Business owner Jill Simonds used to think the BBB was focused on consumer ratings and reviews. Still, as a recent member, she loves that it also serves businesses and business owners.
“This is actually a community and network of other businesses to grow and have a community built on trust, good ethics and values,” Simonds said. “There is established trust and core values across businesses that are accredited.”
Simonds, founder and CEO of Savvy Strategic Partners in Fort Collins, joined the BBB in April 2025, the month her business received the Spark Award for Entrepreneurship. The BBB awarded three businesses from Northern Colorado and Wyoming based on the principles of Character, Culture and Community during the 27th annual BBB Celebration of Ethics on April 22. The award was open to businesses operating between six months and three years and had nine nominees.
“It was an honor, because there was definitely a lot of due diligence in their process of selection, so I appreciate that,” Simonds said. “Even if a company may not qualify or win the award, it’s still worthwhile to go through the exercise.”
Simonds promotes the award through her business’s marketing channels and receives multiple communications from those who learn that her business is a winner.
“I’ve come in contact with people who recognize our name and who we are from the award,” Simonds said. “It’s opened a lot of doors and opportunities that would not have otherwise existed.”
Simonds founded Savvy Strategic Partners in 2023 after working for eight years in marketing, product leadership and operations roles for medium- to large-sized businesses, then as a consultant in marketing and revenue-generating services for another eight years.
“Fundamentally, I learned from distinguished, strong leaders how important and impactful the dynamics and characteristics of leaders mattered with the teams and the cultures where I was working,” Simonds said.
As an employee and consultant, Simonds realized that low-to-mid-market businesses wanting to scale often faced a lack of “leadership as a tendency or trait,” where once passionate founders had to juggle growing their business with managing day-to-day operations.
Simonds founded Savvy Strategic Partners to provide growing businesses across the nation with part-time fractional executives in operations, revenue, finance, human resources and marketing, freeing the founders to execute their visions and achieve that growth. The founders could bypass reactive hustle and trial-and-error tactics to count on fractional executives to put in the needed “thought leadership” and serve as the company’s strategic, fractional or interim executives, Simonds said.
“These are scaling organizations, typically $10 million to $100 million,” Simonds said. “We have individual business to business, B2B, as well as organizations that are direct consumer companies.”
Bringing in new leadership requires recruiting, hiring and onboarding, while the factional model helps a business build “a dream team” of COOs, CFOs, CROs, CMOs and CHROs that can impact the business with repeatable success, Simonds said.
“We say in our industry that it’s full-time impact but part-time,” Simonds said. “We’re embedded leaders within the companies we serve. We are in the trenches with them, actively managing their teams, being change agents and not consulting from outside paid to provide advice.”
Simonds’ team of 14 fractional executive partners with the founders to help them employ a systemized approach to execute their vision and drive sustainable growth. Since the team serves multiple businesses at once, the fractional leaders can bring diverse expertise and tailor solutions to help the business scale strategically, providing a bridge to the next phase of business. The team also helps strengthen systems, elevate leadership capacity and increase enterprise value.
“We were working with so many fractional holes, where growth outpaced their leadership needs and holes in the organization, we were able to start to fill by helping bring in the resources they needed on a fractional basis, which didn’t inhibit them from a cost standpoint,” Simonds said. “With a lot of business owners, their growth is limited to their full-time W-2 team.”
Simonds saw a great deal of growth in her business in the past year and believes that exposure through the BBB will help even more.
“The BBB does a really good job of expanding (a company’s) exposure to business leaders and their networks through events, learning workshops, and things of that nature,” Simonds said. “The position and recognition the BBB provides help with reputation expansion. They provide a platform for businesses in the community to know who each other are.”
BBB accredited businesses have opportunities to network with other businesses, building confidence in the trust and credibility of the membership, often leading to direct support of those companies or sound referrals, Simonds said.
“The credibility of a business that is standing on its values and like-mindedness with other leaders, intentional about their growth and who they work with, carries authority over somebody who isn’t doing that,” Simonds said. “This really is a community of serving businesses, building trust and forging bonds with opportunities to get in and meet other business owners in the community.”