She desires to show your aspect gig right into a full-blown enterprise – Information @ Northeastern

Northeastern alumna Christina Lerouge wasn’t intimidated by the close to each day bulletins that one enterprise or one other had shuttered through the COVID-19 pandemic; as an alternative, she noticed a possibility to begin her personal.

“I noticed this as probably the most opportune time,” Lerouge says, “as a result of as firms are slowing down, individuals have the time and house to consider what they actually need to do—to determine what their ardour is.”

Lerouge’s enterprise? Serving to individuals understand their passions.

Picture courtesy of Tina Lerouge

Thus was born Creative Cycle Consulting, a advertising and marketing company designed to assist new entrepreneurs and younger companies get began and stand out. Lerouge formally launched the enterprise in November 2020, having achieved advertising and marketing and net design on a contract, advert hoc foundation for a number of years prior. Since November, she’s taken on 10 purchasers with companies starting from theater to Caribbean delicacies.

Most of Lerouge’s purchasers have been individuals who determined to focus their time and vitality on constructing out their ardour initiatives or their aspect gigs—the sorts of issues individuals did of their spare time. And, as a aspect impact of the pandemic, these individuals typically discovered themselves with much more spare time to pour into the work they liked, Lerouge says.

“With the pandemic, I feel individuals thought, ‘Life is brief, and I need to do one thing that makes me joyful,’” she says. “I present the providers that make it potential to construct out these ardour initiatives into absolutely functioning companies.”

Lerouge graduated from Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies in August 2019, after finishing a program in digital media administration. Lerouge comes from a line of Northeastern graduates: Each her mom and aunt earned engineering levels on the college. The youngest Lerouge was additionally chosen for a Martin Luther King Jr. Graduate Fellowship at Northeastern, and was featured within the college’s MLK celebration in 2018. 

An entrepreneur at coronary heart, she conceived of the thought for Inventive Cycle Consulting throughout her very first semester on the college, she says.

Amongst her first purchasers was Mark Inventory, the founding father of MiniCityArt, an organization that makes use of 3D printing to create hyper-detailed fashions of main cities. Lerouge designed a promotional occasion for the corporate close to Boston’s Fenway neighborhood, which grabbed the eye of the manager vice chairman of the Boston Crimson Sox throughout her lunch break. The 2 spoke, and “every week later, Mark bought a request from the Crimson Sox to design 1,000 fashions as a vacation present for Crimson Sox staff,” Lerouge says. “From there he simply took off.”

Her know-how comes from her expertise at Northeastern in addition to a number of years working in advertising and marketing within the company sector. Lerouge has labored in varied capacities at large companies, together with the insurance coverage big GEICO, however says she “at all times felt like a spherical peg in a sq. gap,” and finally set out on her personal.

Lerouge’s enterprise remains to be rising—she simply moved into a brand new workplace in February—and she or he hopes to have the ability to rent extra staff quickly, however already the work is gratifying.

“In the identical style that I’m serving to purchasers with their enterprise, they’re trusting in me to get it achieved,” Lerouge says. “That folks see potential in me as a younger entrepreneur, early in my profession, that’s all of the motivation I want.”

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]