Helping founders and executive teams grow profit and people-focused impact with joy and ease at the center of the strategy. Renia (pronounced REE-nah) Carsillo is the founder of Realign Consulting. She believes her superpowers are pattern recognition and activating change. Since 2008, Renia and her team have helped more than 100 small and mid-sized companies build values-driven, people-first operating models, guided by two proprietary frameworks: Do Better Business™ and Values-Driven Marketing. Renia has worked side by side with impact-driven companies, multinational franchises, and B2B brands in some of the most traditional industries, from industrial manufacturing to government contracting. Her work sits at the intersection of people, systems, and habits. For a business to grow sustainably, these three must constantly realign, because alignment is an ongoing practice.
3 Founders, 3 Paths to Building a Business That Lasts [Small Stage, Big Impact Podcast]
E67: 3 Founders, 3 Paths to Building a Business That LastsThree women founders, three very different starts. I sat down with Lisa Council of Mrs. Grout, Stephanie Veraghen of Show Up Awesome, and Stephanie Melvin of Sol to trade the real stories: a layoff two weeks before Christmas, five-year plans for 10 industries, and a corporate exit over integrity. Then we get into funding, how long it took each of us to reach $250k, why we were slow to pay ourselves, and selling from genuine care. Want to do personal work on yourself? Start a business.That’s how Lisa Council, founder of Mrs. Grout, puts it, and Stephanie Melvin agreed. For this episode, I sat down with three founders: Lisa, Stephanie Veraghen of Show Up Awesome, and Steph, who owns Sol with her wife, Sunny. None of us got here the same way. Stephanie and I both started after an “oh crap, what do we do next?” moment. Hers was a startup layoff two weeks before Christmas. Lisa wrote five-year plans for 10 different industries before landing on grout. Steph brought more than a decade of experience helping franchise owners troubleshoot their businesses, then walked away from a corporate career because integrity came first. In today’s episode, we get into the details of each of those journeys, then talk about how we think about scaling, and what it actually took to build businesses that last. |
Renia Carsillo
Helping founders and executive teams grow profit and people-focused impact with joy and ease at the center of the strategy. Renia (pronounced REE-nah) Carsillo is the founder of Realign Consulting. She believes her superpowers are pattern recognition and activating change. Since 2008, Renia and her team have helped more than 100 small and mid-sized companies build values-driven, people-first operating models, guided by two proprietary frameworks: Do Better Business™ and Values-Driven Marketing. Renia has worked side by side with impact-driven companies, multinational franchises, and B2B brands in some of the most traditional industries, from industrial manufacturing to government contracting. Her work sits at the intersection of people, systems, and habits. For a business to grow sustainably, these three must constantly realign, because alignment is an ongoing practice.
E66: Values-Driven Marketing in Action with Mrs Grout Founder & CEO Lisa Council Lisa Council, founder of Mrs. Grout, is my longest-term client. We’ve been working together for more than a decade, and in this conversation we talk about how that trust was built, what we’ve learned from each other, and why her new website converts at 20%. Lisa walks through the review program her team runs, the low-cost touches that make customers feel appreciated, and her advice for women building businesses...
Happy Tuesday, Reader! I am writing you from the past. I pen every Two on Tuesdays email you receive from my heart, several weeks in advance of when you receive it. Which means I don't know exactly where things stand as you read this. But, writing from late September, the state of our world feels particularly perilous. So this week, I won’t be sharing any tips or strategies for building your business. Instead, I want to call each of you in. I am here today to ask you to do two very important...
Happy Tuesday, Reader! When times get hard and uncertain, our instinct is often to retreat. We stay online because it feels safer than showing up in person with all our messy humanity on display. We avoid the discomfort of real conversations about how we're actually doing. We keep our heads down and try to push through alone. But here's what I'm seeing after nearly 20 years of working with small businesses through multiple economic crises: The small businesses doing best in this moment of...