Susan Koger built ModCloth from a solo venture into a larger company, then faced devastating layoffs when rapid growth became unsustainable. She describes the personal failure she felt and how reconnecting with her company's core purpose—building community through social shopping—kept her and her team moving forward through the hardest decisions.
Chapters
As entrepreneurs, you start to equate your personal success and your personal worth with your business's success and your business's worth. And I think that is. There's no way to kind of get around that when you're starting out, because it is just you or it's you and, like, a very small group of people, and you're putting so much of yourself into the business. But as the business grows and as you. I mean, if your goal is to actually add more people, you know, it isn't just you anymore. And I think that's like, an important lesson that founders have to learn, is it's not just going to be you. And that's like, for the good times and the bad times. Like, the good times, it's your team. The bad times, it's you and your team as well. And that can be. Again, it's one of those lessons that I think is probably easier to understand intellectually than to actually put in practice in your life. For me, over the last 12 months at ModCloth, the long story short, it's like we grew really quickly. We had to make some tough decisions in the business because we were at a point where we'd grown quickly. We weren't able to support our burn rate anymore. And this purpose was what got me through making those decisions and having those times where it's hard to get out of bed and it's hard to go to work, that's another thing that's hard to face as a founder. When you've created your own job and you don't want to go to that job, that's a tough place to be in. And I think if you don't have this purpose, if you don't have something that's deeper, that's pulling you back to it, it'll be all but impossible. So for us, like I said, we had to make some hard decisions. We had to lay people off last year, and it was the hardest thing I have ever done professionally. And quite honestly, I spent a lot of last year personally feeling like a failure, and that's a tough place to be in. And again, this purpose was what brought me back to, okay, even though I'm feeling this way, I can step outside, I can look at this, I can look at my business, and I know that my business is a success because my business has this purpose. My business has this thing that it's doing. This is real, and we're making a real difference in people's lives. And having this brought me through that time. It also brought our company through that time, this was what our team rallied around. It wasn't easy. Like I said, we had to make some hard decisions to set our business up for success and set our brand up for the future. We decided to really focus on the things that we did better than anyone else in the world that was thinking about building community and taking, like engaging with that community and creating products and creating innovative social experiences that they would love and that they would respond to.
