Renia Carsillo, Chief Strategist & Founder of Realign Consulting
My superpowers are pattern recognition and activating change. Realign Consulting, the company I founded in 2008 (formerly Genevieve Digital), is a strategy consultancy that helps companies put all their stakeholders (not just shareholders, like most companies do today) at the center of their strategy. We do that by working with Founders to realign with their values and design their strategy around a 5-part framework we call Do Better Business™. We’ve used our model, which begins with the marketing department, to help over a hundred small and mid-size brands figure out how to both make great growth strides and have a positive impact on their stakeholders.
What motivated you to become an entrepreneur? Is having your own business something you always wanted?
In college, I knew I wanted to help make a kinder world, but I didn’t know how to do it. Then, I spent the early years of my career in banking. I started my first post-college job in 2005 and worked in finance through the height of the 2008 financial crisis. I was working with small businesses every day and seeing what a misalignment of big business ideas and small business values did to them. I knew that what most companies were doing wasn’t working. With all the confidence of a 20-something, I set out on my own at the very height of the financial crisis and built my first business with nothing but a Facebook Page and some vague ideas about what the world I wanted my kids to grow up in looked like.
People started asking me how I found clients and built relationships on social media (this was the early days). That led to opportunities to help companies use digital mediums they never had before. For almost 10 years, I worked with companies on their marketing, but something was missing. Then, in 2018, I realized that marketing had a clear place within a business. It is the heartbeat. Like a heartbeat, when it’s healthy, it pumps life into the whole entity. When needed, marketing can speed things up or even things out. But, when the business is unhealthy, the marketing heartbeat causes major problems. Once I figured that out, I learned that we had to do more. From that idea, Realign Consulting was born.
What advice would you give to someone starting out or pivoting their business or their career?
To someone starting out, I would recommend she keep her day job as long as possible to give her work a chance to thrive without the pressure of day-to-day life expenses. I think we do others a disservice when we encourage them to burn bridges and cut ties. New ideas, innovations, and pivots are often fragile things. They need care and nurturing. Going slower, letting the work build into a flywheel before we ask it to support us, is often the most sustainable way (if we have the choice) to achieve long-term freedom and success.
We tell a lot of stories about founders who dropped out or quit, but that’s not what most of them actually did. They took leaves of absence from school or worked part-time on their work until it started to gain some traction. It isn’t true that if we jump, the net will always appear. We need to quit telling people with big ideas to move so fast. Take your time. Build traction. Keep the day job until the big idea can sustain you. Does it take longer? Sometimes. But it’s also a lot less likely to end in heartache.
What is the most important when it comes to goal setting? Do you have any goal-setting hacks?
To paraphrase the work of James Clear and others, I don’t really care what your goals are until I know something about your habits. So, I try to apply the same to myself. Instead of setting a goal first, I look at my habits and what would need to change to be the person I want to be in that area. For example, when my team and I wanted to figure out how to relieve the anxiety of constantly trying to do too much, we didn’t set goals about taking more time off or being more productive. We looked at our habits and started taking Fridays off from May through September (we call them Summer Fun Fridays). That habit shift taught us how to do more with less and take more time to rest. Now, even during the months that we’re working full five-day weeks, we’re more relaxed because we know what we can accomplish with our time.
If we had to burn all the books in the world but keep just 3… Which ones should we keep and why?
Oh wow, this one is tough. A mentor once told me that people only change in two ways: the people they meet and the books they read. So, without books, we take away half of our ability to change. But if I had to choose, I guess it would be:
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I read this during my sophomore year of high school, and it changed how I thought about how different religions and cultures relate to each other. Sometimes, I think my life’s work began with this little book.
On Writing by Stephen King. I reread this book about once a year since it came out when I was in high school. It’s the simplest advice about writing, going your own way, and living a creative life. The book also helps me with perspective, reminding me that even Stephen King wasn’t always Stephen King and that loved ones who are invested in our success are critical to keep us from throwing away our best moments and our most important work.
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - because we all need a little fantastical, romantic magic in our lives.
Connect with Renia on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reniacarsillo/ and Medium at: https://medium.com/@ReniaCarsillo
