Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in business services but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Kelly Christiano, Co-Founder and CEO of Revelocity Consulting, located in Bridgewater, NJ, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Revelocity Consulting is the source for highly experienced sales, marketing, and business gurus who provide pragmatic advice clients can readily act on to accelerate revenue growth. We provide fractional CMOs and CROs, build marketing and sales organizations, set marketing priorities, and execute discrete activities that drive measurable results and positively impact our client's bottom line.

Our deep and diverse expertise across financial services uniquely positions us to swiftly adapt to clients' cultures and processes, understand business challenges, and identify what is needed to add value. We have a track record of applying wisdom and skills to a variety of organizations.

Tell us about yourself

When I left a corporate job at the end of 2019, a CEO at a Fortune 500 company asked me to do some consulting. At the time, I thought the consulting would be temporary while I looked for my next corporate job. Then COVID came and changed everything. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and I decided in May 2020 to start Revelocity. I am thrilled every day to work on diverse projects that help our clients grow their businesses. I also thrive on networking and prospecting for business that introduces me to new contacts and reconnects me with people I haven't interacted with in a while.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

In every client engagement, we strive to deliver quantifiable results. For example, we transformed the website for a client and increased unique web visitors by 165%. In another example, we relaunched corporate communications resulting in $1.8B in impressions and $16M in ad value in just six months. When these outstanding outcomes result in clients who want to engage us for additional projects, I get super excited!

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

One of the hardest things as a business owner is making time for your own internal efforts, in our case, sales and marketing, when you are hyper-focused on your clients' efforts every day. For example, Revelocity had a different name and brand in the very early days. It wasn't a very exciting name or website. We knew we needed to go through a rebranding exercise, but we were so busy with our clients that it took us way too long to get to some of our own marketing needs. I've heard similar laments from other business owners.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Be very attuned to the cycles of the business. When you are busy with paying clients, you still must find time to devote 15-20% of your working week to business development. Otherwise, you are likely to experience a time when paying client work finishes, and your pipeline for potential business isn't robust enough.
  2. Closely manage your finances. In a self-funded business, it is particularly important to realize that revenue and incoming payments will not be as smooth as the weekly paychecks you experienced when working in a corporate job. At the same time, your expenses related to telecommunications, insurance, travel, etc., will need to be paid regularly. Therefore, you will need to start the business with seed funding and build a reserve over time to account for the mismatch between the inflow and outflow of cash.
  3. Build a business partner network. Connecting with other business owners who provide complementary goods or services to a related client base can be enormously helpful for multiple reasons. First, you might partner on projects whereby each company provides a piece of a solution, sharing in the revenue. Second, you might provide referrals, thus expanding your business development network and providing some incremental revenue for the referral. Finally, you build your professional network with other business owners where you can share information on business solutions, best practices, etc.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.gorevelocity.com/

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-christiano/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/revelocity-consulting/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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