About

You have built a business that creates meaningful value. But as the business has grown, the decisions behind it may have become harder to make, explain, delegate, or sustain.

Direction may be more difficult to communicate. Priorities compete for attention. The team still looks to you for too many answers. Your offers or messaging may no longer reflect the business as it exists today. What once worked intuitively may no longer be enough to guide the next stage.

Sometimes this confusion appears first in the marketing. The message becomes harder to explain, the offer becomes harder to position, or the content stops producing the results you expected. The post, website, campaign, or content calendar may not be the real problem. It may be the strategy underneath.

Work On Your Business provides strategic advisory for established, service-driven small business owners and founders, typically with teams of 20 or fewer. WOYB helps owners step back from the day-to-day, understand what is actually unclear, and make the bigger decisions shaping what comes next.

Owning a business can also be isolating. Even with employees or a leadership team, owners do not always have a private place to think out loud, challenge assumptions, and talk honestly about what is happening. Alexis Skigen Rago creates that space while helping owners turn what they know, believe, and practice intuitively into a strategic foundation the business can use.

The work may clarify what the business stands for, the problem it solves, who it serves best, how it creates value, what makes it different, and what should guide decisions about leadership, culture, offers, operations, marketing, and growth.

Burnout is often a clarity problem before it becomes a capacity problem. A stronger strategic foundation helps the business move forward without every decision running through the person who built it.

Work On Your Business is the forward-facing strategic advisory brand of Marketing Mana LLC. It reflects how the work has evolved from marketing strategy to the broader decisions behind the business.

Let’s talk. Schedule a free 15-minute Quick Strategy Assessment to look at where your business may need more clarity, direction, or strategic focus.

Aloha, I’m Alexis Skigen Rago, the Founder and Strategy Advisor behind Work On Your Business.

Working with me feels like a candid, collaborative conversation grounded in a clear sense of direction. You bring the experience of running your business. I bring an honest outside perspective, strategic questions, pattern recognition, and a process for turning what feels unclear into a foundation you can actually use.

My clients appreciate having a place to think out loud, challenge assumptions, and share business vulnerabilities they may not be able to discuss elsewhere. I genuinely care about them and their businesses. I listen closely as they talk through their ideas, often helping them see the business from a different angle while staying connected to their Core Values and Purpose-Driven Mission.

The work is not about pretending every decision is easy. It creates the space to look honestly at what is happening, identify what may be unclear, and determine what needs attention before the next step.

What I enjoy most is seeing clients make decisions with more intention and build businesses that better support who they are, what they value, and what they want to create.

For more than 25 years, I have focused on strategy, marketing, and customer experience with companies of many sizes across more than 30 industries. I bring curiosity, directness, structure, energy, and heart into my work. My background in theater also shapes how I listen, ask questions, understand different perspectives, and notice what is not being said.

You will often hear me say “Aloha” and “Mahalo” because I grew up in Hawai‘i. I now live in Naperville and earned my MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Go Blue!

Outside work, I enjoy traveling, live storytelling, exercising, cooking healthy food, giving my dog belly rubs, and eating chocolate that is worth it.