Renia (pronounced R-EE-n-a) Carsillo hates business silos and marketing hacks. So, she spends her days working with mid-size and small companies to integrate their business strategy with their impact strategy, design sustainable marketing frameworks, and find a growth cadence that works for their team and their lives. Renia believes founders are uniquely positioned to create a kinder, more equitable world. She is passionate about bringing C-level strategic support to the small and mid-size companies shaping their communities every day. Renia says, "Sustainable marketing is built on a solid business strategy. A solid business strategy is built on values-driven habits. Values-driven habits are built on healed/healing leaders. We can’t do these things separately. They’re all interconnected. ”
What Grief and Transitions Taught Me About Business This Year [Two on Tuesdays]
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Happy Tuesday, Reader! The last year has been full of major transitions: our youngest shipping out to the Navy, a cross-country move, and the loss of my husband's mother. It’s been a year of transitions, celebrations, and separations. Spending more time focused on life has taught me some important lessons about business. Here are two I want to share with you. Business Lesson #1: The most important work gets done in 2-4 hours each day. What happens in the rest of our work time is mostly noise. When I really focus on what has to move for 2-4 hours each day, most other things figure themselves out or can be left alone. It’s that amount of focus time that matters more than the actual production or to-do list. This concept is talked about in many books, and perhaps the best known to me is from Cal Newport’s Deep Work. But I never experienced it so viscerally as I have over the last 12-months. The realization that I could achieve nearly herculean strategic and creative outputs in just 2-4 hours has been transformational. It's changed how I work, how our team works, and how I think about my time in general. Want to try it out? Do an experiment and block out your 2 most productive ours for focus work for 5 days. See what happens. Business Lesson #2: Your team is not your family (and that’s just fine, perhaps even awesome). I've long been allergic to referring to a company as a family (unless you’re working with your literal family). We don't generally quit our family or fire our family, and founders who use this language often treat their teams with too few boundaries and require too much emotional labor from their closest employees and collaborators. That said, it’s extremely challenging not to feel a familial responsibility for those who work for you and with you. I’ve long understood that it's bad for employees when the founder treats them like family. But it was only this year that I realized it’s also bad for founders when we assume responsibility for our teams at the same level we would for our family. Give yourself permission to prioritize differently. Neither the dysfunction nor the patience of family ties is required here. Treat your team generously, but remember that it's okay to say, "This isn't working." It's actually awesome to ask for what you need and know that if someone can't deliver, you can choose someone else to step in. This may sound cold, but it's ultimately freeing. It took me way too many years to lay down that misplaced responsibility and realize that in most small businesses, the only person who can't be replaced is the founder. Yes, many companies will and should grow past that phase. But many never will, and that's also just fine. So, if your business is mostly you (as mine is and likely will be for a while yet), put your own oxygen mask on first, darling. Until next time, Renia C. P.S. - These lessons didn't come easily. They came from wrestling with what it means to build a sustainable business while navigating real life. If you’re ready to explore what’s possible when you prioritize intentionally, we're booking mid-year strategy retreats for founders and their teams. |
Renia Carsillo
Renia (pronounced R-EE-n-a) Carsillo hates business silos and marketing hacks. So, she spends her days working with mid-size and small companies to integrate their business strategy with their impact strategy, design sustainable marketing frameworks, and find a growth cadence that works for their team and their lives. Renia believes founders are uniquely positioned to create a kinder, more equitable world. She is passionate about bringing C-level strategic support to the small and mid-size companies shaping their communities every day. Renia says, "Sustainable marketing is built on a solid business strategy. A solid business strategy is built on values-driven habits. Values-driven habits are built on healed/healing leaders. We can’t do these things separately. They’re all interconnected. ”
Happy Tuesday, Reader! Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about creating flexible, GPS-like roadmaps for your business strategy. This week, we're zooming in on a smaller-scale tool that supports that journey: containerizing your weeks and days. Think of your days and weeks as containers—they can only hold so much. When you create intentional boundaries around your time, you gain clarity about what you've accomplished, what remains, and what simply won't fit. In a world that feels...
Happy Tuesday, Reader! A couple of weeks ago, we talked about coaches and communities as scaffolding for building new habits. Today, as we begin The $250K Club program for the first time, I'm thinking about the power of these two alignments and what kind of magic they bring when they're well-aligned and on-mission. (Psst - It’s not too late to join. Register for The $250K Club below.) SECURE MY SPOT The bigger and bolder the thing we are trying to do, the more we need both coaches and...
Happy Tuesday, Reader! I love speaking, training, and teaching different groups of people. But I don't love being on airplanes multiple times each month. And as an introvert, I struggle with too much travel and too much people time. Those are the hard parts of the thing I want. We're looking for a house right now. It costs significantly more to live in a neighborhood where I can walk places and have neighbors who want community with each other, not car-to-garage anonymity. We can have a...