Genna Keller’s first job involved gift wrapping in a department store. There were customers to serve, packages to finish and, presumably, very little commercial advantage in explaining that the ribbon was still undergoing strategic review. She remembers learning customer service, speed and the importance of “the small stuff.” It is an appealingly practical beginning for someone who would make a career helping businesses explain themselves.
Decades later, Keller is co-founder and co-CEO of Trevelino/Keller, the Atlanta public relations and marketing firm she launched with Dean Trevelino in 2003. She is also the founding board chair of TBH Angels, a women-founded group working to connect early-stage female founders with investors. Between those roles sits a career spent close to the awkward moment when a promising business needs someone else to understand its promise.
The department-store lesson gives that career a useful starting point. Presentation has consequences. So does how long the customer waits. A wrapped gift is a small transaction, but the person carrying it away gets to decide whether the service was any good. Much later, when the wrapping becomes a launch campaign, a company announcement or an introduction to an investor, that basic arrangement remains recognizable.
Before her name was on the door
Keller graduated from Wake Forest University and built her career inside established communications agencies before opening her own. Her professional path included Alexander Communications and Ogilvy Public Relations. At Ogilvy, she served on the management committee and ran the Atlanta office while also leading the technology practices in New York and Washington, D.C. That is a substantial geographical brief for a profession in which every client would quite reasonably like to feel local.
Technology supplied an early foundation. Her experience grew to include business and consumer communications, nonprofit work, company launches, acquisition announcements and crisis assignments. Brand experience includes AutoTrader, The Weather Channel and Verizon Wireless. These are businesses with different audiences and different reasons to command attention. A person looking for a car has a different immediate problem from a person checking tomorrow’s weather.
Keller and Trevelino already knew one another’s work. They had met at Shandwick and later reconnected at Ogilvy during the dot-com era. By the time they founded their agency, independence was a considered choice following years within larger organizations. The firm began with five people. Two surnames on the business meant two people taking direct responsibility for how the work would be done.
The early proposition was unusually easy for a client to test: experienced people would stay involved in daily account work, with public relations budgets that left room for the rest of the marketing effort. In a 2008 interview, Keller described that access to senior practitioners as central to the agency’s value. It was a promise about the person who would answer the next question, as much as about the campaign itself.
- 2003Co-founds Trevelino/Keller
- 2006Start-Up Council begins
- 2024Marsden Marketing acquisition
- 2025Angel group launches
A roundtable before the pitch deck
In 2006, the agency created the Start-Up Council. Entrepreneurs could bring their business cases to quarterly roundtables and receive advice across disciplines including funding, marketing, branding, legal matters and accounting. Participation carried no financial or contractual commitment. For a young company, that detail matters: the opportunity to ask a question did not arrive attached to an obligation to buy the answer.
The council offers an early view of a recurring interest in Keller’s work. Getting a company started involves several kinds of expertise, and the founder rarely needs them in the tidy order suggested by a business-school diagram. A question about positioning can turn into a question about revenue. A discussion of growth can arrive rather quickly at the subject of money.
Her subsequent advisory connections include Tech Alpharetta and Atlanta Tech Angels. She is also a member of the Buckhead Coalition and has lived in the Buckhead community with her husband and son. Her professional life has a national client dimension, but Atlanta supplies a durable geographical center. The city appears repeatedly in her work as a place to build relationships that can be useful long after the first introduction.
The deal that started with shared clients
In July 2024, Trevelino/Keller acquired Marsden Marketing. The firms had already collaborated on client assignments. Anne Marsden described having seen their compatible cultures and focus on client results at work before the acquisition. That prior experience gives the deal a less theatrical origin than the usual corporate romance: they had done some work together, and they wanted to do more.
Marsden brought experience in digital advertising, demand generation and account-based marketing. Anne Marsden and Suzanne Moore joined as full-time senior consultants; Jeffrey Willis joined the management team as vice president of growth marketing. Those are useful specifics. An acquisition expands a list of services through the arrival of people who know how to deliver them.
Keller called the combination a natural fit across people, clients and technology. Her assessment began with years of acquaintance, rather than a sudden discovery that both businesses possessed websites. For a communications firm moving further into growth marketing, the deal connected the public-facing story of a business with more of the work involved in finding and converting its customers.
The partnership also illustrates the value of leaving room for another person’s expertise. Keller’s background in launches and positioning did not make Marsden’s skills redundant. Their overlap on shared clients had supplied a working demonstration of what each side could contribute. The announcement formalized a relationship that already had some evidence behind it.
A useful pause in the technology conversation
Later that month, Keller and Marsden appeared together on Atlanta Business Radio. With the acquisition fresh, the conversation could easily have become a procession of marketing terms in expensive shoes. Keller kept returning to a practical starting point: understand the client’s business and goals before choosing the channels. The tools have to serve the assignment.
Her comments on artificial intelligence had a similar emphasis. Teams needed to keep evaluating new technologies while retaining people capable of interpreting what the tools produced. She also urged marketers to revisit their messaging and consistency. That is a fairly demanding test of a fashionable system: can the business explain what it means, wherever a prospective buyer encounters it?
There is a companion piece of advice she has given recent graduates: work hard, follow up and make room for interactions away from a screen. Taken together, those positions suggest a professional temperament comfortable with digital work and attentive to its human dependencies. Somebody still has to understand the customer, keep a promise and return to the conversation after the interesting first meeting.
“Do not be afraid of hard work, follow-up, and nondigital interactions.”
Genna Keller’s advice to recent graduates, 2025
When the introduction needs a check
In 2025, Keller helped launch ATL TrailblazHER Angels with six other founding board members. She and Marianne Faloni served as co-chairwomen. The group emerged after women leaders kept hearing about female founders’ difficulty accessing funding. Atlanta had an established startup community; the founders of the new group wanted more of its resources to reach women building businesses.
The original board brought together experience in recruiting, accounting, law, entrepreneurship and company building. Alongside Keller and Faloni were Laura Berry, Christy Brown, Paula Nagarajan, Loren Mount-O’Brien and Jen Bonnett. The mix made the idea more concrete than a general appeal for encouragement. Founders could benefit from advice and introductions as well as capital, and the organizers were assembling people with different ways to help.
By May 2026, the organization had introduced the TBH Angels name and announced programming for the year. Keller, identified as founding board chair, emphasized guidance, strategic connections and practical support alongside funding. The stated ambition reached beyond making an introduction: it involved helping entrepreneurs through the difficulties of scaling their businesses.
Its structure makes room for people at different stages of involvement. Core membership is for accredited investors, while Collective membership offers an educational and community route without an investment commitment. Members making investments can select the companies they want to back. The organization uses special purpose vehicles to bring participating investors together in an investment.
TBH Angels describes a goal of at least three investments a year, of up to $100,000 each, through its Pitch Day. These are stated goals, rather than a tally of completed deals. Their usefulness is in making the ambition legible: a founder can see the scale of support being contemplated, and a prospective investor can see that participation involves decisions about particular companies.
At least three investments a year, of up to $100,000 each, through Pitch Day. A goal, not a report of deployed capital.
The follow-up is part of the work
Keller’s public recognition includes appearances in the Atlanta 500 and Georgia Trend’s Georgia 500. The agency’s work has also earned industry recognition, including four Hermes Creative Awards in 2025. Awards occupy a visible place in a communications business. The less visible work is sustaining the relationships and capabilities that give a firm another year’s worth of assignments to complete.
At Trevelino/Keller, that includes attention to the people doing the work. Its published staff programs have included Wild Blue Yonder travel getaways and Niners, a getaway marking a ninth work anniversary. There is something pleasingly specific about celebrating year nine. It catches a long-serving colleague before the round number arrives, and makes the calendar briefly more interesting.
Across the agency and the angel group, Keller’s work now spans how a company is understood, how it finds customers and how it gets the resources to continue. These are connected questions, though a founder can experience them as a very untidy to-do list. The person needing help may require a campaign, an experienced adviser, a funding conversation or simply someone who knows whom to call.
The gift-wrapping counter offers a modest way to understand that range. The customer has something that matters to them. They want it handled carefully and delivered in a form another person can appreciate. Keller’s assignments have become more complicated since that first job. Attention, service and a reasonably prompt response still make a good beginning.