Carrick woman in the running for Businesswoman of the Year accolade

Charmayne Milliken is the owner and founder of CNJ Business Solutions, which helps clients to tackle their back-office admin.

The 38-year-old is a Businesswoman of the Year finalist in this year’s Ulster Tatler Awards.

She previously worked in finance for 18 years before deciding to found her own firm. “I just had my little boy and really did not want to be missing out on time with him by returning to an office with a commute, so the seed was planted to go out on my own. Originally, I had set up as a bookkeeping service,” Charmayne said.

"I was soon to find that many people who were looking for bookkeeping also needed help with various other admin tasks, which I was more than capable of doing.”

As the coronavirus pandemic started to take hold, Charmayne was contacted by a school friend. “She wanted to make a difference and help the community in any way possible, but needed help. This work would have been voluntary, and I was fine with that; we were in lockdown after all and things to do were limited,” the local mum said.

"She had set up a Facebook page, a webpage and CRM systems which integrated to make life as easy as possible for us admins.”

Originally a Facebook group, ‘Covid 19 Community Support’ reached out to every community in Northern Ireland for volunteers.

It aimed to help those immunocompromised, those who had to stay at home and who relied on others to collect their medication, do their shopping, all the little things many people take for granted. “Soon we had volunteers spread throughout the country willing to help; we then offered that help out. The requests were rolling in, from every corner of Northern Ireland, and we soon had the help requests matched with a volunteer in that area. We could not have done it without the software and integrations that were set up,” Charmayne said.

Eventually, the Covid aspect of the community support group was phased out and a new social enterprise registered, Community Calling Ltd.

Community Calling was formed in 2020 as a volunteer-led initiative to coordinate urgent community support across Northern Ireland in response to the pandemic.

"We used technology to provide members of the community across the whole of NI with a real time connection to providers of support,” Charmayne said.

“Community Calling opened up a whole load of skills to me that I had never thought of before – integrating systems, website maintenance, blogs, social media scheduling and tools. It was great to be able to build my skillset.

"I started to gain an interest in more areas and looked into online studying. Since 2020 I have completed 11 courses, including a Google Project management certificate. I am now also doing a Google Digital Marketing and ecommerce certificate.

“I was interviewed in May this year to appear in the Grow with Google campaign and have been offered mentoring and support to help grow my business.

“I don’t think I am anything special; I am just a mummy doing her best to provide for her boy – but I am an asset to my clients.”