Podcast excerpt (Bill Gallagher) describing a late‑2001/early‑2002 personal/business anecdote: facing three failing businesses during a recession, the speaker and his wife visit a department store where a customer's comment reveals the deeper purpose of the wife's jewelry business—helping women feel special and empowered. The speaker connects that business why to his personal why (making people feel special), volunteers to run the company, and later spends 11 years working with his wife. The chunk closes with a promotional ad for Align’s Scoreboard software.
Chapters
I want to talk to you about finding inspiration for anything in any moment. I think there's a way to light yourself up for any situation, but you have to be curious about it. You have to look for it. You have to be listening for something and allow it to show up. Like from a place you weren't expecting in late 2001, early 2002. It's right. Right around that time frame, my wife and I had two young kids. A house, a cat, not yet a dog. Two kids, two young kids, and three businesses. Three businesses that were all failing. In the end of 2001, we were suddenly in a recession. It was post September 11th, like, everything was disrupted. We had three companies. I had two tech businesses. My wife had the jewelry company, and they were all failing. And we were stressed. Like, we were fighting it out in between us. But after we kind of got to a place where we were going to sort it out together, we started to look at the businesses. And it seemed obvious that my businesses in the tech industry at that time were going to struggle to find clients or funding. So neither clients nor funding were going to be possible for at least some months. But in her world, there seemed to be a little something more tangible with the fashion jewelry. And I like business problems, obviously, I'm a business coach. I love the challenge of them. And the thing. But I couldn't relate to it because I didn't really get jewelry. Like, jewelry to me was this sort of weird, expensive, irrational thing. Women like jewelry. I don't know why. And men give jewelry to women. When we want to tell them we love them, we want to say sorry for doing. For screwing something up. So that's how it lived for me. Like, jewelry was like this irrational kind of thing, and I didn't truly get it. But we're thinking about our businesses, and in doing that, we visited a department store. And so we go to visit this department store where Lori's jewelry sells. And we're looking around, we're looking at the competitive brands and our stuff. We're thinking about it, pondering the big questions of the company. And a woman hears that Lori's in the store. She sees her, you know, across the counter, around, and she comes running over, and she shares the story that changed everything for me in an instant. She says, listen, Lori, I'm so happy to meet you. I've been a fan of your jewelry forever, and I love it. Tomorrow I'm having lunch with my best friend from high school, and I wanted to come and get some jewelry to feel special for that meeting, she says, my best friend, let me tell you about this woman. She is like a federal judge and all I've ever been is a mom and a housewife. And it's important to me to like feel special tomorrow for that lunch with my old friend. And I realized then in that moment I heard it. I heard her diminishing of herself as a mom and housewife and holding her friend in high regard and using jewelry to empower herself to be her full self, to feel special that day. And I suddenly realized jewelry empowers a woman's self expression and makes her feel special and compliments her natural beauty. And in an instant I got it and I'm like, oh, I could help this company. Because I suddenly understood the reason for being the why of that kind of a company and how it connected to my own why. My why of being a generous contribution of making people feel special, people feel powerful. That's really important to me in my life. In a few minutes later, I said, I turned to Lori and I said, you know what? I could help run the company. I understand the problems the company has at this time. I'm ready to take it on. I get the point of jewelry like I've never heard it before. I'm really moved by what that woman says. I'd like to help you. We should focus on your business for the next little bit and we'll put my businesses on hold. That was the beginning of 11 years working together with my wife and a whole lot of other stories that I'll share with you. Hope that's helpful for you. Hope you hear something for yourself about finding inspiration any moment, connecting to the why of your work, connecting your personal why to the business why and making a difference. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.
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