Exploring Life & Business with Amanda Thomas of TwoScore

Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Thomas.

Hi Amanda, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit, even before I knew what that meant. As a kid, I used to play “office” in my parents’ basement. I created a logo for my own marketing agency and even wrote a weekly newsletter that I proudly “sent” to my parents. Looking back, the foundation was always there.

I have worked in the credit union industry my entire career starting right when I graduated college in 2002 from Wittenberg University in Ohio. I didn’t know what a credit union was, but they were the first company to offer me “one of those 401K” things and a salary working to put my degree in English to good use.

I quickly fell in love with the mission of credit unions – providing access to affordable financial services to different groups of people all across the world. Additionally, their not-for-profit, member-owned structure was incredibly appealing to me. I learned early on that credit unions are vital to the financial services ecosystem, and devoted my career to doing the best I could to make an impact on the lives of members of the credit unions I worked for over the next 11 years.

Over that time, I grew into a vice president role at an organization I truly loved. That experience shaped so much of who I am today – how I lead, how I think about service, and how deeply I care about the people and communities credit unions serve. Like many women in leadership, I also became more aware of the importance of advocating for my value. At a certain point, I reached a moment of clarity. I realized that if I wanted to build a career where my contributions, vision, and leadership were fully aligned with how I showed up every day, I needed to create that path myself.

On what was what would become the first of many trips to Paris, I decided to take the leap into entrepreneurship while I was sitting at a small cafe on the Isle Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine River with a glass of champagne. It was a moment of clarity for me. At the top of my list of “dreams” was “owning a company where people love to work.” So I started TwoScore with a very clear intention to bring strategic, thoughtful marketing to credit unions that wanted to grow without losing what makes them special.

What began as an idea has grown into a boutique agency that partners with dozens of credit unions across the country, and I’m incredibly proud of the relationships we’ve built and the impact we are making. I am even more proud of the amazing team of women I’ve had the privilege to bring on at TwoScore to build on what I started in 2014.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has certainly not been a smooth road. On one hand, I am incredibly fortunate to have had over a decade to work in an industry I love and build relationships that helped me get on my feet early without any outside funding was what I will call lucky, but that network took me years to build. It was the most important foundational blocks on which my successful business stands today. I remember extremely long hours. One stretch of three days where I didn’t sleep or take any time for myself in order to meet project deadlines.

Some of the biggest struggles have been ensuring that I have the right team around me and trusting people’s words too much instead of basing that trust on actions. They say you aren’t a real company until you’ve had to fire someone and had someone quit. I’ve done both, and it’s taught me more lessons than I ever could have learned if those situations hadn’t happened, so I am grateful for those hard lessons.

One of the big reasons I started my business was a personal reason. My dad is a disabled Veteran who served in Vietnam, and he has suffered with health problems since his return from war in his early 20s. In his mid-forties, he was diagnosed with cancer, and they also found a 99% blockage in his “widowmaker artery.” That first heart surgery in 1995 was the first of upwards of 20 heart procedures, most of them starting in 2014. I remember in the summer of 2014, I had my first trip to Paris coming up and I couldn’t take time off work. So here I was sitting in ICU trying to work on my laptop while my dad is incredibly sick wanting me to feed him lunch. I was trying to juggle work with talking with the doctors and making sure he was comfortable and cared for. I remember sitting there thinking, “I say all the time that my family is the most important thing in the world to me, but my actions aren’t living that.” Fast forward a few weeks, and that was one of the other things going through my mind, sitting at that café in Paris.

In TwoScore’s second. year of business, my personal life blew up, and I had to navigate an incredibly difficult divorce over the next 10 months. Having to keep my business going during a time when I didn’t want to get out of bed was undescribably brutal. Thank goodness, by then I’d already hired my “partner in crime” with whom I’d worked at the credit union a few years before, and jokingly said when I left. “I’m going to hire you someday.” That happened way sooner than either of us could imagine. I am so grateful for the times when she carried TwoScore on her back so I could make it through another day.

Over the first 10 years of business, I have endured every hard thing I’ve ever endured in my life. After the divorce, I met the love of my life, who happened to be in the Army at that time. We’d been dating six weeks and he was taking me out to the opera one night so we were all dressed up, and he gets a call while we are in the car. I hear, “yes, sir. No sir,” etc. He didn’t say a word about the call after he hung up. The next day, he told me he was being deployed to Afghanistan. We found out in a couple days that it would be three months from then. We made the decision to get married before he left so I would be taken care of financially while he was away, and I could get on his health insurance plan (yay for no more crappy expensive entrepreneur health insurance)! We had fairytale wedding as we eloped to NYC and all of my closest friends and family were so overjoyed at me marrying “Captain America” and we honeymooned in Paris.

His deployment was SO much harder than I thought it would be. With technology, getting to FaceTime is great in theory, not so great when you are on camera with someone 7,000 miles away and you hear sirens and explosions, seeing your new husband grab his helmet and dive for cover. That was a really tough year, but a great time for me to throw myself into work to innovate and do a bunch of things I had been putting off since before my divorce.

In 2021, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and underwent a complete thyroidectomy. Thyroid cancer is a rare cancer and very under-researched. All of my doctors told me “you’ll be fine in no time.” All of that advice couldn’t be further from the reality of what happened to me. In the recovery room, I had a “thyroid storm” which essentially lasted for about a year and a half. I endured countless nights of scary high blood pressure spikes, ER visits, and even a 911 call when I couldn’t get my blood pressure (which had been fine before surgery) to come down. The exhaustion was real. And, like a lot of thyroid cancer patients, I gained a lot of weight immediately, which put me in a body that not only felt good but I didn’t feel good in either. Running a business when you are going through a health crisis is no joke, and again another reason why I am so grateful to Liz and even my family and husband who helped out with the business as much as they could during that time.

The other big struggle I have faced is not trusting myself enough. I had never been a CEO before, so I had in my mind there was a “right way” to build a marketing agency. Turns out, the best thing I could do for my clients, my team, and myself was learning to listen to my gut and lead with heart. That’s when things started getting really good.

We’ve been impressed with TwoScore, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The most important thing to know is that I was intentional about a niche market when I started TwoScore in 2014. There are a lot of wonderful agencies serving the credit union space, but none were focused at that time on serving the smaller ones (which make up 60% of our industry). There are few resources geared toward small credit unions that are still expected to offer the same services as bigger credit unions and banks. And, as I said before, the financial services ecosystem NEEDS small credit unions, so I made my company’s mission to help credit unions thrive.

We help our clients grow loans, membership, and deposits, but more importantly, we help them understand how to grow in a way that fits who they are. A lot of smaller credit unions feel like they are constantly being told to market like big banks or chase every new trend, and that’s where things fall apart.

What sets us apart is how closely we work with our clients. We become part of their organizations and get to know who they are, and we care about their results as much as they do. Most of our clients have been with us for years, which I think says more than anything else.

Brand-wise, I’m most proud that the company I wanted in my heart “one day” has become what TwoScore is today. It is shown by how our team is with one another, our close relationships with clients, and how people want to be part of what we have because it is different and special.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
I spent years thinking success came from pushing harder, providing myself, or getting it right. What I’ve learned is that the real shift happened when I started trusting myself and my instincts instead of letting other companies and/or louder voices override what I thought needed to happen. When I stopped trying to fit everyone else’s expectations and started building a life and a business that matched who I actually am, everything aligned in a way it never had before.

To put this in real terms, I, like most entrepreneurs, started my company because I wanted a level of personal and financial freedom that isn’t realistic when working for someone else. Being able to be there for my family whenever they have needed me is most important (and there have been many instances where I’ve needed to drop everything and travel out of town to my parents’ because my dad has been in the hospital or when mom had knee replacement surgery, and many other times over the years).

I also love to travel. It is one of my big “WHYs” to have the flexibility to see and experience the world with my husband and loved ones. Because Paris was literally part of my founding story, it’s where I celebrated 10 years in business with Liz on my team and our husbands in the fall of 2024. It’s where, in 2025, I celebrated reaching a level in my company that only 1.7% of female entrepreneurs in the world ever achieve. I’ve turned what most people would say “why would you do this/that” etc. into “why not.” Most relevantly, I took my entire company (all 7 of us) to Paris and closed for a few days so we could have time together in the city where it all began. We sat at the cafe where I sat in September 2014 dreaming of TwoScore. We went to have a private tour of Veuve Clicquot in Reims, France (just a short day trip from Paris) to walk the cellars where Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin walked and innovated a champagne house that put Veuve Clicquot and every other champagne on the world map because of her daring spirit. She has been a huge inspiration to my own entrepreneurial journey. We took team pictures together in spots all around the city of Paris. And had time to truly experience joy altogether in a way that no booked hotel conference room could ever fulfill.

During COVID, before I was diagnosed with cancer, I had a podcast for female entrepreneurs called Adventures in Heels, and that was the start of leaning into who I am and who I want to be as a leader, as a friend, as my “mark” in the world. Striving to “Live an Effervescent Life” has informed how I lead, and champagne has been synonymous with my “personal” brand and the brand of my company. https://twoscore.com/our-story

Getting comfortable with curiosity and leading with “Why Not” has truly brought the company of my dreams to life for everyone here.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.twoscore.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adventuresinheels
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CUtwoscore/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandalthomas05/
• Other: https://www.adventuresinheels.com