We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Laura Thompson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Laura below.

Laura, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s one of the most important lessons you learned in school?

The most important and memorable lesson that I learned in school is related to the art of negotiation. I took a negotiation skills class in while working on my MBA at Georgia State. Subsequently, I have leveraged tactics that I learned in the course in both my professional and personal life numerous times.

The concept of BATNA, which stands for Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement, essentially represents the scenario that is available if the negotiation doesn’t work out. This concept helps me level-set and also eliminates anxiety on my part (especially in terms of illuminating how the worse-case scenario isn’t always so bad).

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

My company, Helium, specializes in digital marketing with a focus on website design/development, email marketing and digital strategy. One of Helium’s areas of focus is helping to demystify digital marketing tools plus elements and showing clients how they can identify the best mix of digital tools to support their business needs.

Even from a young age, I have gravitated toward the tenets of branding and marketing. My fascination with branding started with a focus on the music business (when I was in high school) and evolved to include a wider range of brands and digital marketing. I used to research and collect information related to entertainment endorsements, agencies and other marketing activities. While I don’t have any exceptional creative skills, I feel fortunate to have been able to work closely with creative elements from the business side of things.

I truly believe that you get back what you put out and that has rung very true in terms of my professional endeavors. Since I founded Helium, I have aimed to support a range of pro bono projects to help small businesses who don’t have budget available to support their marketing needs. When the pandemic hit, we increased our outreach and took on more pro bono work. To complement this, I feel like opportunities for paid clients continued to grow (and we started getting a steady stream of referrals from pro bono clients).

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

My plan to start and grow my business was fueled by 3 things: my desire to do truly great work, my interest in continued learning and the need for flexibility with my work/life balance. I wasn’t able to find a balance of these things in a full-time role so that lead to me essentially transitioning my side hustle into a career. I initially transitioned from an agency role to a consulting scenario the year before I formally launched my business. Having the balance of stable income from consulting along with a more flexible schedule enabled me to focus on planning and setting milestones for growing Helium.

Risk has been instrumental in terms of the momentum of my progress, both professionally and personally. I’m a textbook Type-A personality so I tend to overthink everything and lean towards a fairly conservative business growth approach. I know that risk-taking is key for creating an exceptional business, so I have pushed myself to weave in more stable milestones with more risky targets as I am planning (and this has helped with diversification of risk).

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

When I decided to focus on growing my business, I set specific goals in terms of professional development which have proven instrumental in my success and in building my reputation. One of these goals related to participation in professional organizations and pursuit of board roles, which led me to the leadership track for the Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association (I am the President for the Board of Directors for 2020-2021).

My professional development goals also involved pursuit of partnerships, which has manifested in Helium’s participation in the Mailchimp Partners program, Shopify Experts program and support for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud network. As a member of these resource-based communities, I am able to both network and highlight my work in a way that reinforces my reputation.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heliumadvisory.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heliumadvisory/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heliumadvisory/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauragthompson/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/heliumadvisory