A decade ago, Carrita Tanner-Cloud was working in healthcare administration when she began to design websites for family and friends. Her hobby quickly blossomed into a fulltime gig: Creativity Justified. Today the Mandeville, Louisiana-based company provides a wide range of digital marketing services with 25 employees — and is expanding into business application software.
2023 marked a salient point in the company’s growth trajectory. Tanner-Cloud had invested time and energy to pursue a variety of business certifications, which helped Creativity Justified gain a spot in the NFL’s vendor sourcing program. In addition to creating marketing content and videos for Super Bowl 2025, Creativity Justified produced an interactive guide for attendees that promoted New Orleans culture and businesses, with an emphasis on diversity. “Too often the same large companies get shouted out,” Tanner-Cloud explains. “We wanted to shine a light on unique, smaller businesses that might not otherwise get noticed.”
The guides were a huge hit, and Creativity Justified has continued to work with the NFL, producing storytelling guides in other Super Bowl host cities and regions.
At about the same time, Tanner-Cloud began to investigate business assistance programs offered by Louisiana Economic Development and the Edward Lowe Foundation. “This opened a new world of opportunity for us,” Tanner-Cloud says. “The programs taught me the business principles that we needed — not just to grow, but to scale our output without investing more resources.”
For example, she credits the System for Integrated Growth for helping her:
- Understand what kind of new customers she might want to work with, identify where they were, and learn the best methods for attracting and communicating with them.
- Establish Creativity Justified as an authority and thought leader in its industry.
- Get out of daily operations in order to focus on strategy and vision.
In the American Academy of Entrepreneurs program, Tanner-Cloud was paired with Chris Meaux as her mentor. An accomplished serial entrepreneur, Meaux encouraged Tanner-Cloud to look for ways to productize her company’s services. As a result, Creativity Justified now offers a series of monthly subscription packages for graphic design, social media marketing and website maintenance.
The subscriptions have allowed the company to create more predictable, scalable revenue streams while also making its services more accessible to a broader range of clients. “The subscription packages have also improved client retention, enabling us to support partners on an ongoing basis rather than through one-off engagements,” Tanner-Cloud says.
In further product development efforts, Creativity Justified is working on a new type of business application software targeting second-stage businesses like itself. “There are very few options for the middle market,” Tanner-Cloud explains. “You’re outgrowing apps like Trello and Asana, but you’re not yet large enough where you need to use an enterprise-level software. As a result, you feel like you’re using a tech stack with 18 different tools.”
Named “Klevr” to reflect its smart, efficient approach to workflow and client management, Creativity Justified’s software will initially target marketing agencies. Yet the goal is to adapt Klevr for second-stagers in other industries, ranging from hospitality to the legal profession.
Incorporating artificial intelligence is also part of the plan, so that Klevr will be able to recognize when a company is growing. Then, it will pull in new modules to help the company become more efficient and profitable at managing customers, projects and finances.
Klevr ties into Tanner-Cloud’s commitment to continuous learning — not just for herself, but also the businesses and communities she serves. “As we’ve grown Creativity Justified, I’ve seen firsthand that access to knowledge — real, practical, actionable knowledge — is often the biggest gap between where a business is and where it has the potential to be,” she explains.
With that in mind, Klevr is being designed to serve as a platform that is both accessible and scalable, she adds. “It’s about democratizing access to high-level marketing intelligence, helping businesses make smarter decisions, and ultimately building stronger, more sustainable companies.”