ELEVATE NEXT Interviewed in the NashvilleVoyager

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christie Solomon. She and her team share their story with us below:

Christie Solomon, President of Elevate Next, LLC, has her MBA in International Business from Thunderbird School of Global Management with more than ten years of broad corporate experience in project and product management; mergers, acquisitions, and post-merger integration; financial reporting and analysis; market analysis; and business development. She is fluent in Spanish after spending three years working in Spain and traveling extensively in Latin America.

In 2019, Christie decided to apply the same skills and knowledge she gained working with international corporations to ELEVATE smaller, domestic companies to their NEXT level of profitability, performance, and effectiveness. ELEVATE NEXT provides customized consulting services focused on increasing market share, improving profitability, and streamlining business processes.

A resident of Destin, Florida, Christie’s philanthropic focus is on animal rescue and education. She can frequently be seen with her dog, Chloe, adopted from Dog-Harmony, Inc., a 501(c)3 based in Santa Rosa Beach in 2017 where she has served as a Board Member and currently focuses on fundraising to expand the organization’s humane education, shelter enrichment, and positive dog training programs in the community.  She became the Executive Editor of Dog-Harmony Life, a lifestyle magazine dedicated to enriching the lives of humans and their canines, and manager of partner investments in April 2021.

Christie also serves on the Board of Directors of Aletha’s Legacy, a 501(c)3 non-profit founded in October 2019, which is dedicated to bettering the lives of underprivileged children in Liberia through improved education. She was instrumental in supporting the upcoming trip to Liberia to bring children’s holiday gifts and oversee the first phase of renovations currently underway at the Children’s Future Program and Orphanage, home to 53 children in the rural town of Kakata, approximately 45 miles from the capital city of Monrovia. (You can read Aletha’s Legacy’s latest press release, published by Destin Life, here.)

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

I graduated with my MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management in the midst of the housing bubble and subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Unsure of the future and my job employment prospects, I put in many applications for open positions while working part-time as a contract business intelligence consultant.

I eventually landed at Novus International, a global feed ingredient manufacturer headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. During the interview, I related the story of my three-five-year career plan, which my father made me put together while I was living at home. I had no experience in agriculture, so, I think the interview group found my determination to reach the upper echelons of the corporate ladder amusing, because they hired me.

The US agriculture industry is male-dominated. I was one of the younger – and one of the few female employees – in the St. Louis office at that time. The hard work and long hours on various projects – mergers and acquisitions, product marketing, project management, etc. – paid off, but sometimes at the expense of my health (and, on occasion, my sanity), as I tried to prove myself.

I had many character-building adventures, as a result of that hard work and perseverance. I was dispatched by myself to a small city in the Shandong Province of China for a long winter month to manage a due diligence project, and spent most of it freezing in a manufacturing plant with a broken heating unit and a company goat. My hotel was also very cold, but somehow the menagerie of fruit flies in my room were able to thrive and multiply throughout my month-long stay.

In northwest Mexico, my rental car (with my passport) was impounded while meeting with a key employee of a possible acquisition target company. After waking up half the town, we finally located the owner of the lot and were able to recover my car, saving me an emergency trip to the U.S. Embassy. During another trip to an agricultural area of Mexico, I helped two colleagues change a tire during a sales trip gone sideways.

I visited Juliet’s window balcony in Verona, Italy with an outgoing, jovial and very successful country sales manager. In Vietnam, I learned the key skills required to close a sale with feed manufacturers from a petite, but mighty, Vietnamese sales manager. A three-year assignment in Tarragona, Spain, was probably the most difficult from a work-life balance standpoint, but the most rewarding from a cultural learning experience. It resulted in lifelong friendships across the globe.

I am now working for myself during a pandemic (endemic?) and loving it. It is up to me to prioritize time spent on a diverse set of consulting projects for my clients, most of whom are small- to medium-sized businesses. Their successes are my successes – it’s exciting to share their increased sales, improved operations, and company development. While I miss some of the adventures from my international travels, there are more of those in my future.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?

ELEVATE NEXT empowers organizations to grow their business profitably through creative, customized business solutions that increase brand awareness, expand market share, and streamline business processes. We work with clients to identify specific projects that are aligned with their particular business goals, then manage those projects end-to-end to ensure that they are delivered on time and on budget.  Our focus is on developing solutions to the challenges facing a smaller business owner from an outside perspective with integrated consulting services that include:

• Public relations services;

• Website design and optimization;

• Social media management;

• Photography and videography for on-point brand content;

• Graphic design services for brands and marketing collateral

• Customized business plans and budgets for a new product or service launches;

• Streamlined business processes; and

• Financial analysis and valuation services.

I am most proud brand-wise that our clients have all been referrals. For an early-stage business founded in 2019, this is the best sort of client, because it means that the referring client is providing a testimonial of our good work and already determined a good ‘fit.’ That said, I love to meet prospective clients, which is key to our future growth.

Elevate Next leverages up on the services provided by a typical marketing agency with the broad background and experience provided by contracting with individuals talented in all aspects of running a business, whether that is marketing, communications, finances, or operations. We can help determine the value of your company or better understand your financial statements to find cost savings opportunities. Given the growth of Latin American business opportunities, our bilingual services can be especially valuable.  

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?

Several mentors deserve a special mention!

While working at the International Institute in St. Louis, I received life-changing career guidance from my boss and mentor, Glenda Sullentrup. My job was to match refugees, immigrants, and their families to employment opportunities with companies interested in hiring them. I worked with both the prospective employers and the agency clients. When I told Glenda that I did not feel comfortable speaking in public, she encouraged me to join the St. Louis Chapter of Toastmasters International. As the only young or female person in the chapter at that time, Toastmasters provided a very unusual (but accepting) setting for someone fresh out of a liberal arts college in Colorado. It was a foundational experience in terms of the affirmation and acceptance I received from the other members, and the public speaking skills I gained. Glenda also wrote a recommendation letter that helped get me accepted into the MBA program at Thunderbird School of Global Management in 2007, and she has remained a mentor and friend ever since – a gem I treasure from my time at the Institute. 

Gary Reznik is another mentor and friend who has had a profound impact on my career. During my three-year assignment in Spain with Novus International, Gary managed their European Research and Development Center. He and his partner welcomed me as a fellow ex-pat, provided me invaluable survival tips, and many meals in their home. The success of many of my projects at work depended on Gary and his team’s expertise on the products I managed – pigment ingredients for animal feed. He was able to teach me the valuable nutritional benefits of the products I was managing, very patiently explaining the science until I understood it. He was also a great partner for discussing strategy and for discussing the efficacy of our products to clients around the world. As a refugee from Ukraine, Gary arrived in the US with his family and virtually nothing else – and no English. Despite his impressive list of accomplishments and degrees, he is the humblest person I know.

Alice Sterkel, the former Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel at Novus International (now retired), facilitated my hiring in my first role at Novus as a Strategic Initiatives Analyst in 2008. I worked with her on many mergers and acquisitions (M&A) projects, and she taught not just about the legal considerations, but about negotiating and leveraging subject matter expert input. She is a strong, ethically uncompromised role model who, at that time, was only one of two females in an executive position. I deeply appreciated her wicked sense of humor, which always lightened a tense meeting.