Jerrilynn B. Thomas

I have spent nearly four decades helping women turn visibility, relationships, knowledge, and collaboration into business opportunity. Today, I am a co-marketing strategist and creator of the Female Ally Economy, a philosophy built on a simple premise: accomplished women do not need more advice about marketing themselves harder. They need better ways to activate the relationships, audiences, expertise, and opportunities they have already accumulated.

Through Smart Women Partner & Grow Rich, I help seasoned B2B women—particularly women 50+—build collaborative marketing systems around their businesses and high-value projects. I help them identify and activate co-marketing partners, cross-promotional partners, audience-sharing allies, and strategic collaborators rather than carrying the entire burden of marketing alone. My primary playground is LinkedIn, where I help women turn networks built over years into relationship capital and business-development infrastructure.

From Publicity to Partnership

My entrepreneurial journey began in 1988, newly married and pregnant with twins in a new state without family nearby. I researched how to build a home-based business around public relations and writing, starting by creating business profiles for women entrepreneurs. Then I tested publicity myself.

I sent a public service announcement to an Atlanta radio station about women using existing skills to create home-based businesses. Two weeks later, an invitation for a radio interview generated over 400 calls, producing immediate demand. I created Mothers INC, a support organization for mompreneurs, and learned to turn one publicity opportunity into another—radio into newspaper coverage, newspaper into television, and prospects into community. That experience established a lifelong principle: the right message, placed in the right network, creates opportunity far beyond individual resources.

Adapting to Every Business Environment

My businesses evolved as technology changed. Mothers INC became Savvy Female Entrepreneur. I moved from fax-based distribution to email and the Internet, learned HTML, and built my own website, connecting with women globally through bulletin boards and discussion lists. My work expanded through a women's business network, news bureau, magazine, and the International Virtual Women's Chamber of Commerce, which I founded and ran for seven years.

During the recession, women were losing clients and couldn't afford traditional marketing costs. That led to Marketing 2 Women International, where I developed models around shared marketing and cross-pollinating audiences. It taught me an essential lesson: you cannot simply tell women to stop marketing alone; you have to show them how to collaborate and provide the infrastructure to do it.

Building the Female Ally Economy

That lesson anchors my work today. Women have spent decades accumulating professional networks containing experts, speakers, authors, consultants, and media contacts. Yet most of that relationship capital remains commercially dormant. I believe the next evolution of women's business growth is moving from collecting connections to activating relationships as infrastructure for summits, cohorts, memberships, podcasts, retreats, and workshops.

Through Smart Women Partner & Grow Rich and B2B Women Collaborate, I help women develop:

Relationship Capital — recognizing professional relationships as core business assets.

Brand Partnership Infrastructure — creating systems that turn connections into repeatable collaboration opportunities.

Anchor Projects — using a major project to organize multiple strategic relationships.

Project Stacking — connecting complementary projects and offers so multiple businesses benefit mutually.

Barn Raising Marketing — replacing solo self-promotion with a model where women contribute relationships, audiences, and distribution to build together.

Ally Activation — intentionally mobilizing the right people around a specific objective.

I began helping women get publicity, evolved into building networks and shared marketing models, and now focus on collaborative business infrastructure. The platforms and economy change, but the core opportunity remains: women are powerful business assets to one another. My work helps them finally use that asset strategically.

Visit SmartWomenPartner.com to discover how to work with me. Connect with me on LinkedIn.