We’re looking forward to introducing you to Lilian Raji. Check out our conversation below.
Lilian, we’re thrilled to have you with us today. Before we jump into your intro and the heart of the interview, let’s start with a bit of an ice breaker: What are you chasing, and what would happen if you stopped?
I’m chasing legacy – what will people say about me when I leave this world?
My mom passed away in early 2023 after a short battle with cancer, for which I moved her in with me in hopes of our defeating it together. For a while, I was angry at how everything had played out. She had just retired from being a medical social worker at an Atlanta hospital in July 30, 2022 at age 78. I moved her to Miami six days after her retirement party to join me here, where I’d moved in 2021. We found out about her stage 4 cancer on September 30, and she passed a few months later.
For me, it was unfair. She’d worked her entire life to raise my brother and me into the successful people we are today. I’d planned a life of luxury and travel for her in Miami, for her to enjoy her retirement and the life she’d sacrificed so much to see my brother and I have.
Having moved her in with me after we received her diagnosis, I was also in possession of all of her things. As I finally began sorting through them, I discovered letter after letter from her hospital patients thanking her for everything she did for them during their stay. I found one letter – had to be at least 15 years old – that had a telephone number. On a whim, I decided to call the person, just to tell her my mother was no longer with us. Despite the years, the woman remembered exactly who my mother was and mourned with me.
It was then that I realized how selfish I’d been in my anger at my mother’s passing. For me, she was only my mother, but to the rest of the world, she was a warrior, a savior, an angel, a shoulder to cry on, someone who helped them get through one of the worst periods of their life.
While every day, I wish I had more time with my mother, I finally came to accept my mother deserved the rest that death brought her. She’d worked so hard for everyone throughout her life, and now she could rest, having brought so much joy, healing and peace to so many.
Death has a way of focusing you. How my mother’s death focused me is in legacy. What can I do with the years I have left that would make people speak about me as others have done my mother? There is no stopping. To do so would be to dishonor my inheritance as the daughter of this extraordinary woman.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Lilian Raji, president of The Lilian Raji Agency where for over 20 years, I’ve helped luxury brands design and execute communications, PR and marketing strategy to attract more customers. In this past year, I’ve transitioned out of my agency model, where clients would come to me, tell me all of the problems and I designed and executed a strategy to resolve them, to now working as a fractional CMO (chief marketing offer) or CCO (chief communications officer), where I still design the solution, but it’s now the clients’ team that executes with my guidance.
That is the basics of what I do. But ultimately, I’m a storyteller. I help companies tell their story in a way that draws their target customers to them. This applies to what I do with The Lilian Raji Agency as well as to my role as a contributor to Forbes.
Of this latter role with Forbes, I interview CEOs and CMOs, primarily in the premium to luxury goods space, to learn how they’re drawing customers to them. My column for Forbes is unofficially called “The Pursuit of Luxury.” My articles examine how different companies inspire that pursuit.
Of note, as per my agreement with Forbes, I never write about clients, past or present, or any companies I have a financial interest. Every company I cover in my column has been introduced to me by colleagues sharing interesting things a company is doing. I’m able to continue my learning of industry trends through these interviews, which has been powerful for me in continuing to guide my actual clients in their own marketing strategies.
Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
I find this question to be worded interestingly as who any of us was before the world told us who we had to be were children. We all begin as impressionable children and the world then dictates to you your place in it.
I think the better question is who did you become when you realized the world was wrong?
And to answer that, I had to start seeing myself from my own eyes and not everyone else’s.
I have the absolute trifecta of burdens – I’m 1) an immigrant 2) a woman and 3) of color. The world tells me repeatedly that I should be an angry Black woman, or that I should be paid less than others, or that I’m undesirable. That I should make myself small, should not speak my mind, to allow people to talk down to me.
And I’ve simply refused. Nationality, gender nor skin color has no bearing on who you can be in this world unless you accept the world’s definition. I’ve chosen not to and have risen in my career beyond any level that has been dictated to me.
I will be the first to tell you it hasn’t been easy. I’ve fought so many battles for me to be me, endured so many disappointments, struggled with moments of depression because I had to accept how my unwillingness to make myself small shut many doors for me. But I learned a long time ago I am much happier when I am myself and alone than I am being something I’m not to be accepted in a room where I feel lonely.
So I continue to break every stereotype, becoming one of the highest paid PR professionals for my size. I race cars as a hobby, having been trained by Porsche, BMW and Lexus at their respective driving academies, and recently raced a McLaren on a Miami racetrack. I’ll be racing Maseratis in November at their drivinig clinic. I am a 5th level Shinkendo student, which is the art of Japanese sword fighting, having studied for 12 years. I collect edge weapons. I’ve traveled to over 100 cities across 32 countries by myself. I’ve taken a canoe into the Amazons to meet the natives, hiked Machu Picchu, climbed the Great Pyramids of Giza, visited the original home of the Oracle of Delphi, and so much more.
These are all things the world told me, as a Nigerian-American immigrant woman of color, I could never be. Why would I continue listening to the world?
What’s something you changed your mind about after failing hard?
I love this question as it speaks to my coming full circle in my life and career.
What I painfully failed hard on was securing a job at a PR agency. I fell in love with PR shortly after 9/11, when there was a hiring freeze in the industry. After finishing up a 3 month internship with a small agency, I tried to get hired full time at other agencies. And I kept failing. Over and over again.
Now, I wasn’t just sending out resumes and hoping for the best. As the overachiever I was in my youth (I graduated college in 3 years, and only because in high school, I took my senior year in college in a dual high school/college enrollment that gave me credit for both), I would go to the website of each agency I was applying to and write customized cover letters integrating their website copy. I would then layout the cover letter and my resume to mirror the layout of their website, colors, images, the works. I hand delivered these resume packages to each agency. I must have done this for every Atlanta PR agency with no luck.
I was working at Tourneau watch store through all of this, and decided I would simply freelance in PR until the hiring freeze had lifted and my chances of employment improved. What I didn’t know was that agencies don’t like to hire people who have been freelancing for too long. I was hurting my chances at ever being hired at an agency, yet laying the groundwork to open my own agency, which is ultimately what I did. I finally accepted no agency was going to give me what I wanted. I had to create it for myself. I left Tourneau, taking a watch brand (for whom I’d sold the most out of any Tourneau employee across the country) as my first client.
And yet, the way I ended up starting the agency was always a sore spot for me. I basically started an agency after only interning at one, with no real agency experience. The fear “I didn’t know what I didn’t know” always haunted me. So I went to every PRSA event, asked to have lunch with journalists and other PR people, bought dozens of books, went to networking events and taught myself both PR and business ownership in the process. Remember, this was the early aughts when the internet didn’t provide as much information as it does now. Despite how far I climbed, how my agency grew 90% by referrals, offering $500 per month retainers at the beginning before charging five figures per month over the past couple of years, that failure to get hired by an agency still bothered me.
Then I began writing for Forbes. And I began dealing with PR people who got the lucky break I never had and started experiencing a level of incompetence I could never imagine myself doing whenever I worked with journalists; PR people who truly don’t understand the relationship aspect of public relations. Also, there was one agency I repeatedly applied to in my early years, where I had multiple rounds of interviews at one point but was never hired. It was my dream agency job. I’ve since met many people who worked at that agency, and they all told me about nightmare experiences. This is a global agency, and everyone I’ve spoken with worked in different cities. All of them were glad to be gone.
It’s taken almost 25 years for me to realize my failure to get hired at an agency was the best possible thing for me.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What truths are so foundational in your life that you rarely articulate them?
My life is a consequence of the decisions I make. If I want a different life, I must make different decisions.
Everything that’s happened in my life is the result of a decision I’ve made. My regrettable decisions were based on me being misled by someone or by my not having the right information at that time to make a better decision.
Of the former, time has taught me my gut instincts about people are always right. It’s when I ignore it that I suffer the consequences. So I no longer do.
Of the latter, I used to think it was a mark of great leadership to be able to make a decision quickly. It’s not. It’s recklessness. It’s better to let an opportunity go when you don’t have enough information to determine if it’s right for you than go all in then have to clean up when the missing information starts to appear and it wasn’t what you expected.
Another truth – every person has value, so I treat everyone well. I know the names of everyone in my condo building, from the janitors and housekeepers all the way to the general managers. The janitors and housekeepers keep me from accidentally stepping in dog poop, as I’ve heard happens in other buildings. The doorman helps me with large packages. The assistant manager helped me multiple times while I was caring for my cancer-stricken mother.
I see so many other residents being rude to all of these people, thinking they’re better than them, ignoring that these people make living in this building so much more pleasant.
So I treat everyone well and with respect. I honor the humanity in everyone because we all have a part to play in this world.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
The unexamined life is not worth living.
I have a journal (now multiple journals) for each year of my life since I was 14. All my thoughts, feeling, emotions, philosophies, ideas, realizations, everything are filled in those pages. And because of this, I can always go back and put together pieces of a puzzle to understand why something happened.
We are often disappointed when we think we failed at something or we didn’t get something we worked so hard to get. But if you wait long enough, you find out why.
I spoke earlier about my sense of failure at never being hired at a PR agency, only now to understand how much better a life I had. I don’t have the trauma many people have shared with me from the agency background I resented not having. Being able to put this one puzzle piece together made me see just how fortunate I was to NOT have things go the way I want.
We often get too caught up in our losses to see what we’ve gained. Regrets are a waste of time, particularly when your actions were a consequence of things beyond your control.
I’d suggest to anyone holding on to disappointment or pain from an earlier event to trace what happened because of that disappointment, and you might find your life is exactly where it’s meant to be and at its highest good.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lmrpr.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/lilianraji
- Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lilianrajipr/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lilianraji
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLilianRajiAgency
