Founder, Steph Bee Creative Consultancy
1 Can you briefly introduce yourself and share a bit about your journey and work?
My name is Steph Bee, legally known as Steph Blue :). I am a mom and wife, and I currently own a business that is the same age as my daughter, who is two and a half years old. In 2016, I started my journey as a marketer in London, working for one of the biggest marketing and ad firms in the city.
I then got married, moved to the US to be with my husband, and dived right back into marketing while also growing as a wellness content creator. By 2021, I had over 20,000 followers and was working as a coordinator for the Knoxville Chamber. Life threw the most beautiful (somewhat planned) curveball, and my daughter Alina-Dior was born. Here’s where my journey into entrepreneurship began.
I never had a thought, let alone the drive, to be an entrepreneur, that’s not been done in my family for at least two generations. But when moving from the UK, where maternity leave is roughly 12 months, to the US, where the max was 12 weeks, I quickly realized that neither of those numbers made any sense. After giving birth to my daughter and understanding and living through the changes that, that brought me, mentally, emotionally, and physically, there is no time a woman can have that is enough to understand and readapt, let alone truly embrace and embark on this new beautiful journey with a new life.
How can time be put on that?
In 2022, I launched Steph Bee Creative Consultancy, a female-run and owned Social Media oasis that works to redefine the influence of female content creators and small businesses. We have achieved this by building mini-courses that help aspiring women who want to make a full-time income in Social Media or marketing gain the tools to get started. We offer Social Media Management services for both influencers and small businesses that want to keep their hands out of it but want to receive results, build influence, and attract clients. Lastly, we offer one power-hour Content Consultation, providing rapid, result-driven information for whatever your content question is to help you get started with growing and redefining your influence. Lastly, we follow up within 72 hours with a PDF of everything we discussed and additional notes for results.
2) Looking back, was your journey relatively smooth or did you face significant obstacles?
I have definitely experienced obstacles. I birthed my business alongside having my first child and homeschooling her. It has been one of the most challenging situations to juggle, but I believe I’ve done it with wellness at the center. Giving myself and my daughter an immense amount of grace and feeling free to accept help. I always say that just because I am strong doesn’t mean I want to be strong, and multitasking is unproductive.
I wanted my husband, daughter, and my business to get the best of me. That realization came from learning what burnout felt like and leaning into amazing local resources that Knoxville offers, like Parents Day Out – a two-day-a-week church daycare.
3) Can you highlight a few key milestones in your career that you Consider pivotal moments? How did they shape your trajectory?
Although I’m from London, this question leads me back to why I call Knoxville home and my hometown. It’s because all the pivotal moments in my career steer right back to the root, being Knoxville. When I started posting about my wellness journey and the desire to create a cleaner life for both myself and my family, it pushed me into doing more yoga and really connecting with my body to reset and reevaluate what “feeling well” looked like.
Posting from an honest place allowed me to find my tribe and enabled one of the biggest franchises in our city to find me. Dick’s House of Sport offered me an opportunity to collaborate with incredible wellness influencers across America, and I was later invited to partner with one of the largest sports companies in the world, Nike. Dicks opened the door to an incredible content-creating opportunity that led me to learn and immerse myself in understanding the strategies that brands look for when choosing who they want to work with.
I joined multiple workshops, both in my city and New York, that led me to truly understand what growth retention looks like for content creators, both financially and mentally.
Thankfully, this led to another pivotal moment of applying for a local business grant that also gives access to a course and curriculm that help build your business capital. 100Knoxville is an incredible program for local black business owners run by the Entrepreneurial Center. From the work of the facilitators, Kandis Troutman and Catherine Pooth, all the way down to the level of homework we were given, 100Knoxville truly helped me understand the power of women taking up space in the business world-thank you Kandis. It gave me an even deeper drive to teach women how to do the same through the research and knowledge I’d acquired about the power of social media.
4) Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I am a coach and consultant who owns a Social Media Oasis. What helps me stand out is that my business is truly my h’art work. It allows me to fulfill my purpose of serving women and helping them grow in the digital space while reminding them of Wellness and the importance of separation from it and how to balance that with reaching marketing goals.
In saying that, Steph Bee Creative provides women the opportunity to redefine their influence through social media. We offer social media management services tailored to very specific growth and retention goals for women-centered businesses. We also offer a sub-service that focuses on User Generated Content. We design, edit, and direct UGC content for businesses and offer customized reels for women wanting to showcase their business through the power of video.
Additionally, we cater to aspiring influencers, providing mini-courses specifically aimed at moms who want to grow their influence and get started in accessing the life that full-time content creation provides. Lastly, my favorite part is that we provide Content Consultations, which is a power-hour zoom chat with yours truly, designed to help businesses and/or influencers be placed on the right track to reaching their content creation or social media marketing goals. As soon as you book a power hour with us you receive a welcome message and google doc requesting the info we need to help put you on the right track. On your scheduled date, we will join a zoom call and dive right in.Once our one-hour is up, instead of leaving you with a “wan-bam-thank-you-ma’am”, 72 hours later you received a PDF with clear direction of what we went over and a roadmap on how to reach your goals.
5) Reflecting on your experiences, what important lessons have you learned along the way? How have they influenced your approach to your work?
“Your husband is right.” LOL or at least that was my case; my husband has been one of my biggest cheerleaders and advisors since starting my business. I owe my success to his support.
“Trust the voices the Most High has placed around you – especially if they’re women LOL – big push on the LOL”:
Before starting my entrepreneurial journey, I worked at the Knox Chamber. My last place of full-time work was Catholic Charities. In both jobs, I had three life-changing bosses: Lysney Wilson & Callie Blackburn at the Knoxville Chamber, and Lori Sliwa & Sandi Davison, Director & Program Manager of Catholic Charities.
My ability to have the courage to start my own business while also homeschooling a toddler came from the support that these women gave me at some point while managing me. They had no idea how their subtle encouragement helped give me the courage to do something that hasn’t been done in my family for at least two generations. Because of them, my business is thriving with courage under its wings. Thank you, ladies.
And obviously, my mom 🙂 I live by the words she tells me every time I call her in a frenzy lol – please bear in mind the deep Queen’s English sarcasm this is said in, with a very deep soothing undertone of a mother’s love, LOL: “Steph, even when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do it well, so whatever it is you’re doing with marketing, keep doing it; you’re clearly doing it well :).”
-Thanks mom.
These women have helped me coach, consult and even manage women’s content from a space that pushes them to be greater. They’ve influenced my approach to how I view my potential, but also how I now view other women that my business brings me the pleasure of impacting.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephbee__/
Linkedin :https://www.linkedin.com/company/bee-creative-consultancy/
Business Website: https://stephbee.org/consultancy
