We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lisa Rehurek. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lisa below.

Lisa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

I hope to be remembered first and foremost for being kind and spreading joy. Sounds so simple, and if you had asked me this five years ago, I’d have a different answer. But it’s something that I feel the world is missing. As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I have much more empathy for what other people are going through. We just never know. Kindness and joy are free and easy to give. If I could spread those things everywhere, I would. I do my part in my small corner of the world.

Lisa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I spent about 20 years in corporate america and had a great opportunity to leave that all behind and start a couple of businesses with an ex-colleague. That was relatively short-lived and I exited three years in when it was no longer in alignment with my values. That’s when I started my own business. I had no idea what I was doing, what to focus on, or how to be a business owner, but I was able to secure a large consulting contract right out of the gate while I worked to build something more sustainable. It took me a long time.

Seven years later in 2018, I officially founded The RFP Success Company. It took a while to find this niche, and frankly, it found me. I had worked with RFPs a lot in my corporate positions, and people that I knew from that time would call and ask me to help them with RFPs. I then started testing that as a viable business, and the rest is history.

The RFP Success Company helps businesses win work with state governments. If you want to do business with state government, you have to bid on the work through an RFP (Requests for Proposal). If you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t have proposal professionals on your team, responding to an RFP is no fun and often a big use of time and resources. For those businesses that struggle to win the RFPs, they look to us to help them prepare better proposals and processes and gain more consistent wins.

I’m so proud of all that we do here, because it goes beyond just the client engagement.

First, we provide services for every market looking to do business with state governments. Our core services are built for mid-market service-based companies, but we also provide corporate training to professional proposal teams. And we are just launching a small-business Accelerator that is unique to the industry and will serve an audience that desperately needs support in their endeavors to win this kind of business.

Second, we provide accessible resources through our RFP Success Show podcast; books specifically written on the topic of state government RFPs; a new Playbook that provides all the tools a business needs to respond to RFPs; a free digital magazine; and The RFP Success LinkedIn Community. The whole team has a huge passion for providing these resources to help businesses be more successful.

What sets us apart is that we like to find the simplicity in managing these arduous documents. Most people really dislike RFPs, so we’re here to make it more efficient, more fun, and much more successful!

I’m also a proud certified Woman Business Enterprise, certified Small Diverse Business in several states, and we were just honored as a recipient of the 2023 Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Private companies in the US.

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

I started my business at the tail end of a business partnership that had gone south. I had no business starting my own company — I didn’t have any role models or any training in entrepreneurship. I also didn’t really have a vision for what the business would be. I started out with a nice lucrative corporate contract, but I didn’t diversify fast enough. That contract ended a few years in and I had very little other business. I think I made $26,000 the next year. I was not prepared.

At that time, I had a choice. I could go back and get a job, or I could make it work. I wanted to stick with the entrepreneur journey, but it was hard. At that point, my resilience kicked in. I got scrappy. I got a roommate, I got rid of cable, I sold a bunch of stuff. I got a couple of freelance gigs that kept the lights on. I borrowed money from my parents. It was a tough time. But I kept moving forward and eventually it paid off.

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

Spending twenty years in the Corporate environment, I learned that failure meant that I didn’t get the job done. I was unsuccessful.

When you own your own business, failure is inevitable. It might be small failure or big failure, but if you’re trained to fear failure it’s going to make it hard. Learning to embrace failure is such a beautiful thing. We’ve all heard the statement, “Fail Forward”, which I did plenty of. I might not ever love failure, but I sure love the lessons I learn from it. I learn so much faster when I fail, and when I lean into the lesson.

Contact Info:

• Website:www.TheRFPSuccessCompany.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisa_rehurek
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/rfpsuccess
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisarehurek

Image Credits
Karianne Munstedt