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.
The Data Behind the Fake Business Boom Doesn't See Women [Small Stage, Big Impact Podcast]
E63: Half of America’s New Business Founders Are Women. The Data Can’t Even See Them.The media spent the summer calling the surge in solo businesses a “fake business boom.” I dug into the data and found something else: just under half of new businesses are started by women, in a dataset that doesn't even track gender. Most small business research is built to leave women-owned companies out entirely, and I talk about why that matters. I also share my own path, from solo owner to a 10-person team. The media says the small business boom is fake. What if nobody bothered to study the women behind it?Scott Galloway and his Prof G Markets co-host, Ed Elson, spent weeks calling this year's surge in micro and solo businesses "the fake business boom." Most of the media picked up some version of that story. I wanted to jump on the bandwagon. I know what it is to be the one who signs the checks. But when I started digging into the available data, I saw something different. In today's episode, I'm walking through why "fake" is the wrong word for as many as half of these new businesses, and why the data we're using to judge them can't even see who's behind them. |
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.
E67: 3 Founders, 3 Paths to Building a Business That Lasts Three 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. Scan...
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...