Spend an hour chatting with Rachel Talton, and you’ll walk away believing you can do just about anything.
Talton might share how she started Fairlawn-based market and strategy research firm Synergy in 2002, just six months after the death of her husband, when he was only 36. She grew that firm to serve more than 100 organizations in eight years — names like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, National City and Kent State University.
Maybe she’ll mention that she co-founded a second firm in 2009 to collaborate with other female entrepreneurs while earning her doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management this year.
Or maybe she’ll tell you how her sharecropper grandfather raised 18 children, all of whom earned college degrees, with 14 achieving an advanced degree.
“I came from people who had nothing at all, African-Americans in the deepest South with no institutional advantages at all,” Talton says. “Don’t tell me you can’t do it because you don’t have external advantages. Look inside yourself.”
Talton says each woman’s untapped resources are the most important ingredients to personal and professional success. That’s a message she spreads to the many women she has mentored. “She extends herself,” says friend and client Mary Kay Schneider of PNC’s Credit Administration Center. “She figures out what others may need and finds a way to make a connection, and she’s not afraid to ask others to do that for her as well.”
As a child, Talton dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist, but when she worked in marketing in her early 20s, she realized she could do both.
“I can still play around in people’s heads but do it creatively,” she says with a laugh. “I can understand why they make the decisions they make then help influence those decisions for companies I believe in.”
Talton’s professional work has seen her help Kent State University create its Supplier Diversity Initiative and conduct customer audits of the Cleveland/Cuyahoga Workforce Investment Board’s Employment Connection Centers. She’s spent a career chasing after the same question: What makes a company or organization beloved?
“Maybe I can’t make them become beloved, but I can help them build trust,” Talton says.
Trust became the focus of her academic research during the past three years as she pursued her doctorate, graduating in May after publishing her dissertation, Dare to Restore Trust and Drive Loyalty in Distrust-Dominated Environments: A Stakeholder Perspective.
Trust is also the name of the firm she co-founded in 2009, a collaboration among five female-owned firms in the marketing and communications field.
“There are so many talented women who own their own small firms who can’t compete against the larger, mostly male-dominated firms,” Talton says. “[We said,] ‘How do we pool our resources so we can compete?’ ”
Talton is professional yet ebullient, with a hearty laugh and a voice that fills the room. She’s a gifted networker with countless contacts in her address book, and yet it’s not uncommon for professional contacts to become close friends.
“Rachel has such motivation, so much energy; it’s infectious,” says DeLores Pressley, a Canton-based motivational speaker and friend of Talton’s. “She’s very giving; it’s always, ‘How can I help you?’ ”
Talton’s role model in civic involvement was her mother, a lawyer who was the first African-American president of the League of Women Voters of Cleveland. Talton’s own civic focus has been on economic development. She’s involved in Team NEO, Positively Cleveland and the Council for Economic Opportunities, which she considers key to improving quality of life for Northeast Ohioans.
“To me, economic development is a wonderful place to contribute in order to feed all of the elements of a successful community,” Talton says.
Another side benefit: It was through her participation in Leadership Cleveland that she met her second husband, James Talton, now Synergy’s chief operating officer.
At 44, Talton still has big dreams — books, speaking engagements, travel and helping companies build global trust. And she has no shortage of belief in herself to make that happen.
“I am a person who believes that much of what you need you already have,” Talton says. “God has given us so much inside of ourselves, and we first need to focus on tackling that.”