Chapter 11: My Life In Business - Party of the Decade (2013)

My life as Co-Founder of Thirty-One

20 chapters from my 20 years

Including never before shared stories

The year 2013 was a milestone year as we would celebrate 10 years as a company. The fact we made it from a basement start up to a large company employing a few thousand of people was beyond anything I had expected when we began. I returned to work after my maternity leave on January 7 and was fortunate to work part time for a while.

The kind of sales growth we had experienced meant a lot of new employees were hired. Ensuring each one was trained on the history of the company and its cultural values was important. I personally had spent the last ten years doing a wide variety of roles within the company. When I went on my leave I had to hand off much of the work that I had been the only one doing. It now took a team of people of do work I had done alone in the earlier years, simply due to the scale in which the business increased.

In the summer we held the biggest party ever to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Our National Conference was held in Atlanta for a 2nd year and had over 15,000 consultants in attendance. The theme was "Experience the Celebration" and that’s exactly what happened. It wasn’t normal for my husband and kids to attend our annual conference but they came this particular year and I loved showing them around.

In addition to the celebratory environment at our conference there was also a full size recreation of the basement setup from 10 years prior. It sure brought back some great memories as well as reminders of the difficult early times of growth.

As we continued to find solutions to use our work space better with the increase in employees we went through a shift that other companies had proven to be beneficial. Nearly every person who had an office was moved into a cubicle and every office was turned into collaborative meeting spaces. There were definitely good perks of everyone being in an open space but any private conversations or phone calls required moving into a private room and it was sometimes tricky to find an available room.

The fall and holiday selling season were one of our biggest ever. The fact I was no longer involved in any part of the operations that included tracking and stocking inventory, personalization of products, fulfillment of orders and even the back end website set up meant that there were times of feeling obsolete. Being willing and available to do anything necessary when the company was young compared to having a singular role focused on sales strategy had its pros and cons.

I mean I still loved the mission of Thirty-One but the drive to push for more and more was not as important for me now that I had a new baby at home. All I wanted was for my family to be happy and healthy. I wanted us to get in a good place financially as well as in a place that feels like home. I was beginning to realize that Columbus still didn’t feel like home and I wasn’t sure what that would mean.