Chapter 13: My Life In Business - Remote Ready (2015)

My life as Co-Founder of Thirty-One

20 chapters from my 20 years

Including never before shared stories

The year 2015 started out differently for me because I had not been super involved with Thirty-One for the past nine months or so. All the work stresses and the years of moving the business, then moving my family to Ohio and again back to Tennessee, while all worthwhile, had exhausted me. I needed the time away to assess what was next for me. I determined in January that I wanted to get back into a more involved role at Thirty-One. The plan was for me to still work part time and help with the Sales Strategy planning for the business. It would be a remote role where I could work from home and Zoom into conference calls by video. Long before everyone was logging in to work remotely from home during Covid I had been doing it for years.

Before I knew it I the time had arrived for our National Conference in July. The theme was "Love Your Journey" and I sure was loving mine. We had two conferences, one in Denver and one in Columbus. A total attendance of around 15,000 consultants meant there was a lot of work to do. I had not seen some of my co-workers in a year so it was like a reunion of sorts.

Two days after returning home from Denver I turned around and drove to Columbus with my family. I loved the opportunity to travel with my family for work events and the fact we got to catch up with friends up there was the icing on the cake.

Companies in the direct sales industry regularly use incentive trips programs to motivate and reward their sales fields. We had been doing these for several years, but the first such trip that I was able to travel on was to Riviera Maya, Mexico in September. It's hard to complain about work travel when your week is spent at an all-inclusive resort with so many of your favorite people. There really was a lot of work done behind the scenes to pull off the event for hundreds or even thousands of guests, but we also had a lot of fun.

On a personal note, in April we had received an out of the blue phone call about a property 3.5 miles from our kids school/church that was originally 35 acres that was being subdivided and would be sold off quickly. We jumped on a 10 acre piece of property before the offers could come rolling in. The offer was accepted immediately and we thought we’d hang onto it for a few years before building on it, but like with most things, we don’t let many ideas simmer. We moved forward instinctively and began designing our dream home. By June we were clearing trees on the land where our future home would sit. We busily got to planning our build schedule with our Contractor and we finally broke ground in November.