A lot of Hollie Geitner's most important work never sees daylight. It is the message a client was about to send and didn't. The statement, vetted through corporate filters, that would have made a bad moment worse. She talks people out of things for a living, and the ones she talks out of the worst decisions rarely know how close they came.
Geitner is the founder and CEO of Anchored Voice Consulting, based in Pittsburgh. She has been in communications work for thirty years. She has been her own boss for less than one. The practice is an LLC that bills hourly, by project, or retainer for executive visibility, strategic messaging, crisis counsel, and media coaching. As she grows, she plans to bring on contractors to widen what she can offer. For now, the model is simple, and the referrals are doing the work of a sales team.
Power will always shift and change. But what shouldn't change, ever, is a focus on people and the values that hold them up.
A smart outsider assumes good communication is about polish. Staying on message. Saying the right thing the right way. Geitner will tell you polish is often what breaks trust, not what builds it. The leaders she has watched succeed are the ones willing to be human when a filtered statement was the safer option. A controlled narrative is not what people want anymore. She says they crave what is real because that is what cuts through.
Her week is mostly business development, which she is honest about not loving. Coffees, lunches, events, strategy sessions with other founders. Her clients so far have come from referrals, so she keeps showing up in her network, keeps up her APR accreditation through the Public Relations Society of America, and sits on the board of Pennsylvania Women Work, where she co-chairs the development committee and mentors through the Three Cups of Coffee program. The constraint, she says, is not hours. It is protecting the energy for what only she can do. She has come to accept the pipeline building is part of the job.
She grew up in Ohio, then Detroit, then moved to the Scranton area at 10 when her father's job relocated the family. The move was a culture shock and kids were hard on the newcomer. It took her a while to find her footing. By high school she was an athlete and on student council, and she loved being there. What she took from that stretch was how to read a room and connect across differences. She did not know it at the time, but she was learning the skills she would build a career on.
The turning point came in 2019, when she joined the EDGE Women's Leadership Program, nine months alongside 23 other career women. For the first time she did not feel alone in what she was wrestling with. That same stretch she left an agency job for Duquesne Light Company, the electric utility serving about 700,000 people in the Pittsburgh area. It felt like she had finally found her worth. Then came the pandemic, then George Floyd.
"When he begged for his mother as he was dying, I fell to my knees. I'm a mom. It all landed at once."
She watched other companies pledge support to Black Lives Matter, to DEI, to belonging. She has watched most of that fall away since. To her it was never political. It was human rights, and diversity as the thing that makes companies and communities stronger. That, more than anything else, is why Anchored Voice exists. Power shifts. What should not shift, she says, is a focus on the people and values that hold an organization up. When leaders walk away from what they publicly celebrated a few years earlier, trust does not come back easily.
Leaving felt like failure. I didn't know who I was without a title.
The hardest stretch of her career was last year. She reached a point where the role she was in no longer fit the direction she wanted for her work and her life. Once she felt that, she couldn't ignore it. Leaving still felt like failure. She had been the breadwinner. Walking away meant no salary, no 401(k) contributions, and a hard conversation about adjusting the family's retirement plans. She had never once considered being an entrepreneur before she became one. She calls it the scariest thing she has done, and also the most freeing. She is not at the mercy of a salary band anymore. How hard she works and where she takes this is up to her.
Faith, for her, is not a specific religion. It is a belief in a higher power and a trust in the timing of her life. In practice it means she has stopped forcing outcomes. When business is slow or a decision is murky, she doesn't panic. In 2021 she didn't get a promotion she had wanted, and it took internal work to accept she wasn't ready and it wasn't her only shot. She has better perspective on it now.
Ask her about influences and she names every coach and manager she has had, good and bad. The soccer coach who saw how far she had come in a year. The boss who taught her to lead with people and processes built with good intent. And the ones who showed her what she didn't want to be, picking favorites, staying vague, projecting their own insecurities. If she has to name one person, it is Brené Brown. "Courage over comfort" hangs framed in her office, a gift from someone who used to work on her team.
She is nine clients in, past 30 books read this year on the way to exceeding her goal of 40, and building her consulting practice one real relationship at a time. That last part is not marketing. It is the intentional model. If the work resonates, she says, she genuinely wants the conversation. Some of her best work, and her best friendships, have started exactly that way.
