It started with a simple concoction of ingredients mixed together in Emma Allen’s kitchen. It evolved into becoming the signature item of a business that sells its products in more than 600 stores, on Amazon and online.

Allen wanted a face-care product, something plant-based, with a good scent. Something cleansing and hydrating and nourishing.

“I intended to make a face product but started using it on my entire body as well,” she says. “Through experimentation and research, I realized that I could create something that was actually cleansing for the face as well as moisturizing.”

Her concoction used the best wild-harvested botanical oils she could find. Everything organic. Everything labeled ‘cruelty-free.’

“Ultimately,” she says, “Everyday Oil was born. I made it for myself and family and friends for about seven years before I launched it as a product.”

She outgrew the kitchen. She moved from New York back to Asheville, where she grew up. “I met with the SBTDC when I moved back. Moving back to North Carolina was a really positive thing for the growth of the business,” she says. “This is a really supportive community for small business.”

Allen expanded her network beyond family and friends.

“I was originally introduced to Sandra Dennison in 2020 by Tommy Dennison, who I met through the Chamber of Commerce and the Venture Asheville program,” she says. “Sandra introduced me to Chris Slaughter, who helped us do a Clifton Strengths analysis with our team and who was incredibly helpful with business analysis and was very supportive to the business.”

Clifton Strengths is an online personality assessment that helps individuals target their strengths, such as strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing and executing, so they can achieve goals and improve performance. Allen is the sole owner of her company. Her team formed when it became apparent that Allen’s solo gig needed more players. “In the beginning, I was working as a consultant for another company and doing Everyday Oil at night on the side,” she says. “I was lucky to have some friends and family who helped out in the beginning, but it was mostly me, wearing all the hats. I did it on my own for about two years before I was able to hire someone. I was very fortunate with our first hire, and she has been with the company ever since.”

Two became better than one, then three became better than two.

“We slowly added people as we had the need,” Allen says, “and now we have a small but mighty team of six. We have only ever had one full-time employee leave the company in seven years, and every employee has really grown a lot with the company.”

Growing from kitchen entrepreneur to company boss was a little scary.

“It has been really cool and gratifying to see the team take on so many new challenges and to grow and evolve alongside the brand,” she says. “I was always nervous about finding good people to work with, and our team is something I feel unbelievably lucky about.”

In addition to the spray bottle of Everyday Oil (made from organic coconut, jojoba, olive, castor and argan oils), the company sells a refill bottle and funnel to transfer to the spray bottle; waffle knit, 100 percent cotton towels; a hairbrush with massage bristles designed to de-tangle hair; a Gua Sha healing massage tool “made to perfectly cradle cheeks and jawlines and the curvatures of the face and body;” a hand sanitizer; meridian comb; and dry brush.

“We have expanded, but super slowly,” Allen says. “Our bread and butter is still our main product, Everyday Oil, but it has been fun to add some wellness tools and objects to our collection. We do have plans to expand the skincare line, but in a very tight, simple way.”

Her office space keeps expanding as well. The first stop after the New York kitchen was a friend’s basement. “I moved to a new house where it took over every inch of floor space in the entire house, then moved to a small warehouse in Black Mountain. We have moved into larger and larger spaces, bit by bit, and are now in a 14,000-square-foot space in the same building in Black Mountain.

“We have our offices, distribution and manufacturing all in the same space, so we are able to communicate and collaborate with every aspect of the business. Manufacturing our product in-house has given us a lot of control over the quality of our products.”

What started with online marketing grew to independent boutiques, then 600 retail stores including Whole Foods Market. “We have some plans to expand to Europe, and we also sell in Canada and Australia,” she says.

When the product line grows, she says, the marketing will be calm. “We aren’t interested in bombarding people with skincare products they don’t really need, so the hope is to provide only what is truly necessary and nourishing for the skin.”

She has advice for people who may be experimenting with their own invention, like she did in her kitchen.

“I don’t know if everyone wants to follow my kooky path, but I would tell people to just start doing things. Make things, experiment, play, pull at threads, start walking the path,” she says. “Don’t wait to have the perfect idea… start simply. It’s unbelievably difficult to do things well, in my opinion, and if you try to do 10 things right away, inevitably some won’t get the care and attention they deserve.”

If budget is an issue, she advises to start with one product. Grow from that base.

“I really think the best ideas are born out of a desire to solve a problem, or offer something that doesn’t exist already. If it’s already out there and it’s already great, why bother recreating it?” ■

Everyday Oil
Black Mountain
hello@everydayoil.com
www.everydayoil.com

Michelle Menard grew up in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural family. Her mother was born and raised in France; her father is from Panama. As a young child in Charlotte, the language at home was French and Menard often spent summers in France with her grandparents.

“It got me started with understanding that there are cultural differences,” she says. “Our grandparents did not speak English, and my sister and I were speaking French all summer while getting spoiled by our grandparents.”

While in college, Menard worked at a restaurant and also helped her mother, who had a freelance job doing translations. Her boss had an idea.

“While I was a student at UNCC, my manager at Olive Garden suggested I start my own business,” she says. “When he said that, I had goosebumps and flashes of what this business would look like.”

Why not use her language skills to help others?

Menard is founder and owner of Choice Translating, Inc., a company that assists businesses with translations and interpreting services. She has a core of 15 on staff and is projected to bring in about $3.2 million this year.

One key to Choice Translating’s success, which launched in 1995, is Menard’s method of hiring co-workers, and choosing what projects match each employee and what resources they need to complete their work.

“It was humble beginnings, just me and my mom working together to translate French projects,” she says. “In those days, there were visitors from France coming to the Charlotte area — which has more than 700 foreign-owned firms — and they would come to do plant tours, or meet with their U.S. subsidiary. Then we realized additional clients needed additional languages.”

Menard, who has been a SBTDC client for about 20 years, worked with UNCC’s office at the former Ben Craig Center on campus (now Ventureprise, the university’s entrepreneurial resource center), and its PORTAL [Partnership, Outreach and Research to Accelerate Learning] center.

One way the center has helped is with evolving technology.

“In the early days, if you were transferring files, you’d have to confirm the settings on the recipients’ side and save them to these bigger discs or FedEx them. We had a server cabinet,” she says. “Now everything is in the cloud. We expanded our resources to provide a more complete offering to clients.”

Menard’s employees are project managers who can provide interpreting services in person, over the phone or on video by working with vendor partners and translators around the world. In-person services cover needs such as social services or medical visits, crime scene investigations, legal depositions, employee meetings and parent/teacher conferences. Her
firm provides translation services in industries such as construction, education, healthcare, manufacturing, trade shows and for foreign direct investments, import/export companies and foreign dignitaries.

“We are not a reseller. We guide our clients through the process, because they don’t
know what they don’t know, so we’re able to walk them through and deliver our best work for them.

“For example, if it were a highly technical document, they want to make sure their distributor has buy-in on the technology. There’s an art to doing the document that way. Let’s say a manufacturer has a distributor they want to have buy-in; we have a process that translates keywords and has ‘this instead’ jargon, then we use technology to make sure the team of graphic designers and translators have the opportunity to shine and make a project in multiple languages at the same time.”

Long before COVID made remote the norm, Menard saw the benefits.

In 2014, she says, she discovered ROWE or Results Only Work Environment. “As long as people did the work, it didn’t matter where they worked from,” she says, “and we looked at the requirements of each job. On our staff, most everyone is a project manager, but in essence, to manage projects with the creativity and making sure you stay on deadline, does it require someone to be seated somewhere at a particular time? At that time, we did have an office, and we hired a firm to translate ROWE into our company culture.”

That allowed her employees freedom and flexibility.

“In 2017, we took the plunge and went virtual. We had folks on our team who needed to move to a different part of the state, and we didn’t want to lose that resource because they no longer could be in Charlotte,” she says.

Going virtual, she says, was a “huge, huge” undertaking. “We switched to a cloud-based platform that manages our interpreting business, and then being virtual during the pandemic made business much easier to handle. Because we already were virtual. And with the platform, as our clients stopped meeting in person, they no longer needed in-person, but sometimes telephone wasn’t sufficient. So we did video, and it was a huge request.”

Having a staff of 15 sounds small, Menard says, for a company with clients worldwide and services that cover more than 200 languages.

Menard often hires project managers virtually. “We have a multi-step process that uses an HR platform called JazzHR that posts the positions in online platforms and allows us to ask them questions when they’re submitting their applications,” she says. “It allows us to see the candidates and replicate the office, but in a virtual way, so we can do a personality assessment, see their unique abilities, and they get to meet the team. We want to let the team meet different candidates.”

Project managers work with vendor partners – translators – around the world. “So we have our staff, who are project managers, then we have our vendor partners, and how we qualify them is a whole different thing. They, the vendors, are essentially small businesses with excellent communication skills and expertise in the subject matter we’re using them for. They have to relate to our deadlines and the technology requirements we have.”

There are perks for her staff. In October, she’s hosting a retreat near Lake Norman called Reconnect, Recharge and Renew. Staff is flying in from New Jersey, Hawaii and Quebec as well as commuting locally.

“One thing that’s important is, people bring their whole selves to work, but they also need flexibility to do their best work, to commit to work, so we need to treat them like family,” she says. “Sometimes they need time away to deal with things, or visit friends, or travel. We have a project manager who is in Europe and wants to extend her trip. Another lady travels with her son’s hockey, so she needs flexibility because of the team.

“Charlotte is diverse, and the whole United States is diverse, so every community has that population where language services help through translation to support the immigrant communities, and help companies grow their export amount abroad, which helps the
local community.

“People think we have thousands of translators in a building, but what we have is a good database and network of folks we’ve worked with over the years.” ■

Choice Translating, Inc.
Charlotte
704-717-0043
www.choicetranslating.com

Trimm, Inc., is a producer and supplier of DC power distribution panels and electrical accessories, such as breakers, fuses, amps and adapters.

The 40-employee company in Youngsville, a town of about 2,100 residents 45 minutes northeast of Raleigh, has an onsite manufacturing facility and a large national and international customer base in the telecommunications industry.

To increase business, remain immediately accessible to customers and be more competitive in a worldwide digital society, Trimm contacted the Small Business and Technology Development Center [SBTDC] office at N.C. State in June 2022 about participation in its Digital Jump Start program designed for mid-sized businesses.

The result is a thorough, five-page Executive Summary and five-page Digital Media Audit that assess Trimm’s digital presence with recommendations to “jump start the client’s digital shift.”

“What we wanted was an independent review of our website and suggestions of how we could expand our marketing presence to reach other markets,” says vice president Ricky Brummitt, who also heads Trimm’s sales and marketing. “What we’re doing with the SBTDC is we wanted a more modern website — that was one of the keys — because it needs that, then we can expand on it in the future. We’re also adding to our social media, like Twitter, and we created a Facebook page and Instagram, and we’re expanding more on LinkedIn.”

The LinkedIn account, he says, helps target personnel for Trimm to contact.

“It’s not like we can advertise on a billboard,” he says. “We need to contact the decision-makers within different companies.”

Keeping pace with the continual evolution of social media is vital.

When the firm was founded by Walter Trimm more than 100 years ago in 1922, it had one, solitary communications device: A POTL.

“Plain ol’ telephone line,” says current owner and president Will Newton, who has been with the company about 15 years and is a third-generation owner, though he’s been involved with Trimm for a while. (His grandfather bought the business in 1980, and his father took over 10 years later. Newton bought it in 2010.)

“Back in 1999 we had dial-up internet, then one of the changes was to an ADSL [Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line], in about 2000, and we were spending so much per line,” Newton says. “We’ve had a website since around 1998. I was involved in one of our first website rebuilds, and so this is about our fourth- or fifth-generation website. Back then it was mostly tech space, very light graphics, no video.”

The majority of Trimm’s business is conducted within the United States, Brummitt says. “Since we primarily are in telecommunications, our revenue flows from the major telecom people in the U.S. But we also supply gear into the utilities, such as the railroads, and 911 operators, where we provide equipment for them. They’re not all major players — some are local mom-and-pops who have smaller areas they provide for, and we provide the same service to all of them.

“We ship to all 50 states, and we ship a lot into Canada. We want to ship more into Mexico, so we’re building a lot of different customers. What we’ve found is that once they come to us, the retention rate is very high.”

All products are manufactured at the Youngsville facility. Newton and Brummitt say they also hope to expand their presence in the Caribbean and Saudi Arabia.

Through Digital Jump Start, Newton says, “We enhanced our digital marketing presence by redoing the entire underlying structure, and we’re going to automate the generation of our data sheets and make it easier to keep our information current.”

The SBTDC Executive Summary outlines recommendations for Trimm’s website and its LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram social platforms, then pinpoints specific changes to integrate into each. The Digital Media Audit analyzes each site and reports 90-day numbers in categories such as visitor demographics, follower recommendations and categories to highlight through posts. It also identifies the company’s main competitors.

“We were able to identify people we need to contact. We added ‘best-sellers’ to our website and talk about our mission, our values, so people can start to learn about Trimm,” Brummitt says. N.C. State masters student Martha Topolniski worked on the Jump Start project, as did Regional Center Director Alex Viva and International Business Development Counselor Ginny Vaca in the SBTDC’s regional center at N.C. State University in Raleigh.

“They all are helping us with building the brand and brand recognition,” Newton says. “We are building connections and hopefully can attract more millennials as employees. The SBTDC helped us identify things we should be putting on the website, and the feedback has been very positive.”

Trimm moved to its current facility a year-and-a-half ago, a detail that’s included on the revamped website.

“It’s a website that’s easy to use, easy to get the technical info, easy to get installation instructions, and easy to get us a request and inquiry,” Brummitt says. “When people do that, it comes directly to our customer service people, and myself. Putting best-sellers, our mission, those were some of the suggestions. We feel people used to know who Trimm was, but they didn’t know everything about us.”

For example: “When we moved into this facility, we put in maybe the largest rooftop solar installation in Franklin County,” Brummitt says. “We put a bunch of solar panels up there.”

“It’s over 250 panels,” Newton says. “The bottom line is, during summertime especially, we can put more power on the grid than what we pull back. We’ve saved more than 600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide in one year; that’s the equivalent of 400 trees planted. We’re trying to do our part. When people here turn on their air- conditioning, they’re actually using some of our electrons.”

One immediate success area from the SBTDC analysis, they say, is a large increase in LinkedIn followers. “We haven’t been able to tie the followers [amount] with our revenue [increase] yet, but it’s been working,” Newton says.

Brummitt says the top goal “is to increase Trimm awareness and get into as many markets as we can. Will has made investments in the building for us to do that. In the next five years, we hope to expand our sales group to reach more people.

“I still love face-to-face. You can do video calls, but it’s good to meet people face-to-face. We want to increase awareness and establish some long-term customers, and once you do that, you’re setting your company up for down the road. You want to leave the company in as good of shape as you can.” ■

Trimm, Inc.
112 Franklin Park, Youngsville
919-575-6100
www.trimminc.com

Digital Marketing Guide: https://www.sbtdc.org/pdf/digitalmarketingguide.pdf

Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks in Dare County is typical of many oceanfront villages in North Carolina in that most businesses are locally-owned. Except during tourist season, it’s a quiet, oceanfront community where everyone knows everyone.

Tony Sipe, who is in his mid-40s, has lived in Kill Devil Hills his entire life. For the past dozen years, he’s worked at Goombays Grille & Raw Bar on the beach road, Highway 12. Goombays has been established for decades; its undersea murals, Caribbean-style entrees and collage of license plates on the wall create a popular ambiance. Hours extend until midnight, with dinner served until 10 p.m. Last year, longtime owners Charles and Karen Hennigan decided to sell.

“They were great, a married couple who worked all the time, like five or six days a week,” Sipe says. “It was family owned for 32 years.”

Sipe decided to buy.

A friend, Chris Miller, who is in his early 50s and had worked at Goombays in its first few years, joined Sipe in the purchase.

In April 2022, they contacted the Small Business and Technology Development Center at Elizabeth City State University, which referred them to a local branch office and Matt Byrne.

“He helped us so much. I have an economics background, and Chris has managed huge restaurants, but we would have been lost if not for Matt,” Sipe says. “We were prepared for the front side of the business, but it was the other stuff like financing where we were not, and that’s where the SBTDC came in. We could ask questions you wouldn’t be able to ask your friend, or a guy down the street.”

“No one here knew what was going on but Tony and Chris and myself, and the sellers,” Byrne says. “One of the more interesting things was, they [Sipe and Miller] knew who they wanted to bank with so they drove to Wilmington to talk with a branch there, and it became apparent they needed to work with an SBA [Small Business Administration] loan.”

The men’s communication link with Byrne through the financial navigation process was what made the sale possible, Sipe says.

“He kept discretion through the process. We live in a very small town. If you’re in the restaurant business, most people are friends. Discretion is the best advice on the financial side, and he went over every single number with us, answered every email, picked up the phone every time we called,” he says. “It was like he was working with only us.”

Byrne, Sipe says, has been involved in banking and financing in the area and “knew a lot of restaurant owners, including the ones we purchased from. He’s entrenched in the restaurant business.”

When Sipe talked with SBA loan personnel in Wilmington, “Matt knew what they would ask before they even asked, and he got us 100 percent prepared with answers we needed to answer their questions. We met a dozen times in a six-month period, not counting phone calls.

“It’s like getting a home loan, but there’s a lot more to it. They have to know that the business is profitable, that there’s no debt, that it’s a feasible enough business model that would make enough money to handle debt, and it was a lot of the same questions, over and over. A lot of paper. A lot more detailed than a home loan. It was less about our personal finances and more about how the business performed over the last five or seven years.”

Sipe and Miller got a 10-year loan and took over Goombays in April this year.

“They knew it was going to take a while,” Byrne says. “They got a good, early start with it and knew it would take six or eight months. They wanted to close at the end of 2022 — that was our first goal. But when you work with the SBA, you have to factor in some extra time, which for them was April [2023]. So the sellers carried the weight of the downtime during the offseason, and they (Sipe and Miller) didn’t start ownership until we started the
season here.

“Their July was 10 or 13 percent above last year, and last year was a record, so they’re doing very well.”

In August, toward the end of tourist season, business was steady.

“We’re doing OK. We’re doing it exactly the way they thought we would when they gave us the projections,” Sipe says. “We’re really busy in the summer, so we try to save a little for winter when business slows down.” Sipe and Miller have a staff of about 35, 20 in off-season. They open at 11:30 a.m. and have a lunch menu, dinner menu and “linner.” “That’s a concept the previous owner came up with because we wanted some of the lunch items on the dinner menu, like you have to still sell the tacos and you have to sell the burgers, but because of space in the kitchen, we can’t offer the whole lunch menu,” Sipe says.

Much of their seafood is local catch — oysters, clams, shrimp.

When they sold the restaurant, the Hennigans had a request.

“They wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to be someone who would tear it down and put up a condo. And they were very involved in charitable organizations around here, and they wanted someone who would be heavily involved in the community,” Sipe says. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and Chris has been here about 30 years, so if they were involved in a local charity, we will be involved with that local charity. They wanted someone to continue the same model they had. And, of course, we are.” ■

Goombays Grille & Raw Bar
1608 Virginia Dare Trail, Kill Devil Hills
252-441-6001
Open six days a week | Closed on Tuesdays
www.goombays.com