If you do something and you keep doing it, you're going to get better you're going to be able to do it regardless of how hard and risky it is. In this episode, Bob Roark with co-host Catherine Wicklund talk with Nora LaMar, the CEO of Glassical Designs which helps companies design and maintain stellar recognition programs. She talks about her business and who they serve, providing pieces of advice to aspiring business owners on how to become successful. She also shares some of the lessons that she learned from her experiences. She also touches on motivation and the typical misconceptions about the role of a CEO.

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Glassical Designs And The Practicalities Of Running A Business With Nora LaMar and Co-Host Catherine Wicklund

We're lucky to have Nora LaMar. She's the CEO of Glassical. We also have a cohost that's Cath Wicklund. She's the Chair of the Southern Colorado Vistage and the CEO of her own company. Nora, thank you so much for taking the time. Tell us a little bit about Glassical, what your business is and who you serve.

First of all, thank you for having me. It's nice to be here. Glassical Designs is the company I started several years ago. We, for the last many years, provide awards and trophies for the corporate market which is what most people think all the time. We come in and help companies and corporations develop their recognition programs to be more effective, go along with our company culture and fit into their company branding. We do a lot of custom work, pick their brain and see what it is that they're trying to convey and see if we can help them do that.

I've been at your location at a meeting and it is an amazing place. I had no idea what went on. A lot of very busy people creating some amazing items for recognition. Many of us have been in various firms that have a recognition item or award or an event in. You and I talked a little bit before about what Glassical is the physical representation of what they're trying to do. When you go in and talk to a company about developing a recognition program, what types of things do you work with them on to develop a signature piece?

When we go in, we don't have a great idea of where they're at with their recognition within their company. If they see the need and the value in it or if they just heard and they need to start one. It depends on where they're at with it. If they have an established culture and they like their culture and they want to promote their culture and if they really enjoy their branding. We walk into all kinds of scenarios. When we walk in, we try and assess where they're at with recognizing their employees and if they fully understand why. If they do, that's a blessing because we're coming in now and trying to pick their brain about how can we refine this, make this more about your company culture and your branding. How do you make these people value what you're giving them and give them the biggest bang for their buck.

We don't walk in and say, “We want to sell you a $2,000 award for every employee and I hope everybody buys it.” We go in and we try and assess, “Can we genuinely help them solve the problem and do it within a budget that they think is reasonable?” When we walk in, we get to have that leg up per se when they already understand the need for recognition. We sit down and gather information, give them an idea of what we think they should be doing when it comes to recognition, then we go back and we all brainstorm, come up with ideas for them. That doesn't cost them anything. We feel like if we're going to do a really good job for you, you're going to want to work with us and not want to go anywhere else. We don't have to charge you for that time upfront because it all comes out in the wash later on.

If you do want to recognize people well and you do want to make it about the people, then we can't go in with a dollar amount already decided in our mind about how is this going to benefit Glassical Designs? If we do that, then we've lost the game right out the gate. We go in thinking, “How can we help you?” Obviously, we need to make money but we find out how can we help you do this well. If we walk in and they have no clue why they want to do recognition because the people in charge are all about growing the business and keeping the shareholders happy and it's all about the bottom line. That's a much harder meeting to have. We have to educate them quite a bit on if you do want to grow it and you do want to make money, that's a by-product of doing this part well. Does that answer your question?

I think so. I think about the broad range of items that I saw when I was there from custom design, glass pieces for Mercedes Benz and others to a smaller piece. Looking at the companies, what type of feedback do you typically hear from a company after you've instituted a rewards program with items from Glassical? What are the takeaways that companies or a-ha moments that they have?

That depends on them. In a perfect world and we get a lot of this, they're like, "I had no idea. Thank you so much for helping us realize the importance of doing this. Thank you for working within our budget and helping us design an award that conveys what we want it to convey but also has our company branding involved in it." That's the feedback we get. We have the fun part of sitting down and coming up with beautiful things that fit within their branding. We give those to them as an option. Most often they're surprised at what they can have. If you search the web, you're going to see pretty standard across the board what's out there. I'm not saying we don't do that. We'll do that for someone if that's what they want. If we can come in and help them design a recognition program around their branding, then that's our preference. That's the feedback we get. Most of the time when they receive our awards, we'll get an email back and like, "We're so excited. We can't wait to give these out. We had no idea what this would do." We guarantee that they're going to get them on time. We take good care of them.

I heard stories as an aside, I'm not sure who it was and they said there was a problem getting a shipment for an award. You guys have flown awards in.

Three times in 35 years. The University of Phoenix was one of our top customers back then and we had their entire Southwestern United States territory. They would hold several events and they had one in Hawaii. We had already provided the majority of the awards for events in Tahoe and in Reno and up in Seattle. This was the last one. It’s sixteen awards that had to go to Hawaii. We happen to be in the office on the weekend and I answered the phone and our contact was in Hawaii, at the venue and wanted a tracking number. We did a little digging and found out that we didn't send those awards. In fact, they hadn't even been engraved yet. That was a big one.

We didn't spend a whole lot of time going, “Oh no.” We sat down and made flight arrangements, edge the awards fast and well. We packaged them. I went on down to LAX, hopped on a plane, hand-delivered the awards myself in time for their event because we like to say we never miss a deadline. I thought they'd never worked with us again. The speaker made the entire presentation other than giving the awards to the recipients about customer service and how great we are and they'll never work with anyone else.

It's funny when you do the right thing. For the folks that are reading and they go, "We don't even know if we're a prototypical client for what Glassical does." What is the range of clients that use your service?

[bctt tweet="If your goal is truly to serve others well, sales will follow." username=""]

Anywhere from a $1 million company that wants to award their ten employees at their Christmas banquet to Pacific Life, Google, Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi Motors, their headquarters in the US and they put together a whole recognition program. They mandate that all of their offices and all of their managers choose from what we've provided for them. We do thousands of awards for some companies, names you've probably never heard of. I'd never heard of them until we start working with them to big name companies like Pacific Life, Google and others. I've been doing it for a while so we have quite a customer base.

I’d have to ask, how did you get involved in this business?

I didn't grow up thinking I was going to be the CEO of Glassical Designs. Back in the day when we had our retail business, a hand glass engraver. I was artistic. I got a job as a teenager, engraving on toasting glasses for weddings free-hand and met my now husband who was very entrepreneurial-minded and he said, "Why are you doing this for someone else?" I said, “I don't know, is there another option? “He bought the machine and I started really small in an outdoor marketplace. Other places in the country call them flea markets. We don't call them that in Southern California. It's an outdoor marketplace and we built our clientele from there. We opened a retail location, worked our fannies off for a long time and then decided maybe we should do this for corporate customers instead of brides and made the switch.

We were talking about that right before we started. You made a conscious shift at some point between retail to the corporate world. Walk me through that process and your mindset when you were doing that. 

I don't know if all of your audiences remember the recession of the ‘90s right after Desert Storm and it hit the whole country first before it came to our area. We were a local business. We were working our tails off in our retail business. I had to lay off a few employees and staff. We were working seven days a week and had four children and felt like we never saw them. My husband and I were sitting in the Jacuzzi and I looked at him and I said, "What if we dump all of our retail customers and go for the corporate customers?" We had, not even a handful, about four corporate customers we were working with back then. One of them was In-N-Out Burger and another one was Mitsubishi Motors. We did In-N-Out Burgers entire awards program for them. I thought that there was real promise in that. It's a little scary to think about dumping what you've done for thirteen years and that many customers from your customer base and head in a different direction. It was a risk that we took and I'm glad we did because it paid off hugely. I stopped working weekends mostly. I still do a little bit every now and then because that's life on planet earth. That's what we did and I'm happy that we did it. There were no guarantees. When you run a company, there aren't any guarantees.

I haven't found the guarantee that comes with being a business owner somewhere.

It doesn't exist. You have to be a risk-taker or you probably shouldn't start one.

I think about that discussion. As you're saying, "What do you think?" “That's a good idea.” Did you immediately go and institute that or did you stew on it a little bit?

We did it instantly but we maintained our retail customers for about a year. We eased our way out of that and then focused pretty hard on sales with the corporate clients in Southern California at that time. Before we located here, we were there for thirteen years.

With all of that experience and if there's another business owner out there and you are going to offer that business owner a piece of advice based on your track record, success and all the pivots, what would that be and why?

My husband and I worked together very well, but I would tell you never go into business with your spouse because the first five years, it was pretty like this until we figured all that out. He and I love working together now, but we tell that to people all the time. I would say honestly until you run your own business, you have no idea how much is involved in that. The advice I would give people is to count the costs and then go in being willing to adjust as you go to accommodate what needs to happen. It will pull out of you the very best you have to offer. If you're not willing to do that, then you probably shouldn't start it.

I think about people that have the story. I'm going to start my own business so I can be my own boss. I always chuckle when they say I can be my own boss, which is I'm going, "You haven't run a business yet." You mentioned an interesting time frame, the first four or five years with your husband and running the business and then after that initial period of time, things settled down for you guys. Was there a particular event that caused it to settle down or just progression?

Anytime you work with a business partner and whether it's a spouse or any other human being, they have their strengths and weaknesses, you have yours. They have their perspective and you have yours. As you grow and you mature. I was 25 when I started this, you round off the rough edges over time. It was, "That's not working. How else can we approach this? Let me see if I understand you better." We learned a lot about communication and how to be better listeners and how to focus on what was great and what wasn't so great. We decided that was none of our business and that person would work on their own stuff. It wasn't my job to point that out. We both had to come to that agreement that we would accentuate the positives and ignore the negatives. It was a good decision. That happened over time. That was not any one event.

It sounds like a typical marriage to me.

It's dimensional. That the marriage that you're working on which then you've got the business that you're working on as well being a partner.

You are supposed to raise the kids too.

Try and bring out the best in them. I have four daughters, so I don't want to pretend that's easy.

If you could go back with decades of experience that you have, you could go back to your pre-business self and offer yourself some advice, what would you say?

The young me, I would say is figure out your stuff.

Personal or professional?

Personal first. Don't ignore and stuff, be real, genuine and authentic. The young me, I would say embrace all your strengths and be thankful and grateful for those and be so grateful for the opportunities, more so than do this business step and do that business step. I could have saved you so much time, Nora, if you hadn't done this or done that. The number one business thing I would have said is you should have pulled the trigger on the corporate business after the first year rather than thirteen years into it. We wasted a lot of time. If you think of it that way, doing retail and not doing the corporate business, we should have started that sooner.

We talked about being able to be adverse to risk. Pulling that trigger was a huge risk. There was some apprehension that went with that that took some number of years to work through before you were like, "Wow." It's easy to say, "As I went back now, I wish we would have done it sooner." However you learn different lessons, right?

Yes. There wasn't much apprehension. Both my husband and I are risk-takers. We jump out of airplanes, that kind of stuff. We may be a little bit unique in that. We do tend to take probably more risks than the average person. We count the cost but we don't lament things that maybe went south, and then we learn from it and move on. We don't spend a lot of time beating ourselves up about decisions and stuff.

To switch to the corporate sooner rather than later and be able to take your lumps as they call it.

[bctt tweet="As smart as you are, you don't know everything." username=""]

We should do it anyway.

I think about that philosophical approach to paying tuition as you, "I wish we hadn't done that and it cost a certain amount." There's the tuition and learning along the way. If there was a specific skillset that you could have gone to college or any higher education institution that would have helped you, you're looking at it now, what would you have taken or what course might you have studied?

I would have taken some business classes. Thank God I don't have to do any of the accounting. Rick is stellar at it so I get to do the people management side of it and all that. I would probably take some management courses so that it wasn't all learn on the job. My children went to college and I know how much they learned when they were there. I don't know how much you retain, like high school. I did take some courses in college, as did Rick, but most of it was on-the-job training. They can prep you some in school for it. There's not a whole lot of education out there for doing what we do other than maybe people management. We could have learned a lot more. I learned a ton through the CEO group in Vistage about managing people and how to do that well that I wished I'd learned when I was younger.

Do you have children in your business now? 

I have one daughter. She's a salesperson.

That reminds me of the apprentice program many years ago. What advantage do you think your daughter will have from being in the business and executing on the sales side and watching what you guys are doing as opposed to the experience you have?

I wasted a few years doing sales for Glassical Designs myself with too much knowledge about the bottom line and what we needed to make. Jackie has benefited and our salespeople. A great deal from what I learned was that you don't focus on that. People pick up on that right away. If you're going into a meeting and your focus is, how can this person benefit me rather than what can I do for them? People are smart. They pick up on that. In sales, right out the gate, I tell our salespeople, “Don't try and sell anything. Go ahead and find out what it is, how you can serve them well, understand them, look in their eyes and see what it is that God put in them that made them unique and special. Try and connect with that and then see if you can find a solution for their recognition problems. If you can help them find solutions, then the sales will follow.” I would say that to all salespeople. It's amazing to me how successful people aren't going to show how much we have consumer needs. Walking in and upselling and trying to push people into something and make a decision now and all of that. We don't do any of that.

That's a temporary sales thing. It's not a long-term sales thing.

We have customers that have been purchasing awards from us for 20, 23, 25 years. They would never go anywhere else because they know our goal is to take good care of them.

It's nice to see the growth of those customers over the years. Family members extended. For you, as you look over company over the past maybe most...