It’s fair to say that Streetlight Digital started by accident.
Maybe it would sound better if we said we had a fancy business plan, vision and mission statements, brand guidelines, strategies for growth and the like… but that would be the exact opposite of how it all started.
Kara and I had worked together at the St. Baldrick’s Foundation — I was in Arizona, Kara in Colorado — we hadn’t been in the same room more than five times. I left to take a role at Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) and Kara jumped into my former role at St. Baldrick’s.
We stayed in touch, but we weren’t intentional, it was just a happy accident. It was a conversation here, a “maybe this could be a thing” there, and then somehow, it was something. Without really thinking about what we were getting into, we had our first client. After a month of work, we had a check to cash. And when that very professional-looking payment arrived in my mailbox, we had to figure out how to actually form a business and open a checking account in order to cash that check.
“It’s just a side hustle,” we said, but a few months later I quit my job and it became the main hustle. I posted my plans on LinkedIn, and again, the business just kept growing by accident.
I’ll never forget sitting on a curb at Disneyland — my kids and husband climbing Tarzan’s Treehouse — while talking to a nonprofit leader in my network who called to ask if we were in the business of writing peer-to-peer fundraising emails. I called Kara and asked, “What do you think? Do we write peer-to-peer emails?” We decided we did. And Noel was our second client.
Another friend and professional peer called days later to ask if I would be interested in evaluating some software.
“Kara, do you think we are in the software evaluation business?” Sure, why not? Client #3.
The leads kept rolling in from the trusted, fabulous, awesome people in my network, and we had to get serious about what it was we were building.
I had my reservations (that’s a different story), but what Kara and I both knew was that we wanted to build a business that gave women (and men! Though, sorry guys, our first thought was of working moms) the chance to build a career around a life they loved — and not the other way around. We wanted a workplace where people and relationships came first, profits second, and where the focus was on helping nonprofit organizations use their donor dollars wisely to raise more money and change lives.
We’re five and a half years into this happy accident. Streetlight Digital has doubled in business every year and our staff is now 17 members strong. We work with large and small nonprofits alike. It turns out we do write peer-to-peer emails — ha! — but we’ve been able to put much of what was learned while at St. Baldrick’s to use for other organizations. We manage Google ad grants, run robust SEM and paid social budgets for direct response programs, provide strategic guidance and support for peer-to-peer fundraising programs, guide our clients on the best use of their tech stack and help them implement solutions. But at the core, we help them put their budgets to good use to raise more money.
It feels like both yesterday and decades ago when we were figuring out how to obtain our EIN. There are plenty of days when Kara and I both feel like our lives are now built around our careers and not the other way around, as we had originally intended. But, there are also days when we get to step back and watch this team that we’ve built serve Streetlight Digital’s clients like the rock stars they are — that we see a life we love, and we’re grateful for this happy accident.