Entrepreneur Brittany Bettini Throws Herself into the Professional Fire
Photo credit: Brooke Parker Photography
By Meg Hale Brunton
Entrepreneur Brittany Bettini feels she has come full circle. In a span of less than ten years, she has gone from needing assistance from local nonprofits, like Safelight Family Advocacy Center and The Storehouse, to starting her own nonprofit to give back to organizations like them. Her nonprofit, Bettini Community Charities, is only one of four businesses that Bettini started. She says the key to her success is hitting her personal bottom, recalling the night she had to get a trunk load of groceries from the Henderson County Food Pantry so she could feed her kids. “I thought, ‘I could lay down and let this beat me, or I could take back what I wanted to do and what I knew I could do.’”
Bettini grew up in an affluent family of entrepreneurs in Hendersonville, North Carolina. “I hated that everyone’s life seemed to revolve around their businesses,” she explains. Like a lot of kids, Bettini had no desire to walk the same path as her parents and planned to go into either journalism or law and move to New York City. “Pretty much, my life goal was to be a member of the cast from ‘Sex & the City’.” Instead, Bettini studied graphic design and business administration, got a job working for a local bank, and rekindled an old flame with her high school sweetheart. The couple got married and had two children. Rather than an HBO series, Bettini’s life turned out more like a Hallmark movie… until things changed.
When Bettini’s marriage turned abusive, she was forced to leave and take her two small children. In financial ruin, losing her car, her home, her credit, and finding herself unable to support her family, Bettini reached out to her parents for help. They owned a janitorial business called Clean Streak and gave Bettini a job cleaning banks and medical facilities at night. She also got a day job with a collections call center. When one of Clean Streak’s office employees suddenly quit, Bettini jumped at the opportunity to take on the role, and learned everything she could about managing the business. In no time flat, Bettini had scaled the business so well that she was able to ‘retire’ her parents and take over as Clean Streak’s COO.
Working primarily from home during the pandemic, Bettini took online courses to increase her own financial literacy and learn how to repair her credit. Seeing that there were other people in need of the same skills and assistance, Bettini started Bettini Financial Solutions, which she was able to operate out of her home. “Credit repair helped me get back on my feet when I lost everything,” she says. “It helped me so much that it was a logical business for me to start.” As her business grew, Bettini began outsourcing some of the day-to-day aspects of it to virtual assistants (VA) in The Philippines. She found this to be a life-changing and cost-saving way for a business to improve their productivity. She quickly implemented VAs at Clean Streak as well.
In July 2021, Bettini started her second business, I Need a VA, a staffing company to connect businesses with qualified virtual assistants. Bettini changed everything in her brand to be focused on team-building and staffing. She even sold Bettini Financial Solutions so that she could focus all her energy on I Need a VA. Bettini says that she herself has five VAs that maintain her hectic schedule. “I can be in five places at once,” she says, explaining that her assistants set her appointments, correspond with vendors/customers, and manage her online presence and social media. “Entrepreneurs who have a team have double the amount of hours in a day. I make it look very manageable because it’s not just me. I couldn’t operate without my amazing team.”
Last August, Bettini decided to push her skills as an entrepreneur even further by opening The Main Event, a 10,000 sq. ft. event space on Main Street in downtown Hendersonville. Bettini admits that she had to learn a lot about the event business, and about opening a brick-and-mortar location. She also found it triggering to go into debt again, after so many years debt-free. “I was on top of the world. I think I needed to be knocked down a couple pegs,” she acknowledges of her professional confidence. “I realized when I did this that I knew nothing. It was so humbling.”
“I wanted to have a space that was the heart of my community,” Bettini says, stating that she didn’t want The Main Event to just be a wedding location. Besides being a convenient and beautiful space, The Main Event location will always hold a special place in Bettini’s heart because it is the former location of Safelight’s domestic violence shelter, Mainstay. Bettini says it has been extremely fulfilling to restore the building and to use it to partner with the charities that she credits with saving my life. “It feels really, really good to be bringing something in my hometown back to life in a really cool way.”
One of the ways she is already utilizing the space to help the community is by making it the meeting place for her women’s empowerment group, Regroup. Bettini formed Regroup as a way for women to get together, not only to support one another, but just to be honest about what they are going through. “It’s not like a lot of those hoity-toity women’s events; it’s very transparent,” she says. “We let our guard down, talk about how much of a hot mess we are, laugh together and know we are not alone.”
Now 33, Bettini is remarried and even has a three-year old baby. While she has a hard-working team and an incredibly supportive husband, she attributes a great deal of her achievements to being stubborn. “I owe so much of my success to the fact that I am spiteful. I would say 90% of my success is owed to my abusive ex-husband, because almost everything I’ve done has been to show him that I’m not what he said I was,” she says. “The growth that I’ve experienced in myself in the last seven years- I don’t even recognize myself. I just kind of threw myself into the fire.”
To learn more about Brittany Bettini, go to her website: https://brittanybettini.com/
EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that The Main Event offers their space at no charge for nonprofit community events. The article was updated on 5/17/24 to reflect Ms. Bettini’s intended message, that The Main Event serves as the meeting place for her women’s empowerment group, Regroup. While The Main Event does not offer the space at no cost, they do offer discounted rates for nonprofits, which can be arranged by reaching out to them directly.
