For 16 years, Genevieve Morrill showed up for everyone else. The businesses. The members. The City. West Hollywood taught her one thing above everything else — the audacity to think boldly. She spent those years proving it on behalf of an entire community. Then she walked away without a plan. Just a conviction that if she cleared enough space, the universe would show her what came next. It did. And for the first time in a long time, she got to ask herself the question that had been waiting. What does Genevieve want?
Morrill, who served as President and CEO of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce before stepping down in January, has launched Morrill Strategy, LLC, a full-spectrum consulting firm focused on economic leadership, advocacy, placemaking, and organizational reinvention.
How She Got Here
She said the honest starting point was doubt. “I wasn’t sure how hard it would be to build up a business at this stage in my career,” she said. “It just sort of started organically, where someone would call me — a potential client looking for some consulting, for me to be involved as part of a team to work on a project,” Morrill said.
The bigger clarity, she said, came when she got honest about what she didn’t want. “I don’t want to be a lobbyist,” Morrill said. “People know me for my strong advocacy, but I don’t want to be a lobbyist. I don’t want to do something that requires me to raise funding all the time.” Once she drew that boundary, she said, the shape of the firm started to emerge on its own.
Left With Intention
Morrill said retirement was never the plan. She said the months between leaving the Chamber and now have been unlike anything in her adult life. “I’ve been working since I was 13,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever have had time off like this before.” She has a 17-year-old dog named Steve — her husband Mike named him after a funny grasshopper joke — who requires the kind of attention she never had time for before. For the first time in a long time, she said, she has had room for that kind of ordinary life.
But stillness, she said, was never the destination. It was the reset. “What’s driving me is there’s still so much more I want to give,” Morrill said. “There’s so much more I want to explore creatively that comes through from me rather than being dictated by working for someone else’s company.”
She said she left the Chamber on her terms. “I left with intention, not exhaustion,” Morrill said. “There were many times throughout the course of my 16 years where I could have left from burnout. But when I left, I felt I had accomplished everything I set out to do.”
She said the question she kept coming back to was a simple one she hadn’t asked herself in a long time. “I grew up in an organization that did community development work around the world,” she said. “My whole life was about doing it for the community. I still want to be of service to the community. But I also want to say, okay, what does Genevieve want right now?”
Morrill Strategy
Morrill Strategy will operate on two tracks.
The first is chamber consulting. Morrill said she believes chambers of commerce are at a critical inflection point and that most are not moving fast enough. “I think chambers are at a pivotal moment, and they should always be at a moment where they’re ready to evolve,” she said. “Their financial models are based on membership and sponsorship, which are not achieving the revenue they used to. We really have to look at how do we become a service organization and an economic leader rather than a membership-based organization.”
She said she isn’t calling for scrapping the model entirely. “I’m not saying throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Morrill said. “But you do have to diversify that formula in order to survive.” She said she watches too many chambers drift toward events and lose the thread of what their mission is. “Chambers have lost their way a little bit,” she said. “They’ve become more ribbon cuttings and mixers rather than — are you doing your job for the business community? How can we be the best relevant economic leader in the region rather than just a local chamber of commerce?”
The second track is broader. Morrill said her career has spanned enough industries that the firm’s full shape is still evolving, and she is comfortable with that. “My career has straddled so many different industries — travel, tourism, private sector, the design, the civic,” she said. “To try to take all of that and funnel it into my own firm, to be the best version of what someone needs at that moment — that’s what I’m trying to communicate.”
She described a kind of work that has always pulled at her — spotting a corridor with unrealized potential and imagining it transformed into something people seek out. A theater destination, she said. Gaslit lamps, restaurant row, real cultural programming. “Somewhere people want to be,” she said. “They want to open businesses. They want to live, work, and play.” She said there was no job attached to that vision. There rarely is, at first.
What West Hollywood Gave Her
Morrill said 25 years inside West Hollywood’s political and economic ecosystem gave her something she intends to carry into every engagement. Those years span two chapters — nearly a decade overseeing the Pacific Design Center before the Chamber’s board asked her to step into the top role in 2010, and 16 years leading the organization that followed.
“The audacity to think boldly,” she said. “As much as there have been challenges with West Hollywood, I think it’s a bold, courageous city. And I think our chamber proved to be that as well.” She said the City’s willingness to draw outside the lines shaped her own sense of what was possible. “West Hollywood has stayed true to its corpus — who it is,” Morrill said. “And in that regard, it draws outside the lines. The boldness of it, the courageousness of it, is what made me feel like I could do anything.”
What She Misses
She said she misses members of the community, but her team most.
She said she catches herself watching the Chamber’s activity online with a mix of pride and the particular ache of something that will always feel like hers.
She said there are things she would have loved to see through. Legends of Sunset was one. “I would have loved to see how the walk of fame will be ideated and will miss seeing it implemented,” Morrill said. “But I can always attend the ribbon cutting ceremony.”
As we wrapped up, I asked her what she wanted Morrill Strategy to be, in the end. She paused for a moment.
“I hope that Morrill Strategy makes a positive impact on not just a destination, organization, or a business I serve,” she said, “but the very people who dare to have a dream and realize it.”
I’m thrilled but not surprised to see that Genevieve is moving forward quickly with fresh vision that is sure to enhance the success of organizations with whom MORRILL will engage. We can all recognize the enormous changes and challenges that impact business as we enter a new era. As usual, Genevieve will bring value and solid values to her clients.
Returning as a consultant could set a new standard in West Hollywood.
Too bad Gen could not have helped Guac Daddy in their three year ordeal to open a business in WeHo. Also Gen has a much better approach to the community, both it’s business ecology and its residents, than most lobbyists such as Jake Stevens.