Meet Nicole Elliott founder and owner of Artistic Albums by Nicole
www.artisticalbumsbynicole.com 
nicole@artisticalbumsbynicole.com

What is your company all about? I own a scrap-for-hire business in which I create digital scrapbook pages for clients from their personal pictures. I can also create custom engagement, graduation, and birth announcements; and specialized photo Christmas “cards”. I can also create many business items including business fliers, business cards, etc.

How long have you been in business?  One year.

How long have you been a Christian & share a little about your faith: I’ve been a Christian basically my whole life. My parents both got saved shortly after I was born and I have been in church ever since. I accepted Jesus as my personal Savior at the young age of 4 and have been trying my best to serve Him ever since!

How has your faith in God inspired and helped grow your business?  My faith in God has helped grow my business in several different ways; the biggest one being that I would have never started my business if it hadn’t been for His leading. I’ve always known that I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but had been feeling that I would also like to help contribute to my family’s income. My husband is in the Coast Guard and although the military offers many wonderful benefits, the pay among the lower ranks is not very substantial, to say the least! I’d been praying that God would show me a way that I could help out with the bills, while also still taking care of my family in the way I felt I should. I tried a direct selling job for a few months but with our lifestyle of continually moving it just didn’t work as well for me as others I knew, and I ended up spending more money on it than I was making. I decided to stop and just give my situation to God, allow Him to open doors if He wanted me to work in our home, and if not just try to help save money in other ways. Around this time my wonderful best friend kept encouraging me to start scrapping for others for money. I kept brushing her off, thinking that no one would be interested. After showing some of my pages to my friends I got overwhelming positive responses about my work and decided that maybe it was what God wanted me to do. I had no money to start up a business though, and the commercial licenses you needed to purchase to use designers papers and embellishments was very expensive. Because I wanted to do everything honestly and legally I prayed something to the effect of “God I want to do this but don’t have the money, if you want me to you’ll give it to me!” He provided the money through my wonderful first client who is a lady I used to go to church with. She was willing to give me a the money I needed to get started up-front so I could purchase the materials and licenses and then make pages for her afterwords…talk about an answer to prayer! God has continued to work through my small business…bringing me business when we needed it the most, and allowing things to slow down when my life needed that too. I’m so excited to see what He will continue to do with my little contribution to our little world!

What advice do you have for other moms thinking about starting their own business?
My biggest piece of advice is: don’t get discouraged! You might have to try a couple of different things before you find what works best for you. Keep your chin up and pray, pray, pray! Even just one customer can be considered a success! We all need to start somewhere. Also be sure you’re doing something you love, it can be a lot of hard work… and doing something you’re passionate about makes it so much easier!

What specials can you offer Moms visiting from CMB Resource?
I’m offering moms a choice of either your first two pages free or a custom announcement/card! (high resolution jpeg image only) Make sure you mention CMB Resource to receive this special offer!

 Are you willing to allow other Christian moms to contact you if they would like to know more about starting their own business? Absolutely!