Smith Ink, LLC is an Atlanta-based writing, editing and design services company that produces publications for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. The company also produces encouragement greeting cards for women facing breast cancer.

After working nearly 25 years in the communications industry for other corporations, Smith Ink’s CEO, Pamela Thompson Smith, decided to launch her own company in 2001.

“My career’s turning point or ‘light bulb moment,’ as Oprah calls it, came in 2000 in my doctor’s office during my biopsy to determine whether I had breast cancer,” explains Smith. “I promised God if the news was unfavorable, I would quit my job and do what I really wanted to do. His response? ‘Why wait for the news to be bad to live the life I want you to live.’ So, with a negative biopsy and an idea to develop a greeting card line for women challenged with breast cancer, I stepped out on faith and created Smith Ink.”

Working in corporate America and the nonprofit realm helped prepare Smith for entrepreneurship. Her experience includes being publications manager at The Carter Center in Atlanta, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn Carter. Smith’s responsibilities included overseeing a comprehensive program of writing, editing, designing and/or assigning more than 50 internal and external publications about the center’s peace and health programs.

Smith also was a vice president in Communication Services at Bank of America (formerly NationsBank) in Atlanta. Her work as managing editor included coordinating many of the company’s employee publications, writing speeches for bank executives and collaborating with photographers, artists and printing vendors nationwide for various projects.

Years earlier, Smith was a technical writer for nearly a decade, producing computer “how-to” manuals, and a production manager in radio, writing commercials, promotions and trade magazine articles.

Smith is a graduate of the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also is a wife and mother of two children.