28. I hung on to every word as she gave me the pep talk of my life. This was the time I called her for her counsel on a speech I was writing for a beauty industry conference. Per usual, her sage words calmed my nerves as she guided me out of the weeds and back to the roots of what we were really doing as a business. “Your business paradigm hinges on two things—that of creating relationships between the company and the clients and the clients creating relationships with one another.”
She was talking about how it wasn’t just about building relationships between the company and the customer but that the women in the community ended up creating deep bonds with one another. Good point, and it was true. All that connectivity led to new products and even our philanthropic program, which was developed by the community from beginning to end with Terry’s guidance.
Terry Ross was my trusted advisor. But before that, she was a customer I’d met in the online chat room that she co-hosted. She was wicked smart, with piercing insights, and I wanted to be like her someday.
“How do you do it?” I wanted to know.
“I’m from the South,” she told me.
Terry is a stay-at-home mother who lives in a small town in Michigan with her husband and three kids, the ultimate bareMinerals advocate, natural leader, and knitter extraordinaire. She had a lot of opinions about how to grow the community, and we listened. Her candid wisdom was liberally distributed to the global teams and to investors and was used in onboarding materials.
I spent the early part of my career working at large companies where there were bottomless spreadsheets, but not once had I asked a living customer for advice. When your customers care as much as you do about bringing standout experiences to the world, you can learn a ton from them.
Just as Terry once said, “You bring the reality of the human condition into your business; if you continue to do that, you will never go wrong.”