’s journey gets especially interesting. She has built an impressive network over the course of her career, but not through the kind of networking people often imagine.
She is the first to admit that roaming a conference room and making small talk with strangers is not really her thing. “I’m not a very good conference attendee,” she says.
Instead, she has gravitated toward more structured ways of meeting people. Earlier in her career, that meant PRSA. Later, HSMAI became especially important, and Sara joined its marketing advisory board.
“I love to have a board of directors meeting,” she says. “That kind of structure really helps me.”
It turns out that might be one of her best networking tips. “If you just walk up to someone at a mixer at a conference, it’s great, but you can only get so much out of that conversation,” she says.
Board meetings and advisory groups are different. “You get two days together. You really get to know people. You’re talking about where they’re having wins, or how they got here or there.”
In other words, participation creates deeper relationships than attendance. As Sara puts it, “When you know good people, they know good people.”
Ask for Help
Those relationships now form Sara’s informal advisory board. When she was looking for her next role, she called people. When she is trying to solve a problem, she calls people. When she wants to understand what others are doing with AI, she calls people.
“I use my network and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’”
Her broader philosophy is refreshingly straightforward. “Put smart people around you. Don’t pretend like you know everything. Ask questions.”
That applies especially now, when marketing is changing quickly. “Nobody’s going to climb the mountain in a day,” she says about AI. “Figure out who’s doing it right.”
It sounds obvious, but seniority can create a strange pressure to appear as though you should already know the answer. Sara’s instinct is the opposite: ask.
The Mentor Who Changed How She Managed Up
One of the most influential people Sara met professionally was Donna Bond, a consultant who came into Hotel del Coronado at a pivotal moment in Sara’s career.
Sara’s Director of Sales and Marketing had left, and the role was not replaced. Suddenly, Sara had no buffer between herself and senior leadership. Around the same time, she was dealing with a hard-driving general manager.
Bond gave her some simple advice. Instead of going into conversations defensively or trying to prove she was already doing what he wanted, start asking questions.
“What can I help you with? What’s going to make you look good to your owners? What’s important to you?”
“It was a big shift,” Sara says. The relationship improved, the GM became more comfortable putting Sara in front of ownership, and she gained exposure to Blackstone, Strategic and other stakeholders.
That experience taught her not just how to manage up, but how ownership thinks. “They want to feel comfortable that they’re getting good information,” she says. They don’t need a dog-and-pony show. “Here’s the problem, and here’s what I’m doing about it. Or here’s the win, and here’s how we’re going to repeat it or optimize it.”
Transparency, in her view, builds trust.
Leadership Is Less About Having the Answer
These days, Sara says the biggest evolution in her job has less to do with marketing than leadership. She has gone from managing one person to managing teams approaching 30.
“So much of my time now is leadership,” she says. That means developing people, training, shifting resources, managing up and down and making sure her team understands the bigger vision.
Her approach is not to solve everything for people. “When I’m talking to my team, I think the most important thing is to listen and to hear and to understand.”
She also believes in letting people have their own journey. “Don’t try to fix something for them. Help them see their options, and get clear on what they want.”
Sometimes, leadership is simply seeing something in someone before they can see it themselves. “A lot of times people don’t understand that they’re really good at something,” she says. Her response? “Yeah, you are good at that. You just need to practice it.”
When Optimism Works Against You
When I asked Sara about mistakes, she didn’t hesitate. “I tend to be a big optimist.”
I can confirm this. Having known Sara for years, it is one of the things that makes her so likable. She is warm, upbeat and always convinced there is a way through.
But as she has learned, a strength can become a weakness when taken too far. “Sometimes I want things to work out so badly that I hold on to things for too long,” she says. “Whether it’s people, projects, jobs, whatever it is.”
She laughs at herself. “We can make it work. We can make it work.”
Until, sometimes, you can’t. Her lesson has been learning when to stop trying to rescue something and accept that it is time to move on. Not necessarily a failure, but a lesson and an opportunity to change direction.
That feels especially fitting now. Sara has spent decades building relationships, asking questions and learning from people around her. And when it came time to make her own big change, she did exactly what she has always done: she called people she trusted, she listened, and then she moved.
Maybe that is the real lesson in networking. It is not about who can get you your next job. It is about surrounding yourself over the course of a career with people who can help you see more clearly what you cannot always see for yourself.
