Gilbert entrepreneur’s new venture aims to help other businesses Laurel Pendle has seen and experienced business in several ways.

The Gilbert woman’s parents started a half dozen different businesses over the time she was growing up in the Midwest. And she’s started a few of her own, including meeting/conference planning, real estate and even dog-watching. But a funny thing happened along the way in her quarter-century career – she became a mom to a boy, now 7. So now, she’s opted for a new startup, LPBC Services LLC, that allows her to remain a fulltime mom but also help struggling businesses through her own experience as a certified meeting planner, strategic communications expert and a business owner. “Our goal is to help shape and share your story,” she said.

“Many organizations do not have the time or budget to hire full-time employees to perform all of the necessary duties needed to grow a department or brand.” That leads to a “gap” that she says her business can fill so that by acting as an extension of a client’s business, the client can focus on things he or she wants to do.  Calling herself a “driven, female entrepreneur that values relationships and family,” Pendle said she got the idea for her new business, which officially launched in July, from the business owners and others who “reached out to me to see how they could start their own business or grow their own business and what advice I could offer.”

Larger organizations sought her ideas on “how they could grow their market share, be more viable in the public eye, develop relative content, attract a new target audience or share their story with others.”  It didn’t take long for her to discover “two successful professionals in the start-up community that have amazing technical and system ‘process’ experience but were missing the public relations, event strategy and business development arm.”  She developed a public relations strategy, and they were so happy with the results that they asked her to join them in yet another business that will be launching soon.  As for the company that she has launched, Pendle said she can fill the needs of both large and smaller businesses and organizations that “have a tremendous amount of work to complete but do not have the budget to hire full-time, high-level employees to deliver the results necessary to complete the on-going projects/tasks that demand big results.”

“Even large marketing/PR agencies have a need when unfortunate layoffs or downsizing occurs, and they need someone to help ‘fill the gap to keep their existing clients happy,” she said.  “Sometimes organizations need an industry expert or ‘opinion leader’ to land a new client or help tackling a new project that they do not have experience in but need to get up to speed quickly.”  Among those needs are strategic marketing, video production, website design, process and systems integration and social media advertising campaigns,” she said, as well as marketing and sales strategizing, business development.

Information: LaurelPendle.com

Page 26-27 of the Gilbert Sun News