More Than Creating a Job

Mary Elaine Baker did not set out to build a company. She set out to solve a problem.
What she built instead was something she could not have planned for.

In 2018, she and her husband launched VAUSA from a need they knew personally. They were a military family. Two young children in daycare. Mary Elaine was an elementary school teacher burning out from the pace and the inflexibility of it. She discovered virtual assisting, tried it, and never looked back.

What she did not expect was what came next.

“What I didn’t realize until I received that blessing was that this wasn’t just a Baker family problem,” she says. “This was a huge problem in America.”

Military spouses, in particular, face an employment gap that most workplaces were not designed to close. Frequent moves, unpredictable schedules, deployments. The traditional job structure simply does not fit. VAUSA was built to fit. And as the team started to grow, Mary Elaine began to see what she had actually been given.

“These weren’t just military spouses,” she says. “These were families that were entrusted in our care.”

Seeing the invisible burdens

Running a growing team will surface a question eventually, whether a leader is ready for it or not: what do I actually owe the people who work for me?

For Mary Elaine, the answer kept expanding.

She started wondering about the things underneath the surface. Not performance. Not output. The invisible burdens her team members were carrying that kept them from what she calls a flourishing life.

“I just started wondering how we can start to care for our people beyond creating a job,” she says. “We can’t expect people to trust and to follow us unless we put in the groundwork to show them that we are trustworthy and worth following. And that starts with showing that I care about you as a person, not just your performance.”

That conviction was real. But conviction without a framework tends to stay good intention. She needed something concrete to work from.

That is when C12 introduced her to the Caring Matrix.

What clicked in Charleston

Mary Elaine has been part of a C12 Business Forum in Charleston for five years. The Caring Matrix, a framework C12 uses to help leaders think systematically about caring for employees, their families, the community, and beyond, arrived at the right moment.

“When I saw the Caring Matrix for the first time, I thought, oh my goodness, I’m not the only one facing this problem,” she says. “Other people have already thought through this before me. It gave me such a bigger lens to look at caring, and to see it so simply and so beautifully.”

What landed hardest was the permission it gave her to treat care like any other function of the business.

“Caring can be treated like any other department, whether it’s your sales department, your marketing department, your HR,” she says. “It requires people with accountability that understand what their job is, and there need to be some key metrics. If we are tracking it, we are heading in the right direction.”

She also saw quickly that the matrix was bigger than any one person could carry. Employees, their families, the community, the world beyond. No leader does all of that alone.

“You need to cast the vision and you need to build the team of people,” she says.

So she did. Last year alone, VAUSA had over 200 one-on-one sessions with a company chaplain. Multiple salvations came from that work.

None of it happened at once. It happened in small, compounding steps. One act of obedience at a time.

He is not calling us to be successful

This is where Mary Elaine’s conviction lands, and it is worth sitting with.

“God calls us to be obedient,” she says. “He is not calling us to be successful.”

For a business owner, that is a reorienting statement. Most of the pressure in leadership runs in the opposite direction. Hit the number. Grow the team. Protect the margin. Success is the metric everything else gets measured against.

Mary Elaine is not dismissing any of that. VAUSA is a real business with real accountability. But the lens she leads through now is different. When she and her husband surrendered the business, the question shifted.

“It’s not like, hey, we’re trying to do some good things for the Kingdom,” she says. “It’s the lens of, if God was making these decisions, how in our best judgment can we try to replicate what he would do?”

That lens changes what you build toward. And it changes how you start.

“I look at our Caring Matrix today and I think if you had presented this to me when we started our business, I would have said no way am I going to be able to do all of those things,” she says. “But it started with my first act of obedience. We have to obey first, act, and then ask God to provide. And he will.”

Starting where you are

Mary Elaine is careful not to make the Caring Matrix or the work of workplace ministry sound like something only a certain size of company can afford. She built this in a lean, distributed, remote-first business serving military families across the country.

Her advice is practical.

“I bet there is someone that exists that you can come to and say, this is my vision. What are your ideas?” she says. “Getting outside of your own head and finding at least one other person in your organization that will help champion this with you will help you in taking that next step.”

The point is not scale. The point is direction.

“We didn’t get to where we are today by doing everything at once,” she says. “It’s those little compounding deposits that we are putting into our culture that are going to make a difference in the end.”

She asks the question that started everything for her, and leaves it for every leader reading this:

“What are those invisible burdens that are really keeping your people from experiencing a flourishing life?”