Kirsten Poe Hill and Renée E. Warren: Sharing Secrets to Starting and Succeeding in Business
Cofounders, Noelle-Elaine Media, Inc.
When Kirsten Poe Hill and Renée E. Warren met 18 years ago they became fast friends. While working together at CNBC, they discovered that they were both naturally talented with being able to bring people together, after the success of their “fundraiser” for a vacation drew a standing room only crowd — during a snowstorm.
Hill and Warren’s backgrounds in media and production proved to be the perfect combination for event management and media relations, so the pair formed their own production company Noelle-Elaine Media, Inc. Their client roster includes Essence magazine, Charles Schwab, L’Oreal, Black Enterprise magazine, The National Black MBA Association, National Urban League, National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, non-profit organizations and companies that tend to do annual events or conferences.
Warren and Hill found that they not only had to prove themselves because the company is a woman owned business, they also had to address the fact that they are a small business. “We have the credentials, we’ve worked in the industry for years and our company itself is 15 years old. As women, we have been in male-dominated areas [like] the financial industry, and we would come in and show what we could do, ” Warren explains. “Our biggest challenge is being a small business. We might be a second runner-up to get the business because the company can’t conceive how our small staff is able to manage the workload as well as we do. We have outperformed larger companies,” Hill adds.
Hill shares that the company recently overcame a major crisis and decided they need to write a book to share their stories. “We would always say that we have a great story for a book,” shares Hill. “We have a bunch of stories to tell and we can help people with our stories.” Poe and Warren wrote You Buy the Peanut Butter, I’ll Get the Bread: The Absolutely True Adventures of Best Friends in Business to enlighten entrepreneurs and dispel myths.
Hill and Warren acknowledge their mentors and role models Earl Graves Sr., Michael Bloomberg, and Oprah Winfrey for teaching them how to operate with tenacity and dignity in the world of media relations. –yvette caslin
