Lauren Mckenzie, owner of REN Creativ, a branding and marketing agency catering to area small businesses, is the Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Lauren Mckenzie likes to push against the status quo.

“Ultimately,” she says, “I’m quite the contrarian.”

That pushing of boundaries is helpful when it comes to her artistic and creative side, she says. “In order to be good at it, you have to do that a little bit.”

It’s not always so helpful, though, when working for others.

“I’ve been fired from almost every corporate job I ever had,” Mckenzie says.

Looking back, she says, “I realize that was the entrepreneur in me trying to escape.”

And escape it did. Mckenzie is the owner of REN Creativ, a Colorado Springs branding and marketing agency catering to small businesses, and a sister company, REN Creativ Photo. She was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Pikes Peak area

Small Business Week Awards in June.

Nikki Ricciardi was among those who cheered when Mckenzie won that honor.

“I am going to shout this loud and clear: YOU DESERVE THIS, YOU EARNED THIS!” she posted on Facebook. “I am so

proud of this amazing, talented, kind, and fun woman who has continued to grow and thrive as a small business owner. Just a couple of years into starting her brand agency and she has successfully created a legacy of positive change in Colorado Springs while earning awards and accolades time and time again.”

Ricciardi, in an email, said she and Mckenzie started out as casual friends in 2015 and found they had a lot in common, including “a love for supporting local businesses, our Dobermans and similar career paths. We are both creatives with a passion for storytelling with a purpose.”

Ricciardi, an in-house communications professional for more than 20 years, hired Mckenzie as a freelancer to assist with work-related template designs. As more freelance work came Mckenzie’s way, Ricciardi was excited to cheer her on and remembers conversations about her desire to be her own boss. She hails Mckenzie’s “true grit” in making that happen.

Mckenzie cites Ricciardi as a friend, client and sole investor in REN Creativ.

“It’s funny that she calls me her ‘sole investor’ in REN Creativ,” Ricciardi said. “I just lent a ‘paying it forward’ helping hand to get her set up with the tools to help her business grow. A helping hand that she paid back in no time, and a gesture of paying it forward that she has extended to many people in the years since.”

Mckenzie’s two businesses began as one, but she decided after the first year or so to split them, as she found herself serving two client bases. While photography is just one of the skills she uses in REN Creativ, “then I have a clientele for just photography that is more lifestyle. So your families, your senior portraits and things like that.”

Her office and photo studio are downtown. Most of her business comes from word of mouth.

“I do very little marketing for myself, which is pretty hilarious considering what I do for a living,” she says. “But I’m too busy doing it for everybody else.”

Creative at a young age

Mckenzie, 31, is a native of Southern California; she spent her high school years in Arizona. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Mary Hardin-baylor in Belton, Texas.

Her creative side blossomed at an early age.

“My grandmother said I was always with crayons, always with beads, always painting or cross-stitching or sewing.” She took her first Photoshop class in fifth or sixth grade, she says, and was instantly hooked.

Her passion for photography was sparked in high school.

“I had my hands in every extracurricular class that you could imagine,” she says. Photography was one of them — and she found herself spending time before school, after school and during lunch breaks in the darkroom.

In college, she became comfortable charging “a nominal amount” for her photos — engagement photos and subjects like that, she says. Her first marketing job also came in college: She was waiting tables at a restaurant and when managers found she was in school for design, they asked her to do their marketing.

After college, she left the Texas Hill Country in favor of the Rockies. She got a series of jobs in Colorado Springs, from learning labeling and packaging design at one company to doing layout at the Colorado Springs Independent and graphic design at a public relations and marketing company.

She started working on REN Creativ full time at the start of 2018 with one client, Fieldhouse Brewing Co., already in hand. She had been pouring beer at Fieldhouse a couple of nights a week for extra income and was asked to assist in a rebranding effort as Fieldhouse became FH Beerworks.

She was confident in her design and photo skills, but says she had a lot to learn in running her own business.

“What I really had to learn the hard way and overnight was: How do I invoice clients? What do I charge? How do I do my taxes? How do I file my LLC? How do I register my business online?”

She got help through classes at the Pikes Peak Small Business Development Center. But just months into the challenge of launching her own business, she also faced a personal crisis: Her boyfriend committed suicide.

“That was really, really hard to navigate,” she says, “while also trying to baby a brandnew business. … I had never experienced something like that.”

It was difficult to allow herself time to grieve, she says, but she got help and started seeing a therapist; she also went on to meet “the love of her life,” and they just got married this summer.

A tough pandemic year

Business has been good, Mckenzie says. She’s happy to be working directly with clients and enjoys the personal freedoms having her own business entails — although she rarely truly feels free from work, as REN Creativ is largely a one-woman operation.

“The downside to a lot of it is it’s all consuming. I never stop thinking about my work. I never stop thinking about my clients. I’m never not laying in bed at 1 in the morning staring at my ceiling going, ‘I forgot to send that email or I should follow up on that proposal.’”

2020 and the pandemic, of course, brought new challenges.

“It was quite impactful financially, emotionally, mentally,” she says. Luckily, she had signed a big contract with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs just before the pandemic hit. That enabled her to keep working with her smaller clients and help them through the crisis, even at times when they couldn’t pay her.

She also joined photographers across the country in taking “porch portraits.”

“I did that strictly on a donation basis,” she says. “What that meant was we were all masked up and 6 feet away and I would come to your house and take a family portrait on the front porch. That was a really cool experience. I got to meet so many families.”

Mckenzie also headed up Support the Springs, which brought fellow creatives together to create a website and social media platform connecting residents with small businesses struggling to survive the pandemic.

“Something I really love about the Colorado Springs design community and creative community is we’re all competitors, but we’re all a big family as well,” she says.

“If a client comes to me and it’s not a good fit, I give them 10 other designers in town to go see. We have a great relationship. So when the shutdown order came, I sent an email to 14 of us in town. I knew that they would be willing to help, too.”

The result, she says, “was a pretty magical experience” that brought calls from other communities wanting to do something similar. The effort is somewhat dormant now as the volunteers focus on their own businesses, Mckenzie said, but she still hopes to see its footprint grow.

As for the future of her businesses, “I’ve learned now doing this for four years that it’s going to evolve and be whatever it wants to be. Does that mean we stay small? Maybe. Or maybe we grow at least a few people. … As long as I’m serving my clients well and serving small businesses, and staying on track with what I believe in.”