“And when I was at the Edgewood Leadership program, I had the opportunity to really explore myself. I was getting my master’s and so I was really exploring myself. Finally we were supposed to do a co-sensing project. And I said, ‘Know what? I’m going to take a leap of faith and talk out loud to my cohort that I want to start a business and use the co-sensing process to help me figure out what I want to do.’ That’s what got it started. And as soon as I said it out loud, my heart just started to sing. I knew, but I had just been afraid to say it. I said it and the next thing I knew, I went from saying it in November to being in MGE’s space telling them that I wanted to go out on my own and wanted to be a consultant. I asked them if they would be able to support me in that. And they were like, ‘Yes.’”

And so Miller started EQT by Design with MGE as her first client, still performing her old duties while they found a replacement, but as a consultant and not as an employee.

“April 27, 2017 was when I filed with the WI Dept. of Financial Institutions to make EQT by Design an LLC,” Miller recalled. “When my heart sang, my brain and my mouth were like activated and I just started doing what I needed to do to make it happen.”

Miller wasn’t totally unfamiliar with small business. She experienced the highs and lows through her husband Mike who was a partner in North American Rotisserie and Later Kipp’s Kitchen near Camp Randall. And so as she ventured forth with her own business, an expert ear was always close by.

“I had some serious conversations with my husband Mike about it, Miller recalled. “Obviously he had been a business person. He was mentoring and coaching me. And I really appreciated his support. I think that gave me some legs too in terms of knowing that my spouse, my partner in life, was very supportive. He was like, ‘I don’t know why you want to do this, run your own business. But I know you and know that if anyone can do it, you can. Here’s what you need to know.’”

As a consultant, Miller needed relatively little financial capital, but she did need human capital — herself — and a lot of connections, which she developed while working for the state, Madison and MGE.

“I wasn’t starting a restaurant or selling a product where I had to make an investment to have the product and then get it to people,” Miller said. “I was the product. My brain, my mind, my experience, my outlook were what folks were investing in. And they had seen me do the work. I think that really helped too. Also I wasn’t 20 or 30 coming into this work. I was 47 and I had a long career in the community. The community knew me. The business community knew me. The non-profit and government community knew me because I had been in all of those spaces. And so what I learned doing my co-sensing while I was getting my master’s is that people were really excited to be able to work with me and do work that would help them with what they were struggling with. They were like, ‘If you put the shingle out, we have something for you.’ I had soft promises for business. I was wondering if they were real or not. But I had to take a leap of faith. And the investment was in myself. That was the investment, believing that I could do this, that I had the talent to do it, that I wasn’t a fraud or fake or didn’t have the skills. That was where the big investment came in that first year.”

In addition to MGE, the city of Madison was another of Miller’s early contracts working on peer support for one of their initiatives.

“They were contracts for peer support,” Miller said. “It was working in the community. There were dollars that were made available to help with crisis management in the community. And so the city was writing up the rules on what the RFP would like to contract for services. They wanted me to go out and ask the community what the contracted services would look like. What should it look like with community voice input? That was pretty exciting to come at it from that perspective. I walked the community through deciding what kind of crisis services they would want and what should the RFP look like. It was a neat process. We had a lot of people whom you would expect who are interested in peer support in the room. That was pretty cool.”

And another was with Nehemiah helping to lay the groundwork for some of their future initiatives.

“And then with Nehemiah that was one point of what is now the Center for Black Excellence,” Miller said. “It was the preliminary groundwork on thinking about what the space would look like in Madison. And it also was the leadership program, the African American Leadership Program. I worked on those two things with Nehemiah.”

EQT by Design has grown over the last five years from that one nervous consultant to a business with employees.

“I would say that those early projects of being so nervous and now being so confident and having a team of people is like night and day in terms of how I feel,” Miller said. “I am so proud of the growth and the trajectory of the work and the people whom I work with and are in the space. I love knowing that I can employ five other BIPOC people besides myself. They are contract positions. Diara Parker and Mayra Medrano are full time. Mathias Lemos is 50-75 FTE and I have two people, Matt Braunginn and Joel Campos, who are part time. Mayra is in Washington, D.C. She’s a project manager, doing work planning, helping to facilitate client relationships for projects, working with Mathias who is on the ground. I do project management and provide the wisdom in consulting although they all bring a lot of wisdom to the group. It’s been amazing when you look at our different lenses about equity and inclusion, diversity, their lived experience, and my lived experience. When you look at the work around equity, we have a great team.”

As we talk, it is readily apparent that Miller loves her work for EQT by Design is part of a new wave of businesses/consultants who are working to change the way that large organizations do business in order to create equitable and inclusive environments.

“I get to work on groundbreaking work all the time,” Miller said. “Our work is custom and niche. We don’t sell services. We don’t sell equity. We don’t sell public engagement. We’re not here to extract from the community. We’re actually here to work with people who want to work with people and want to change systems. They understand that the system needs to be fixed and they know that racism is real and that they way to repair and restore is to think about equity. That requires no only for people to change, but also for systems to change and for the culture to change. Then we are interested in working with people.”

And some of the hardest work is staying authentic.

“I think that is the struggle, making sure that it isn’t a conversation about contracts, but that it is a conversation about change,” Miller said. “I also have to have compassion for myself and my team has to have compassion for itself because all we can do is the best that we can, be authentic in our intentions, be transparent in what we want to do for change and then really just watch the evidence, which is through time, to see if that change actually happens.”

Next Issue: A view of DEI work