Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Caroline Roberts. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Caroline, appreciate you joining us today. Parents play a huge role in our development as youngsters and sometimes that impact follows us into adulthood and into our lives and careers. Looking back, what’s something you think you parents did right?

As I’ve gotten older, it’s become abundantly clear how my parents set me up for success, whether they knew that’s what they were doing or not. Two characteristics stand out the most: generosity and management style.

My parents are incredibly generous people. With time, attention, and money, they not only support nonprofit causes that are important to them, but they are generous with their family, friends, and even strangers. While there are countless stories about nonprofit organizations that have benefited from their generosity, my favorite story is about a simple Thanksgiving dinner. My dad worked for a community college and tried to get to know as many students as possible. One Thanksgiving, there was an unexpected knock on our door, and it was a student from years back with whom my dad had built a relationship. The student was returning to town from long-haul trucking and stopped by for a quick visit. He didn’t realize that we were about to enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner, but my parents quickly invited him in and set another place at the table. The student shared how much my dad helped him navigate school and was incredibly proud of his accomplishments.

That Thanksgiving visit made a huge impression on me. I learned that relationships are everything and that even simple actions could mean the world to someone else. At Coastal Connections Marketing, we have a real spirit of generosity embedded in our culture. We are generous with our time by getting to know our team members, clients, and suppliers and generous with our dollars by donating to nonprofit organizations.

The other characteristic that stands out to me is my parents’ “management style.” I know talking about a family like that sounds funny, but that’s what it is. I’m so thankful I was born before the helicopter parents because my parents were far from micro-managers. They were always available and frequently reminded me that they were available, but they trusted me to get my schoolwork done, get to work on time, etc. They trusted me to communicate with them, and I knew that I could go to them for help anytime. I learned the skills needed to manage my time and make my own decisions at a young age when the stakes were low. As I’ve gotten older and decisions are more critical, I have years of decision-making skills to back me up. And yes, I still go to my parents for advice on occasion.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I knew from an early age that I would own my own business. Instead of playing “house” as a child, I played “city,” where I would set up shops, market, and sell. Today, I run two incredible companies that reflect my passion for creativity, deep connections, and simplifying in meaningful ways.

First, there’s Coastal Connections Marketing. We specialize in creating high-end promotional products that help corporations and brands strengthen their connections with clients, employees, and partners. What I love about CCM is the relationships I get to build and the creative ways we can help companies. I started working for CCM under the founder in 2006 while finishing my MBA, purchased the business from her in 2013, and am proud of all the things we have done in the past eleven years.

Custom-branded products are powerful. They can show appreciation, increase morale, unite a group, evoke emotion, and more. In our 20+ years of business, we’ve learned that promotional products are most powerful when product selection, design, and distribution are equal parts of the gifting strategy.

In 2019, decluttering and downsizing profoundly impacted my life, and I wanted to share that with others. I went to a KonMari Consultant training session and founded the Simplified Island shortly after. Through TSI, we offer professional organization services, both in-person and digitally. We help clients declutter and renew their spaces with practical, beautiful, and simple solutions.

I absolutely love working in these businesses and with the two teams of incredibly skilled and intelligent women.

Ultimately, my mission is to help people spend less time on things that don’t matter and more time living. By fostering connections through CCM and simplifying lives with TSI, I’m dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for everyone I work with.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

I’m so proud of what our team of four at Coastal Connections Marketing can accomplish. After working for the company for seven years, I bought Coastal Connections Marketing from the founder in 2013. Since about 2017, we’ve slowly shifted from a traditional promotional products distributor who works with customers on a somewhat transactional basis to being a partner and an extension of our clients’ marketing departments offering support with upscale branded promotional products.

Making this transition has required many leaps of faith. The first leap of faith was upgrading our project management software. I still felt very new at business ownership and needed to triple our software investment to make this happen. I knew what we were doing was outdated, but it was terrifying to make the change. What if we lost our data? What if the team hated it? What if it didn’t work as promised, and we’d have to change again? I over-analyzed the decision and finally did it. The upgrade has been one of the best business decisions I’ve made. Not only has it smoothed our internal workflow, but our clients love that we now offer online shops, a client portal, and other software-related services that only huge companies can provide.

At that point, it was time to push myself out of my comfort zone. Our team is very smart and a little scrappy, so I knew we could work with larger clients and work on larger projects. I kept operations as lean as possible to build up savings to fund the larger projects. We started marketing ourselves to clients and potential clients using the products and projects we wanted to sell to clients. We’d never spent that much money on marketing, but it worked! We quickly landed one of the largest projects we had ever worked on and received inquiries on projects for co-branding with retail products and gift fulfillment. Clients saw their own potential in our marketing projects and trusted us, no matter how small our team is, to provide high-quality branded products and execute high-end projects that would represent them well.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

While the people have changed through the years, we have always had a close and effective team at Coastal Connections Marketing.

When we changed from in-person to remote work in 2017, it was tempting to lean in and manage everyone even more, but I resisted and pulled back. We have clear goals with clear tasks, and I let everyone work in a way that works best for them. We talk about what work needs to be done during traditional business hours (since most of our clients are still on 8-5 schedules) and what work can be done whenever works best for them.

One of the most important things we do is take Friday off. In the summer of 2014, I announced that we would be closed on Fridays, and we have yet to look back. Team members can use Fridays to catch up from the week, or they can completely shut down. Because we are in a creative industry, it’s so important that we have the chance to recharge, explore our communities, and take care of ourselves so that we can come back to work refreshed and inspired.

Having multiple channels of communication is critical. There are so many ways to communicate that it’s easy to lose information or feel overwhelmed by too much communication. We have a weekly team meeting to go over big goals, projects for the week, and bigger-picture things. Project discussions happen in our CRM, and simple questions or personal conversations take place in chat. We want people to access the information they need when they need it without being overwhelmed with superfluous details.

Finally, we get personal. Our team members are spread up and down the coast of North Carolina, so we make a point to have a team retreat each quarter. During work time, we usually have an internal project to work on, we share product samples we’ve collected since the last retreat, and we usually hook a computer up to a project for “tech-time,” so we can share best practices and tips for the various platforms we use. During personal time, good food and outdoor activities are non-negotiables.

We have a weekly team meeting to review the week’s projects and any administrative or operations notes. We also play “rose and thorn,” where we share one good thing and one not-as-good thing going on. It sounds a little juvenile (I also do that at the dinner table with my kids), but it does wonders for connecting our team and helping us gauge who may need a little extra support that week.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://coastal-connections.com/, https://thesimplifiedisland.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coastal.connections.marketing/, https://www.instagram.com/thesimplifiedisland/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-roberts

Image Credits

Corry Frazier Photography