Member since January 2023
Meredith Eaton is a Co-Founder, Co-CEO, and Entrepreneur based in South Carolina. Her educational background includes Bachelor's Degrees in Political Science and Women's Study from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a Master's Degree in Organizational Management from George Washington University, and a Psychology of Leadership Certificate from Cornell University.
Upon receiving her Master's degree, Meredith started her first company providing management consulting to non-profits and small, women-owned businesses. After six successful years, she transitioned to her next venture, opening a publishing house for first-time authors and writers of historical and sociological fiction. This evolved into one of her current businesses, Eaton Press, where she provides writing coaching and self-publishing consulting to non-fiction writers who want to use their books as tools to grow their businesses.
While running Eaton Press, Meredith hired stay-at-home moms to help with administrative tasks, and this is where her next business was born. In October 2018, she and her friend Jennifer Crawford co-founded Sparent, a virtual assistant agency that specializes in connecting stay-at-home parents with business owners who could benefit from their flexible, reliable, and highly-skilled work.
In June 2022, Meredith and Jennifer expanded their entrepreneurial portfolio by acquiring Move Forward Virtual Assistants (MFVA), adding a third business to Meredith's current portfolio. MFVA is a virtual assistant agency specializing in administrative needs and medical billing of mental health professionals.
Today, Meredith lives in Murrells Inlet, SC and keeps busy working on her 3 companies, all of which allow her to follow her passion for helping businesses scale. When not working, she enjoys spending time with her friends and family - including her three grandchildren - and relaxing at the beach.
My passions include, supporting young women entrepreneurs, and helping women scale their businesses to 7 figures and above with humanity, economic justice, and work-life integration. I'm also passionate about the power of a good organizational system to transform a workflow or work experience, and am at my happiest when I'm designing or implementing a new system.
My business partner, Jennifer, and I had our ah-ha moment about a year after we started our first company together - Sparent. For the first year we'd been so busy building the company, we didn't have a lot of time to think about what kind of company we wanted or even what was driving us beyond our natural entrepreneurial drives. We were meeting with a brand consultant who was going to be writing the text of our redesigned website and she kept pushing us on our knee jerk responses to questions like "Why Sparent? What do you want Sparent to mean to clients and team members" and before we knew it, we were spouting out what we came to call our manifesto. Our brand consultant captured all of it and with very little editing, delivered it back to us as the central story behind our brand. The core of this manifesto was the question "What if we fueled our passion with compassion? What if we structured our work around humanity, instead of patriarchy? Ambitious, driven women don't construct the future by assuming a role, we do it by breaking the rules. We believe in economic justice and equitable pay no matter of social status, racial or ethnic background, identity or family commitments."
Those beliefs guided us to grow Sparent by 400% in one year, and gave us the road map to revamp Move Forward Virtual Assistants when we purchased it in 2022. We immediately increased the base pay for all employees, reduced full-time hours to 30hrs/week, and provided phones and laptops so they could disengage from their virtual jobs at the end of the day by turning off their phones and computers. Everyone said we were crazy to spend that much on the team, but we knew that investing in our team was the only way to build a sustainable company. We also raised our prices and our service standards, and our team raised their own standards to meet our expectations. We experienced zero staff turnover in the first 8 months of owning the company and less than 5% attrition of clients in response to the price increase.
And we were profitable in less than a year. We treated our team like professionals, and they behaved like professionals. We told our clients they deserved better service standards than they had been getting and they accepted the price increase because it was making their businesses better AND improving the lives of their Virtual Assistants. That was all the proof we needed to confirm that leading with humanity and economic justice pays off. It's a slower growth plan than most private equity firms would find acceptable, but we're ok with that. We have no regrets about building a million-dollar company around having CEOs who earn the same as the lowest-paid members of the company because we know that we don't need to exploit our labor so that we can thrive. We refuse to measure our worth as CEOs by the size of our paychecks, and instead, we look at the success of our team and our clients and our pace of growth as a company.
My business partner, Jennifer, and I had our ah-ha moment about a year after we started our first company together - Sparent. For the first year we'd been so busy building the company, we didn't have a lot of time to think about what kind of company we wanted or even what was driving us beyond our natural entrepreneurial drives. We were meeting with a brand consultant who was going to be writing the text of our redesigned website and she kept pushing us on our knee jerk responses to questions like "Why Sparent? What do you want Sparent to mean to clients and team members" and before we knew it, we were spouting out what we came to call our manifesto. Our brand consultant captured all of it and with very little editing, delivered it back to us as the central story behind our brand. The core of this manifesto was the question "What if we fueled our passion with compassion? What if we structured our work around humanity, instead of patriarchy? Ambitious, driven women don't construct the future by assuming a role, we do it by breaking the rules. We believe in economic justice and equitable pay no matter of social status, racial or ethnic background, identity or family commitments."
Those beliefs guided us to grow Sparent by 400% in one year, and gave us the road map to revamp Move Forward Virtual Assistants when we purchased it in 2022. We immediately increased the base pay for all employees, reduced full-time hours to 30hrs/week, and provided phones and laptops so they could disengage from their virtual jobs at the end of the day by turning off their phones and computers. Everyone said we were crazy to spend that much on the team, but we knew that investing in our team was the only way to build a sustainable company. We also raised our prices and our service standards, and our team raised their own standards to meet our expectations. We experienced zero staff turnover in the first 8 months of owning the company and less than 5% attrition of clients in response to the price increase.
And we were profitable in less than a year. We treated our team like professionals, and they behaved like professionals. We told our clients they deserved better service standards than they had been getting and they accepted the price increase because it was making their businesses better AND improving the lives of their Virtual Assistants. That was all the proof we needed to confirm that leading with humanity and economic justice pays off. It's a slower growth plan than most private equity firms would find acceptable, but we're ok with that. We have no regrets about building a million-dollar company around having CEOs who earn the same as the lowest-paid members of the company because we know that we don't need to exploit our labor so that we can thrive. We refuse to measure our worth as CEOs by the size of our paychecks, and instead, we look at the success of our team and our clients and our pace of growth as a company.
