We were lucky to catch up with Elizabeth Coluby recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Elizabeth thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I didn’t start my business because I had some neat little entrepreneurial master plan.

I started because I got laid off in 2023 after more than 25 years in banking, and a question I thought I would answer later suddenly got shoved right in front of me: What now?

The truth is, the idea had already been forming. I had already started thinking seriously about consulting and coaching as my next chapter. I had even hired a coach a few months earlier to help me build a three-year launch plan. Then I got the severance package, and that three-year plan became a two-month execution sprint.

Someone gave me some advice that turned out to be exactly right. They said: Use the severance to test the waters for six months. Try what you think you want to do next. If you hate it, you can get another corporate job.

So that’s what I did.

I treated it like a real experiment. I set up the business. I started shaping offers. I had a lot of conversations. I paid attention to what kind of work gave me energy, where people leaned in, and what kept pulling me back. I was not floating around “finding myself.” I was pressure-testing whether this thing had legs.

And to be honest, that first year was hard. It was not some clean little reinvention story. There was real stress. Real uncertainty. Real stakes.

But even in the middle of that, something became clear pretty quickly.

I loved the work itself.

I love messy, high-stakes business problems. I love the moment when everyone is circling the issue, and I can feel the real issue sitting right underneath it. I love helping leaders connect the dots, cut through the noise, and finally see what matters.

And once I stepped back, I realized that had been the pattern all along.

Across Bank of America, Citi, KeyBank, and even earlier in Silicon Valley product work, I kept getting pulled into the same kinds of situations: a business goal that mattered, too many opinions, not enough clarity, and a lot of pressure to move. I was often the person brought in when an important project was stuck or going sideways and needed to be untangled, reframed, simplified, or pushed forward.

At some point, I finally said to myself: This is not just a skill set. This is the business.

So the hardest part of those first six months was not setting up an LLC. It was getting honest about where to focus. I had to separate what was true for other people from what was true for me. I had to learn how to sell from the outside, not just influence from the inside. I had to get clearer on pricing, clearer on positioning, and clearer on where I create the most value.

One of the clearest early signs that the business was real was a project with a fast-growing regional bank. They wanted to build a community for women entrepreneurs and executives. The opportunity was obvious. The path was not.

On paper, it looked like a marketing project. It wasn’t.

It was a clarity problem. A growth problem. A strategy problem.

I helped them get sharper on who they most wanted to serve, what those women leaders actually needed, how to make it easier to do business with the bank, what success should look like, and what practical steps were needed next. We worked on audience clarity, value proposition, goals, KPIs, and a real roadmap. In other words, we turned a good idea into something leadership could actually move on and the board would want to approve with a “h#ll yes.”

That project confirmed what I was building.

I’m not here to sell vague inspiration or consultant theater. I’m here to help leaders get clear, make smarter decisions, and move important work forward.

So in the end, launching my business looked a lot like the work I now do for clients. Get clear. Cut the noise. Name what matters. Build the path. Move.

That’s how I started. It’s also what I help leaders do every day.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’m a strategic growth advisor. I help leaders turn complexity into clear action.

This can be as a consultant, coach, fractional executive, speaker or facilitator … whatever form the client needs it to be.

I got here the long way, which I actually think is the useful way. I spent more than 25 years inside financial services and tech organizations in growth, product, marketing, and digital transformation roles, including time at Citi, Bank of America, KeyBank, and earlier in Silicon Valley. I’ve led new product launches, turnaround efforts, acquisition programs, simplification work, digital initiatives, and a lot of cross-functional efforts where the stakes were high, and nobody had time for fluff.

Over the years, I kept seeing the same pattern: what people call an execution problem is often a clarity problem upstream.

The strategy is fuzzy.
The priorities are muddy.
The audience is too broad.
The message is trying to do too much.
The client experience has too much friction.
Everyone is busy, but the thing that matters is still stuck.

That’s the lane I’ve built my business around.

Today, I work with leaders and organizations with meaningful growth goals, especially in service-based and often in regulated industries, when the path forward has gotten muddy. Sometimes the strategy is not clear enough to get funded, aligned, or executed well. Sometimes the work is already underway, but momentum is slipping. Sometimes the business is doing too much, and the real priority is buried under activity. I help leaders get clear on where to focus, what is making progress harder than it needs to be, and how to turn ambition into a path people can actually execute.

Consulting and speaking are now the center of my business. Coaching often shows up in my work when a leader needs to strengthen how they lead through change, but the core of what I do is helping organizations create clarity, alignment, and forward motion.

What sets me apart is that I’m not just an ideas person, and I’m not just an operator. I connect the dots between strategy, priorities, people, customer reality, and execution. I tend to see the hole in the plan pretty quickly. I ask the question that other people are thinking but not saying. Then I help make the hard parts usable for the business and easier for the client.

Not prettier. Clearer. Simpler. More executable.

That has shown up in many different ways over my career. At KeyBank, I helped launch EasyUp(R), a tool that has helped more than 200,000 clients save more than $190 million by making saving feel simple and doable, rather than one more thing people had to manage. I’ve led simplification work for checking products where we were actively selling seven products, even though three was the industry norm. But, research showed we still had no real fit for 20% of the market. More complexity, and still gaps. That’s exactly the kind of thing I love untangling. At Bank of America, I was part of the work to reverse a seven-year decline in checking acquisition. At Merrill Edge, I helped simplify sales collateral and tools to connect better with the actual target client, not just the internal view of the client.

More recently, I worked with a growing regional bank that wanted to better attract and serve women entrepreneurs and executives. Again, the issue was not a lack of ideas. I helped them sharpen the audience, strategy, value proposition, growth path, and next steps so the work could move from “this sounds good” to “here’s how we build it.”

And if you ask people what it’s like to work with me, the themes are pretty consistent. They say I make complex things understandable, quickly pinpoint what really matters, and bring a mix of smarts, grit, and a focus on execution. One client said it felt like we could “slay dragons” together. Honestly, that’s not a bad description.

What I’m most proud of is not just scale, although I’ve done plenty of that. I’m proud of simplification. I’m proud of helping leaders grow into more of who they are capable of being. I’m proud of building products, programs, and experiences that meet real client needs while still delivering strong business outcomes. And I’m proud of the moments when a team finally sees the real issue and stops wasting energy on the wrong problem.

What I want potential clients to know is simple: I do my best work with leaders who are serious about growth and honest enough to admit when the swirl has taken over. They don’t need more activity. They need clarity, alignment, and forward motion. That’s the lane I’ve built my business around.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One lesson I had to unlearn was this: just because I can do a lot does not mean I should do a lot.

Early in my career at Citibank, one of the first mantras I picked up was, “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” And honestly, that fit me. I’ve always had a bias for action. I like moving things forward. I like figuring things out. I like being dropped into something messy and finding the path through it.

That served me well for a long time.

Across big roles, reorgs, new initiatives, and more moves than most people make in a lifetime, I became the person who could step into complexity fast, connect the dots, and create momentum. At Bank of America alone, I moved through more than ten roles in fifteen years. I got very good at learning quickly, proving value quickly, and saying yes to hard things.

The problem is, when you get rewarded for being highly capable, you can start confusing capability with strategy.

You start thinking, “I can do that too,” instead of asking, “Is that actually where I should be spending my energy?”

That followed me into entrepreneurship. Early on, I could have built a business that offered a little of everything because, truthfully, I can do a lot of things well. Consulting. Coaching. Strategy. Messaging. Growth. Leadership development. Facilitation. The range is real.

But range can become a trap if you are not careful.

I had to unlearn the habit of over-functioning and being broadly useful, and replace it with being sharply valuable. I also had to unlearn a quieter thing underneath that, the idea that external structure, titles, or other people’s approval were what made my work credible. At some point, you have to stop waiting for institutional validation and own the value of what you know how to do.

That was a big shift.

Now I think about it very differently. Saying yes to everything is not generosity. It is often just a fast path to dilution. The real work is knowing where you create the most value and where your effort actually changes the outcome.

That lesson shows up in how I run my business and how I help clients. Many teams are not stuck because they are lazy or untalented. They are stuck because they have too many priorities, too many moving parts, and not enough strategic clarity. I know that pattern well because I lived it, many times over.

So yes, I still have a bias for action. I always will. But now it is more disciplined. Less “yes, I can do it.” More “yes, this matters, so it’s important to me to do it.”

That changed a lot.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Resilience, to me, is not about looking fearless. It is about staying clear enough to keep moving when life gets loud.

I got laid off in 2023 after more than 25 years in banking. That alone would have been enough to force a reset. But that year was not just a career transition. My husband was laid off a few months later. My mom had a stroke soon after that. Our family was hit with several hard things in a short period of time, and emotionally, it was a lot.

I didn’t get a clean transition. I got a stress test.

So no, I did not get one of those neat little reinvention stories with the perfect lighting.
I got real life.

What helped is that, in some ways, I had been training for change my whole life. I have lived in 30 homes in 5 countries and 8 US states. I have had to start over, adapt, read the room, and build quickly more times than I can count. At Bank of America, I moved through role after role, often getting dropped into new situations where the expectation was basically, “Figure it out, create value, and move the business forward.” That gave me a deep tolerance for ambiguity and a strong ability to recalibrate quickly.

But this season asked for something different, too.

It was not just about being tough or capable. It was about decompressing from years of corporate stress and learning how to regulate myself enough to think clearly again. Grounding. Stillness. Learning how to come out of survival mode. That was part of the work, too.

And honestly, I needed that.

Building a business after a long corporate career is not just an operational shift. It is an identity shift. You are no longer being carried by the structure, title, and momentum of a big institution. You have to hear your own thinking. You have to trust your own value. You have to keep going even when the path is not fully visible yet.

That year taught me that resilience is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like getting up, making the next call, having the next conversation, refining the offer, serving the client in front of you, and choosing not to collapse just because life gave you every reason to.

It also clarified something important for me. I did not want to go back to a version of work that drained me. I wanted to build something that could keep growing with me for decades, something rooted in my real strengths, my experience, and the kind of impact I most want to make.

So when I think about resilience, I do not think about pushing through at all costs anymore. I think about staying connected to what matters, adapting without disappearing, and continuing to build even when life is asking a lot of you.

That is probably the truest version of resilience I know.

Contact Info:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ecoluby
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethcoluby/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Coluby