We recently connected with Lisa Raebel and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I am not a good employee. Let’s start there.

My career has been spent helping both large and mid-sized organizations get bigger, either through selling or marketing their services to their clients. And I was pretty good at it… until I wasn’t. As I became a wife and mother, my priorities shifted yet corporate America didn’t seem to care, so I left.

The reason I say that I am not a good employee is that when I recognized that the internal workings of big business sales and marketing departments were broken, I spoke up about it. Big business does not like to be told they are doing something wrong, or unfair, or processes that could be done more easily are bound by red tape, or… you get the idea.

Knowing I had to leave my last job as a marketing director, I found myself at a women’s retreat trying to seek the answer to my question: “what next?” While walking on a tile labyrinth as part of an answer-seeking exercise, I found myself going from my question of whether or not to stay in ‘for profit’ or go back to ‘non-profit’ work to asking myself if I should work for someone else or for myself.

WHAT?!? Entrepreneurship was never on my radar. Ever!

Running with this bat-crap-crazy idea of starting my own business, I called some of my successful entrepreneur friends and set up lunch meetings with them to run my business plan past them, secretly hoping they would tell me I am crazy and to go get a job. They didn’t.

My approach to marketing consulting was (and still is) to help small businesses and sole entrepreneurs with their marketing on a gig basis, with no long-term contracts, including full transparency of idea sharing, and they kept all of my work once we were done working together.

The problem this approach solves for this underserved community of small business owners is they didn’t have to be held prisoner by their marketing firm, not knowing what was going on or what the next campaign looked like. I was teaching the business owner how to market, (vs. teaching them how to fish, they would starve if that was my job BTW!).

What happened next was surprising. Out of the five entrepreneurs I met with, two hired me on the spot. I didn’t even have a business name yet!

My family comes first in all areas of my life. Building a lifestyle business that allows me to work when I want and with whom I want to work has been one of the best decisions of my life. I have found the freedom to be myself, speak my mind, do what is right vs what is expected, and be the best version of myself every day, (ok, almost every day… nobody is perfect).

Rebel Girl Marketing, LLC was born out of the realization that marketing did not need to be as complicated as large agencies make it out to be and that it is hard for small business owners to talk about themselves when it comes to creating their own marketing content. My passion is helping people see their uniqueness, put it into words, and help them tell the world how fabulous they really are!

I am here to help small businesses stay in business. There are benefits to a RebelMindset!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Marketing has always been intriguing to me. Yet, when I graduated with a degree in marketing back in the late 80s, marketing professionals didn’t make enough money to live on, so I started my career in sales. My sales experience taught me to listen for the client’s needs, even if the client didn’t know what their true needs were themselves.

Having a quota over my head and managers who were only interested in when your next big deal was going to close made me realize that I was not cut out for a sales career long-term. Don’t get me wrong, I made good money back in the day, it just wasn’t my passion. And yet, I didn’t realize how important my sales experience was going to be until I started my own business.

Marketing is about storytelling, so you need to know what stories to tell which audiences. That is the key! Seeing business development strategies from both the sales and marketing vantage point is what makes me different from other marketing consultants. The content and strategies I create are always from the customers’ point of view. What do they need to know about an organization, product, or service? What problems do they need to solve? How do they digest information? Seeing marketing from the customer’s perspective creates content that is engaging and relatable.

I love to teach and coach my clients on more than marketing what they sell. I help organizations with internal marketing as well, as in, how they communicate with their team. I spent six years working within the human resources industry and learned a lot about what it takes to be a great manager and an employer of choice. Everything you do internally is also marketing. I LOVE it when a business owner embraces this concept! These business owners don’t just have a team, they build brand ambassadors and their retention ratio increases. It makes me so happy!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When you first start your business, you’ll take any client that is willing to give you money! Learning that not everyone is your customer is a hard (and expensive) lesson to learn.

I took on a client that in my gut I knew would be difficult to work with, yet the money was too good to pass up. I put my heart and soul into this client, even to the point of volunteering my time to make sure events went off without a hitch. I know, I know… my bad.

The owner was one of those people who knew everything and didn’t always take my role seriously. Yet if something went wrong with a marketing idea they came up with (and I disagreed with), I found myself under the proverbial bus. Yet, if one of my campaigns did well, it was all their idea. I kept thinking, “I’m not going to let them win, I can do this!” Ugh, so naive!

When the relationship started to come to an end and I knew my services were no longer needed at this client, my approach to off-boarding them did not go well. It was the beginning of COVID and I knew their revenue was going to suffer because of it, so I used that excuse to end my frustration with working for this client. They took it as mutiny and accused me of working for the competition. Seriously!?!

The contract ended abruptly, and they refused to pay my last two invoices.

Lessons learned:
1. Trust your gut when it comes to choosing your clients
2. Get paid in advance!

Today, I have a strict screening process for new clients that includes a list of questions that helps me diagnose their psychographics as it relates to their view on marketing and outsourcing this service. It has helped me avoid bad clients and work with people who understand marketing as a mindset.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Humor, humility, and honesty are the reasons people remember me.

Humor: I love what I do, and it shows in the relationships I have with my clients. From the beginning, I start with a light-hearted approach to marketing their products/services. I help them see their sales and marketing efforts from their client’s perspective and how what they do makes their clients’ lives better. And, it is all done with a twist of sarcasm and a beaming smile on my face.

Humility: My approach is simple, I become part of their team, not an outside consultant. I tell my client, and every member of their team, to see me as a part-time marketing director at their disposal whenever they need me. I am open to suggestions from anyone at the organization and I don’t get offended when a client doesn’t like what I create.

Honesty: I am not afraid to tell a client ‘no’ if I disagree with an approach they are trying to make and it is always followed up by the reasoning why I disagree. The customer is not always right, if they were… they wouldn’t need my services.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rebelgirlmarketing.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebelgirlmarketing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisaraebel/

Image Credits
Professional photographer: Miriam Bulcher Photography