We recently connected with Christine Thomas and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Christine , thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

I love helping my customers, who are mainly solo entrepreneurs, go from being stressed to feeling blessed in their businesses! I assist with the back-end pieces of their businesses that they are either tired of doing themselves or know they need to do (Like social media or email newsletters!) but haven’t had time to figure out.

Here are a few examples:

One of my clients is a plumber that came home every day exhausted from his hard work in the field only to find that he had to work half the night getting invoices out, applying for permits, and setting up contracts. I took all of that off of his plate so he can enjoy some downtime when he made it home at the end of the day. He is now able to make more money because his invoices are going out on time and he is able to take on more jobs because he is not exhausted anymore.

Another happy customer is a busy financial planner that simply did not have time to take care of the marketing that she knew her business needed, I helped her set up a monthly e-mail newsletter that gives her clients and others interested in her business wonderful financial advice. This is what she had to say about the experience: “I’ve been working with Christine for almost a year. Among other things, she helps me publish my monthly email newsletter with Mailchimp. In fact, without her, there would not be a monthly newsletter because Mailchimp drives me bananas!
She does careful work and is prompt and courteous. Overall she is great to work with, I recommend her without hesitation.’

I also worked with a doula that was so busy delivering babies and giving birth education classes that she fell behind in her digital marketing efforts to get new clients. She tried to post to her social media accounts when she could but that task always seemed to fall to the bottom of her to-do list. I assisted her in setting up an inventory of evergreen, branded graphics as well as content that could be recycled along with new posts. I set up a schedule to have the posts go out on a regular basis so she would know that she was making a digital connection with current and future clients while she was supporting moms giving birth. Here are her kind words that she shared with me at the beginning of this year: ‘You are amazing! I thank you sooooo much for helping to keep my stuff together. I really couldn’t have done it without you in 2022.”

Christine , 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?

I held quite a few hats in the corporate world – sales, management, customer support, and a few other titles before I left to stay home with my children for what I thought would be a couple of years. It ended up being much longer than that because my youngest child had a learning disability that our school system did not recognize at the time and I decided to homeschool her.

Even though I homeschooled my daughter for many years (all the way through high school), I never really stepped completely away from working or learning new skills. I always had some type of part-time job such as evaluating websites for a marketing company, handling tasks for friends that owned small businesses, or using my skills in administration and marketing with nonprofit organizations. I even taught preschool at my church!

Finally, my children were grown and I felt like I needed to go back to the real work world. I needed a “real job”, right??? I thought I had plenty of experience to share that would benefit companies in the corporate world. I even had a marketing degree!

But apparently, the corporate world did not appreciate the wide array of experience and skills that I had gathered over the years. No one seemed interested in hiring me or even interviewing me. So I took matters into my own hands.

The year of Covid was my wake-up call. I had extra time on my hands and felt a nudge from God that was telling me to go for it. But go for what?

I reevaluated and decided that I would like to own my own business so I could be in control of my destiny. I dug down deep and looked at all of the skills that I had and what I thought I would also need to learn to have a successful business. I decided to take a WordPress website design course (Mainly, because I wanted to create my own business website.) and I decided that my skills could really help small business owners. So I decided that I wanted to open a virtual assistant business that could help with a variety of tasks and Targeted Business Support was born in July 2020.

I now enjoy helping solo entrepreneurs and small businesses with the behind the scene tasks in their businesses such as digital marketing, administrative tasks, invoicing, graphics, and more.

My tagline is “Your Virtual Assistant Partner” because I excel at learning about my clients’ businesses and providing ways that I can assist in making their businesses grow. I only feel successful, if my clients are successful!!!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

As a child, I was taught that you needed a college degree to get a job to provide for yourself. So getting a college degree was a big priority!

I got married while I was in college but that did not detour me from getting my degree. We even put my husband’s education on the back burner so that I could make sure that I had a degree. Unfortunately, that college degree did not help me as much as I thought it was supposed to.

Now, I’m not saying that college is bad. It can absolutely be beneficial! It was also very expensive! However, there are also other ways to be successful in this world. Many successful business owners have never received a college degree.

I think what matters most is finding a way to learn the skills that you want to use in whatever you dream of doing. That might mean going to a trade school or going into an internship program instead of going to college.

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

After my children grew up, I thought that I would just be able to apply for a job and waltz back into the corporate world even though I had stayed at home and worked part-time jobs so that I could have a flexible schedule to be around for my kids. That did not happen! I had to decide what to do next.

I did not want to take an entry-level job paying next to nothing when I knew that I had knowledge and skills that could be beneficial to many businesses and their success.

So I decided to design my own future. I did not want “real world” to predict my future. I wanted to control my future. Abraham Lincoln said “The best way to predict your future is to create it.”. I took that to heart and started my own business, Targeted Business Support.

Now, I’m glad that I had to pivot in my job search. I no longer have just a “job”, I have a FUTURE in my business!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.TargetedBusinessSupport.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/targetedbusinesssupport/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TargetedBusinessSupport
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/targetedbusinesssupport/

Image Credits
Brandie Baird Photography