We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Feleceia Wilson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Feleceia, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I started a business because I couldn’t find a job.

In 2012, after being on a job search for over 4-months, I knew that something had to give. I was a the single momma of a little girl with Down syndrome, and I was running out of time and resources.

I’d dabbled with the idea of being an entrepreneur for a long time. My mom likes to tell the story of how I hated going to pre-school and would ditch the classroom for daddy daughter time in fancy meetings. My dad was an entrepreneur before I knew entrepreneurship was a word. He’d been carving his own path for a long time, and without even knowing it, I was following in his footsteps.

So in April of 2012, almost 10 years ago, I heard that little tiny voice that so many of us ignore – I know I’d been ignoring it for a long time.

“Use what you’ve got in your hands.” I’ll never, ever forget those words.

At the time, I had the skill of graphic design in my back pocket. I’d initially gone to college to study musical theatre, and I did walk across the stage with my BFA in theatre, but, my ever so wise entreprenuerial dad saw to it that I also got something “more practical” as well. I also graduated with a degree in advertising/public relations.

Sometimes, listening to your parents pays off big.

My other big source of inspiration was my little girl, Zoe. I’d noticed some interesting things about Zoe since she was born with Down syndrome. One of the biggest was that when Zoe was little and we were teaching her how to communicate, we would often have to try lots of ways to communicate with her – sign language, different words, pointing, phrases, songs. It took all kinds of communications tools for us to understand what things worked for her.

So, she became the foundation for how I thought about marketing and communications. Every person, every single human being, receives information in different ways. And it often takes us, the marketer or communications team, to use different tools in order to effectively communicate an idea to a customer.

Zoe became the name of my company, The Zoe Communications Agency, and she teaches us new things about marketing and communications, almost every day.

I’d met some people in my community over the years prior and had offered some freelance work. I once served on the DeSoto Arts Commission, an appointed board in the City of DeSoto, where I did lots of graphic design for the committee, free of charge, of course. I had a contact there – Kathy Jones. I told her I’d started a graphic design company and was offering my services. She signed up, almost right away.

After months of offering graphic design services, I started to wonder if my designs were working. If someone shared a graphic or mailed a postcard, were people responding to the design?

This question led me to consider offering more services. I had the idea to become a full-service marketing + branding company pretty early on. I figured that a company or organization could hire an entire team for the price of an individual.

In 2022, that makes a lot of sense. In 2012, not many people were interested. In fact, hardly anyone was interested! We had just enough business to keep us going for a while, until I learned that we were too far ahead of the curve.

I downsized for many years, running our little operation as a solo-prenuer…until 2019, when the world started to change again. Social media usage has been on the climb over the past several years, and thankfully, our company was ahead of the curve. And right before the pandemic hit, we’d started perfecting our understanding of video production and live streaming, which means that we became the first people to call when so many organizations had to convert to having a strong online presence.

And now, many moons later, the idea of hiring a team for the price of a person is not only novel, it’s necessary.

Sometimes, you’ve got to hold onto your idea and perfect it while the world changes. One day, your customer will be ready and waiting for you.

Feleceia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Lots of this info is in the question before :-)

We take a lot of pride in thinking on behalf of our customers.

Our clients come to us so that we can help them figure it out. I’m a big believer that we’ve got the tools + talent to build and create anything. There are many companies who can do the same.

We are different because we think in the cracks and we pull out all of the details and all of the steps, too. And we can do this task on all kinds of communications projects – video production and live streaming, festivals, events, product and brand launches, small business programming, podcasting. You name it, we do it. We’ve got the ability and the flexibility to manage all of our clients communications needs for the cost of a single communications professional.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My business partner is my husband.

Although he didn’t start the business with me, he’s been around for much of its life. We actually got married right in the middle of the first year of the pandemic – July 31, 2020. He’s my best friend, my anchor and my favorite gift.

We met several years ago when I was hosting a Christian music festival. He was there to interview some of the artists that were performing. I saw him and didn’t think much of him! Actually, we didn’t think much of each other. Both of us were in relationships at the time.

But, time is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Eventually, we started working on some projects within the community together. One year, our team even worked with him on a gospel music showcase he did for SXSW in Austin. Some time before we got married, we started collaborating on several projects between our two companies – he’s had a company for many years that offered similar services as Zoe Communications. And then, when we got married, we just brought it all together.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Our biggest pivot happened in 2020, right has the world shut down.

We’d been doing lots of research into virtual and hybrid events and eventually became predominately a production company for about a year and a half. In 18-months, our small team did 60+ live streamed, hybrid or fully virtual events.

Contact Info:

• Website: zoecreates.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/teamzoecomm
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TeamZoeComm
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/teamzoecomm
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/zoecommunicationsagency