Dennis Consorte began his digital marketing career in the early 2000s after successfully selling his first ecommerce business. In 2010, he founded Consorte Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency catering to start-ups and small businesses. However, after several years of acquiring numerous clients through lead generation and agency partnerships, Dennis experienced burnout in 2015, leading him to temporarily shut down the company. Two years later, he revived it with renewed purpose and focus.
Today, Dennis runs several mission-driven marketing enterprises, including Brand Boba, which specializes in publicity and branding, and Luminary Tiger, a book publishing company. He is also the author of the Amazon bestseller “Back After Burnout.”
We are thrilled to have you join us today, Dennis! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Dennis Consorte: Dennis Consorte sold his first ecommerce business in the early 2000s and began his decades-long career as a digital marketer. He launched Consorte Marketing in 2010 as a full stack digital marketing agency for start-ups and small businesses. After acquiring numerous clients through lead generation and agency partnerships, he went through a period of burnout around 2015 and shut the company down before rebooting two years later. Now he runs purpose-driven marketing companies including Brand Boba, a niche spinoff focused on publicity and branding, and Luminary Tiger, a book publishing company. He is also the author of the Amazon bestseller, “Back After Burnout.”
Can you share a time when your business faced a significant challenge? How did you navigate through it?
Dennis Consorte: The biggest challenge my company faced was when I went through a period of burnout. I lost my sense of purpose because I was so busy bringing new clients that I forgot why I was doing it in the first place. Work was no longer fun, and I was distracted from being a good leader to my team. My negative attitude affected the rest of the team, and I decided to shut down the business. Eventually I regained my sense of purpose and now I spend time every day making sure that the work my team and I do is aligned with our mission, vision and values.
How has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success?
Dennis Consorte: I’ve learned through failure that staying on mission is crucial to the success of any business. It’s even more important than bringing new clients. If you spend your time on the wrong clients, or your work doesn’t align with your company’s core values, then your culture will become unrecognizable. When that happens, it means that either you need to shift focus and get back on mission, or you need to reevaluate why you’re in business, and pivot if necessarly.
How do you build a resilient team? What qualities do you look for in your team members?
Dennis Consorte: The best way to build a resilient team is to recruit people whose personal values align with your company’s core values. If they share your values, and believe in the mission, then they’ll stick around when times get tough. They’ll persevere because they aren’t just driven by a paycheck. With that in mind, you also want to hire people who acknowledge that they’ve experienced failure, and found a way to get back on their feet. If you hire people who say they’ve never experienced failure, then one of two things will happen. Without that experience, they won’t have the wisdom to navigate failure in a healthy way when it arises at your company. If they have failed but choose to hide it from you, then it means they’ll continue to hide important information after you hire them.
How do you maintain your personal resilience during tough times?
Dennis Consorte: During tough times, I utilize several tools to stay resilient. One of the most powerful, yet simple tools is to practice gratitude every day. I spend a few minutes at night making a mental checklist of all of the things I’m grateful for, both professionally and personally. I find that this helps alleviate some of the anxiety that can keep me awake and I’ll get a more restful night’s sleep. For me, sleep is what I need to pay attention to most. I don’t sleep well generally, so I have to be mindful of my stress levels and their effect on it.
What strategies do you use to manage stress and maintain focus during a crisis?
Dennis Consorte: During a crisis, I find that situational leadership is a powerful tool to maintain focus and keep my team moving forward. I lean towards servant leadership, where I provide my team with the support they need, to accomplish the goals we agree upon. I also use transformational leadership to inspire people to be innovative and reach their full potential. But in a crisis, you sometimes have to be a bit authoritarian to hit your deadlines and goals. I just don’t make this the standard, because it can be very demoralizing. If I find that I’m delegating tasks to achieve a desired outcome in a crisis, I’m always mindful to pull back when it’s over and give people more liberty to solve problems in their own way. The important thing is to treat people as individuals. Higher level people tend not to need too much direction, and they often resent it. But new people without much experience will need a lot of direction, even when they think they don’t. With situational leadership, you pick and choose the style that works best with an individual in a specific situation.
How do you communicate with your team during a crisis?
Dennis Consorte: I always do my best to treat people with respect. I stay as positive as I can during a crisis, yet I’m transparent about goals and repercussions if we fail. Most importantly, I reinforce teamwork and the idea that if we fail, we fail as a team, and if we win, we win as a team. The last thing I want during a crisis is for individuals to try and outdo each other because they want all of the glory for themselves. I’d rather reward teamwork that produces an okay outcome than a cutthroat person who does good work but doesn’t support the people around them. After the crisis is over, I’m always vocally appreciative of everyone’s contributions. We do a post mortem where we evaluate what went well, what went wrong, why we ended up in the crisis in the first place, and what we can do differently in the future to solve a similar crisis more effectively, or to avoid it altogether.
What advice would you give to other CEOs on building resilience in their organizations?
Dennis Consorte: The best way to build resilience in your organization is by hiring people who align with your company’s values, and to have a culture that is both transparent and empowering. Make sure you give your team the psychological safety of knowing that failure is okay as long as they learn from it and can apply their learnings to future situations. And, build mentorship into your culture so that people are rewarded for supporting each other and building team cohesion.
How do you prepare your business for potential future crises?
Dennis Consorte: Next to culture, documentation is super-important for any organization. Build standard operating procedures (SOPs) around all of your repeatable processes. When you face a crisis, document as much as possible and build an SOP for managing similar situations in the future. Make sure your team is aware of where to find this documentation so they’re not relying entirely on guesswork during a crisis. Finally, if you don’t want people to panic in a crisis, and you want them to be supportive of one another, then model that behavior for them. Your team will learn by watching you, so be a great leader and show them how to navigate a crisis when it happens.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about leadership in times of crisis?
Dennis Consorte: Poor leaders are rigid in their thinking and actions. They behave similarly whether there’s a crisis or not. Worse, they may not know how to handle a crisis, so they panic, and their poor actions and judgments infect the rest of the team. By contrast, great leaders are flexible. They adapt to different situations based on the needs, and the people involved. They keep a cool head in times of crisis and assign responsibility in a way that feels reassuring to the rest of the team while also staying firm about solving problems. Most importantly, great leaders make more leaders. As you teach people on your team how to lead others well, you can take a step back and trust them to do their jobs.
