May 8, 2023
9 Years of Mess, Muck, Magic, and Marketing Our Way
Spring is such a magical season. For weeks now, spring here in Baltimore has been joyously escorting us back to our fullest, most alive selves. This is the season that beckons our senses to collaborate in deeply-wired delights: hands in dirt, feet on grass, ears to birdsong, sight and smell turned to the colors and blooms flooding in from every direction.
Asana Consulting is a spring baby, born in March 2014. When we marked our 9th birthday last month, I kicked off my annual ritual of revisiting the early days, when I was intentionally unemployed and working away at my desk, accompanied by a vision for a new professional direction, a business name, my lone colleague Woody the (most perfect) dog (ever), and a treetop window with a view of all the seasonal awakenings all around me.
Everything slowed. This was a welcome change – after all, I had chosen it – but it was also hard to adjust to. The quiet and my solitude often got uncomfortably loud. Initially, I had to find my bearings in the vacant spaces once occupied by the elements that had defined my work days for the 16 years before – commutes on highways and city streets and sidewalks, parking spaces, office buildings and offices (which in my final career stop had been an open-space concept filled with the frenetic energy of a start-up hurtling towards launch), daily schedules bursting with meetings and deadlines, and twice daily body/mind transitions from home to work and work to home.
Just like the annual rebirth that is spring starts its voyage up and out into the world from seeds and buds that stir awake deep and dark and still-cold places, Asana Consulting began its emergence slowly and imperceptibly out of the vacated spaces of my former work habitat. The stirring seeds and buds at my desk by that window were an amorphous collection of my ideas, visions and values laid out before me, saying yes to the act of making a place for them to grow into the unimaginable form they spoke of becoming.
It’s so easy to herald the bonkers bounty of late spring, but Parker Palmer writes like no one I’ve read about early spring, the part of spring where plenty of magic is at work but largely out of our sensory realm.
I know for me it is the part most easily forgotten in the glory of what rolls in next.
Palmer writes: “…before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created…Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way…”
The early days of what became Asana Consulting were a lot of mud and muck. I turned over the soil in my mind every day, moving doubts and fears out of the way, creating more favorable conditions for seedlings to blink open and send out their first insistent shoots towards the light. A mission, a set of values, a brand story, a business and a business plan. Then my first client and that first miraculous check. It took, it bloomed, and here we are nine springs later.
More years in business means every year my view of this adventure gives me more to take in. More ups and downs of every kind, more well-executed wins, more standstills and disappointments.
And yet, what comes through more strongly than anything else in this anniversary reflection season is the damn wonder of it all, the sheer ridiculousness of the fact that from the muck of my mid-career crisis – when I realized the way I had worked my entire career no longer fit who I had become, when I could no longer look away from the clumps of my hair that were falling out from stress and staring up at me from my bathroom floor – emerged tiny tendrils from my heart and mind tenacious and insistent enough to grow into an actual business for nine years and counting.
Nancy is a Baltimore native who came to communications and marketing through her work in public health. In 2014 she took an entrepreneurial leap of faith to start Asana Consulting and she found her wings.
