How one people pro went from employee zero to key role at Peyton Manning’s company

Ashley Braband spent most of her career creating sports content, so leading a people and culture team, she says, sometimes brings out her “imposter syndrome.” But, what’s kept her going is knowing she excels at two of her job prerequisites: working hard and leading with kindness.

Braband joined Los Angeles-based sports media company, Omaha Productions, in 2021 as its first employee and head of development, shortly after it was founded by Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning and sports broadcasting executive Jamie Horowitz (who was terminated by Fox Sports in 2017 following sexual harassment allegations, which his lawyer has denied).

Starting as employee zero, Braband told HR Brew she did everything, including run-of-the-mill HR tasks on top of her other responsibilities as head of development. But, in 2023, Braband was tasked with a new challenge—crafting and leading the company’s people and culture function.

Earlier experiences shaped her leadership. Like many women working in a male-dominated industry, Braband said she was frequently one of few women in the room. In a 40-person early career program at ESPN, she was one of only two women. Later, in a different ESPN role, she said she finally felt her voice mattered and that employees were treated equitably.

These early roles taught her about “unconscious biases” in hiring and promotion strategies and how important mentorship opportunities are for early career employees. This became the basis for how she would ultimately lead Omaha’s people and culture team.

“One of the women who is on [Omaha’s] leadership team with me is somebody that I mentored when she was under me at ESPN,” Braband said. “We used to have a weekly ‘women in sports media’ meeting, where we would just talk about experiences we had… I was really happy to mentor them, because I had a handful of people that mentored me.”

Braband worked in other roles at ESPN before joining Just Women’s Sports, but when Horowitz co-founded Omaha, Braband was one of the first people he called.

“It was like everything I had learned throughout my career coming together in this [chaotic] tornado of a startup, which was so fun, and exhilarating, and incredibly hard,” she said, adding that working at a startup meant doing “whatever needs to be done.” She recalls writing the company’s parental leave policy while nine months pregnant, so there was a protocol in place for her and future employees.

Building the culture she always wanted. Coming out of companies where there were “departments and protocols for everything,” Braband said the buck stopped with her in those early months at Omaha, like crafting the company’s mission statement and onboarding its first 23 employees. But, after nearly a year, she moved back into the familiar zone of media production as the company’s head of current series before going on maternity leave in September 2022.

During her leave, Braband was asked to lead Omaha’s people and culture function upon her return in January 2023. From then until now, Braband said she’s created the department she wished other companies had earlier in her career.

Braband’s strategy included asking herself and existing employees: “Who are the best people you’ve ever worked with? It could be at any point in their careers and in any role,” she said, and those were the people Omaha recruited to build up its team to 50 full-time US employees.

The rest of the people function, Braband decided, would resemble her favorite parts of working at other companies and look nothing like her least favorite parts. For instance, she wanted to make Omaha’s parental leave policy “as uncomplicated as possible.” Starting with 12 weeks parental leave in 2022, she said the company has now extended that benefit to 15 weeks.

Omaha also has an unlimited PTO policy for employees. Braband remembers having to trade shifts and coordinate stressful schedules with former coworkers to take PTO for her wedding and honeymoon, and said she doesn’t want her employees to experience any stress when they should be enjoying their lives.

Constantly improving as a people leader. One powerful skill Braband has learned leading her team is “listening to people and hearing from them,” she said. In 2024, for instance, Braband received employee feedback that, while many employees wanted to take PTO, they felt unable to do so. Addressing that concern, she said Omaha now mandates that employees take a minimum of two weeks off, on top of unlimited time off.

“We want them to know we really value their mental health and their ability to reset and take a deep breath,” she said. “You don’t have to travel anywhere, but you need to just sit on the couch and watch a Netflix series.”

Braband concluded, “What’s so interesting about HR and people is something that wasn’t even on my board for a thing to do that week or that month can pop up and all of a sudden now be my biggest priority… It’s constantly evolving.”