RALEIGH – If women hit the proverbial “glass ceiling,” women of color, it has been said, face a “concrete ceiling,” But interestingly, that’s not how Amie Thompson sees it.
The 42-year-old Durhamite is the new CEO and president of Creative Allies, a content marketing firm based out of Raleigh. She’s spent the past 20 years rising up the corporate ladder, and as her recent appointment attests to, there’s not much that can hold her back.
Sadly, that’s a rarity in today’s world where African American women were only 3.9 percent of executive- or senior-level officials and managers and 0.4 percent of CEOs in those companies, according to the Center for American Progress. Even more troubling, zero African American women CEOS currently head companies in the S&P 500.
On her own terms, Thompson is moving the needle. She recently sat down with WRAL TechWire’s Chantal Allam to talk about her journey, and her mission to bring others along with her.
- First off, congrats on getting your promotion as CEO of Creative Allies. It’s a great accomplishment for anybody, but according to the statistics, you’re a rarity as an African American female. What’s your reaction to this?
It’s exciting, stressful and hard, but I’m thrilled about the opportunity. On the one hand, I feel it’s just my job. But I do also recognize that I’m a little bit different and hold a position that most people don’t look like me hold. The comforting part is that I feel that it is the right fit for me. I don’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t feel like there is something that I can’t do. I also have an incredible network, so I feel like people are rooting for me, wanting me to be successful.
When I need to reach out and get advice, there are people that will stop what they’re doing and help me. That’s extremely important. And it’s not just other women, but people of all different backgrounds. Maybe they’ve been in my shoes, maybe they haven’t. But they can offer a different perspective to help me make the right decision.
- Was it always your goal to rise to CEO?
No, not at all. Not because I didn’t think I could. That was not really the issue. It’s really been that I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes type of person. I like getting things done, making things happen. But I was never that type that would be up front. So last year, I spent a lot of time thinking through this. Is this my personality? Is this something that I want to do?
But it’s a mix between, Amie, you should step out of your comfort zone a little bit and also this is what the company needs. If I’m going to be successful in this role, I’ve got to do things that are not ordinary to me to make it happen. Certainly, I never said to myself that I want to run a company some day. I always want to invest in companies, make money from companies, lend my expertise where I could, but running a company was never my goal. I just kind of fell into it because I knew I could do the job.
- Take us to the beginning. Then you ended up at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. Tell us about that.
It was great. I was 15 when I got in. For me, there are so many people qualified to get in. Some people don’t want to go there because then they’re not at the top. For me, just being surrounded by so many intelligent people was exciting, where I didn’t feel like an odd ball. I felt like I fit in. So I loved it. Math, specifically, has always been my favorite.
At one of her usual hangouts … Creative Allies CEO Amie Thompson at the Union Members House in Durham.
It’s what I’m good at. That’s been since early teens.
- Talk us through your career, and how you got here.
After college at UNC, I worked for GSK for a few years and no matter the industry, I always stayed in sales and marketing – whether it was systems, contracts, sales, or support. I later worked for a small biotech company in Memphis, Tennessee called GTx for about five years. Again, I was always working in sales and marketing, anything related to making sure the team was running effectively. After that, I worked in technology , the last role at iCiDIGITAL, now BlueAcorn iCi after merging recently
- Describe what it’s like to be an African American woman working in tech?
When I lived in Memphis, that was the first role I had that was a leadership position. At the time, I was the youngest leader, and I was also the only female and black person. Some days, it doesn’t matter. I just want to go to work and do my job. And some days, you look around the room, and you’re like, why am I the only one? When I worked at iCiDIGITAL, which was my last corporate tech job, I was the only female in a leadership position for a while. I wasn’t the only minority, but I was the only female. It does make you question a little bit, why is that?
How can black women crack the ‘concrete ceiling?’ Creative Allies CEO offers advice
Sometimes, I do think it’s about confidence and feeling like you should be there. The other part is, being okay with being the only African American or female there. Sometimes you have to be the only one there to open some doors for other people, and get to the point in your career that you want to get to.
- Tell us a little about Creative Allies, and how it got started.
The company was founded in 2009 by two individuals, who were in music management in Asheville. They had bands that they managed, and they were looking for good, graphic design work for their artists. So they decided to create this technology that would help them pair these musicians with the artists, and that’s the foundation of the company.
That technology built a community over time that was a few hundred people to now over 100,000 people. Now instead of working with small, touring bands, we work with really anybody in the music industry. Then we said, let’s go into sports and business. Now we use our platform for really anything, any type of content – whether you’re a business, a startup, an established brand, we can work with you.
- How did you become involved?
I started as just an investor in 2015 with two other individuals. The company had already been around for around seven years at that point. I was still working at the technology company. We heard about it, and honestly I liked the name and went to the website and I was like, wow, and saw all the cool people that they had worked with, and we started to talk to the founders and the folks involved, and it sounded like something so different and interesting.
I said, you know what, if I’m going to write a big check, I want it to be something that is fun and that I can enjoy and then hopefully make some money off of it.
- OK, so you started as an investor. How did you end up running it?
The original plan was to just be investors, help out where we could and lend our advice. I was working at iCiDIGITAL in Raleigh at the time. But what happened very quickly was that the folks that were involved wanted to move on and do other things. For about two years, I was working just nights and weekends. I started doing books and things like that.
Eventually, I stopped working at iCiDGITAL and doing 15-20 hours work per week for Creative Allies. Then last year, we had a lot of things shift, and I said, you know what, I think I can run this. I talked to the board about it, and they gave me the opportunity to be CEO. I feel like it was the right time. It’s a company that I believe in, which was really important to me. I didn’t necessarily want to be a CEO, but I wanted to be with the company and I really felt that I was the right person that could lead it.
Creative Allies CEO Amie Thompson.
- Where is the company at the moment?
Right now, I’ve got six people on the team and we use a lot of different contractors and interns. Our community is around 100,000 – mostly designers but we do have other skill sets in the community. The way we like to work is, if you’re a client, you come to us with a project, we not only use our technology, but we also use our community.
So what that means is, one of the lessons learned, is to not use our money to hire full-time people. It’s really to tap into the freelancer network that we’ve accumulated over time so that we can not only help them grow their businesses, but then from an overhead perspective, it keeps my overhead a little bit lower if I can just tap into freelancers for projects.
- That’s a growing trend, right?
Yes, I love it. You can get people that have very specific skill sets, so it’s better for the client as well. Then when that project is done, the goal is obviously to sustain work for the freelancer, but if we can’t, I’m not paying the cost of it. It works out nicely.
- What’s your vision for the company?
I certainly want to grow our community, not necessarily in numbers but in diversity. We’re interested in writers. We’re bringing on a sub-community of writers because we know how important written content is – whether it’s articles, books, copy for your website or social. The technology piece is very important as well. Obviously, that requires money. That’s a little bit longer on our road map. We’re looking to create an automated system. Now our technology is quite people intensive. There are parts that are automated, and parts that my team has to do. We’re looking hopefully by the end of this year or 2020 to have a part of our system that is completely automated, meaning you can come to us, buy from us, work with us, without a lot of heavy human interaction.
In the next three to five years, I’m looking to sell it. I’m certainly not looking to run a company for 20 years. That’s what we invested in, and that’s what the goal is. We want to become so attractive financially that a bigger brand or someone with a big checkbook is really interested in looking at us.
- Are you fundraising?
We’ve done four rounds of fundraising. It’s been close to $1 million over ten years. We’re probably 12 to 16 months away from another larger round, somewhere in 2020. We’re still in growth phase. We’re still looking to break even. Even though we’ve been around for a while, we’re still looking to turn that corner, but that will happen this year. I feel very comfortable that will happen this year.
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