Christian Marketer's Sharp Moves Help Believers Succeed in Business
by Mary Rettig and Jenni Parker
November 18, 2004
(AgapePress) - One marketing consultant says she stepped out on faith and left a six-figure income in order to find a way to combine her job skills and her faith. At the same time, she also found a way to fill a need for Christian businesses and churches.Last year Anne Sharp started Sharp Concepts, a marketing and public relations firm. Before that, she was working as a marketing executive with major companies such as Toyota, Disney, and Sony. Still, the cracker-jack Christian executive had a strong drive to live out her faith in her work life, and she says the vision for her own company came from that desire deep within her heart.
Although her career was going well, Sharp says during the last two or three years she had "really been praying, 'Lord, it just doesn't seem like enough. What's missing?" That's when she began to pray very specifically, saying, "Lord I would really love to be able to combine my talent in PR and marketing with my passion, which is you," and asking of God, "How do I put those things together? Do I just go and work for a Christian company? Do I start out on my own?"
Out of those prayers, Sharp Concepts began to take shape. The Christian entrepreneur's firm handles a plethora of media and marketing services, including public, media, and community relations, grassroots marketing & promotions, media-driven marketing & promotions, talent coordination and booking, and sales brand positioning and promotions. Many that have solicited her company's services give glowing testimonials, praising the CEO in terms like "uniquely focused" and "extremely resourceful" and touting her as a "great problem solver" and "a creative executive" with the "ability to promote anything."
Sharp Concepts definitely fills a void, the company's founder says -- a gap she discovered while asking God to show her what move he wanted her to make next. Whenever the energetic marketing expert was working and networking in the Christian community, she says she would run into people in ministry or people with small businesses, "and I'd find all the time that they simply didn't have the time, the tools, or the talent to promote their message or their product into the marketplace -- particularly the crowded marketplace that is secular media."
Whatever Sharp may have left behind with her previous high paying, high-profile job, she believes she gained much more by taking a step of faith to found a company that helps further the kingdom. And it was well worth the risk, she says, because today Sharp Concepts is giving Christian organizations and churches the missing ingredients they need to excel and succeed, not only in this world, but in the world to come.
