Nicole Marra ’96, Founder and CEO, Fixer Advisory Group
Nicole Marra ’96, Founder and CEO, Fixer Advisory Group
Nicole Marra ’96 is an award-winning entrepreneur, attorney, and senior executive with decades of experience across the luxury, retail, and consumer sectors. After a distinguished career in private practice and more than a decade as general counsel at Gucci, she founded Fixer Advisory Group to address a critical gap in how growing brands access embedded, senior-level leadership. Through Fixer’s fractional model, Nicole partners closely with founders and executives to provide strategic, legal, and operational support at pivotal moments of scale. Drawing on the analytical rigor and judgment honed at NYU Law, she brings a pragmatic, founder-first approach to building resilient businesses rooted in clarity, trust, and long-term growth. Read more below.
What made you decide to pursue a career in entrepreneurship/venture capital/startups after NYU Law?
It wasn’t until nearly 25 years after graduating from NYU Law that I moved into the start-up and entrepreneurial space—so I often describe myself as a late bloomer. After spending many years in private practice and then a decade as general counsel at Gucci, I reached a point where I was thinking intentionally about my next chapter. What became clear to me was that there was a meaningful gap in the market that I was uniquely positioned to fill. Throughout my career, I had seen firsthand the transformative power of strong in-house legal, HR, real estate, and operational leadership—particularly when those functions are closely integrated with the business. Yet many small and midsize companies, especially in retail, luxury, beauty, and consumer, were making critical decisions in these areas under intense pressure and without access to that level of embedded expertise.
I founded Fixer Advisory to address that need. The firm is built on a fractional, shared-services model that operates more like an internal leadership team than a traditional outside advisor. It allows growing companies to access world-class legal and operational support at the moments when it matters most. In many ways, this path has allowed me to focus on the work I’ve always enjoyed most: helping founders and leadership teams make sound decisions, protect their brands, and build durable foundations that support long-term growth.
How did NYU Law prepare you for this career?
NYU Law trained me to think rigorously, distill complexity quickly, and stay steady in high-stakes situations. Those fundamentals matter every day at Fixer, where we operate at the intersection of risk, judgment, and fast-moving commercial realities. NYU also reinforced the value of curiosity and community. The habit of learning continuously and the strength of the network have carried into my work as a founder, where the job is often to ask better questions, synthesize quickly, and build trust across many stakeholders.
Why do you think lawyers find success in this career path?
Lawyers are trained to anticipate issues early, structure decisions, and communicate clearly. In early-stage environments, that ability to bring clarity to ambiguity is a real advantage when time and information are limited. Lawyers also tend to be effective navigators of competing priorities. When you are building or investing in businesses, success often comes down to judgment, alignment, and execution, not just ideas.
What was the biggest challenge you faced as a lawyer in this career path?
One of the toughest moments of my career was taking the leap from a very high-profile general counsel role into the vast unknown of being a founder and CEO. As an in-house lawyer, I was accustomed to advising senior leadership, exercising judgment, and helping shape decisions—but ultimately within the structure and safety of an established organization. Walking away from that to launch my own company was both professionally and personally daunting. There is no question it was scary. As a founder, every decision—strategic, financial, and reputational—sits squarely with you. The instincts I had developed around risk, judgment, and execution were essential, but they had to be paired with a much higher tolerance for uncertainty. Building a business means making consequential decisions every day with imperfect information and no institutional backstop.
I also learned quickly that building a company is its own discipline. Pricing, hiring, positioning, and—importantly—saying no to the wrong opportunities are just as critical as delivering excellent work. That shift from being a trusted advisor to being fully accountable for outcomes was the hardest part of the transition, and ultimately the most formative.
What is the most important thing students should do while they are still in law school to prepare themselves for a career in entrepreneurship, in venture capital or at a startup?
Get as close to operating environments as possible. Work with founders, spend time inside early-stage teams, and pay attention to how decisions actually get made day to day. You will learn quickly what is urgent, what is noise, and where lawyers can add real leverage. In parallel, build fluency beyond the law. Learn how a business makes money, how teams are structured, and how investors evaluate risk and growth. And start building relationships early, because your network and your reputation compound over time.
What was the most important lesson you learned in your career thus far?
There are so many! But I think the most important learning is that how you show up matters—consistently, over time. A strong service mindset is critical at every stage of a career, whether you are advising others or building something of your own. That means being responsive, being clear, exercising good judgment, and always overdelivering. It also requires humility and a genuine sense of responsibility for the outcomes of your work.
I’ve also come to appreciate how central community and reputation are to a long, meaningful career. Your reputation is one of the few things you truly control, and it follows you everywhere. It is shaped by the decisions you make, the way you treat people, and how you handle moments of pressure. Acting as if the business were your own and never compromising your integrity are what turns service into partnership—and creates relationships that last well beyond any single role.
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