This Is It by Glenn Edwards

Author:Glenn Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-05-10T20:37:25+00:00

Jordan’s Story

As we started building Mixology over the years, many of our early employees were family members or became like family members. Everyone knew what we stood for, and they believed in our core values and mission. The bigger our company got, the more obvious it became that we needed our belief system and culture to trickle down all the way to our most junior employees. For example, I realized some of our newer employees didn’t understand what Mixology stood for—the mixing and matching of high and low price points. That was unacceptable to me, so I knew I needed to do a better job of communicating.

I knew a current of mutual respect had to run through Mixology, bottom-up and top-down. In other words, I didn’t want an organization where the top monkey—the CEO—looks down and sees smiles, but the bottom monkey looks up and sees only assholes. That’s not my line originally, but I believe in it.

I had many formative experiences in my life, including my time at sleep-away camp called Camp Winaukee. At camp we had a set of guiding principles called the Tree of Values that included moral standards such as sportsmanship, leadership, and others. Each week at camp, the counselors would give an award to a camper who successfully demonstrated a core value. In other words, our experience was rooted in them. The theme continued into my college years; in my fraternity, we lived by a set of core values that everybody believed in and strived to embody.

I didn’t forget these lessons as I set out to lead and grow Mixology. On a family reunion/vacation to Puerto Rico—with no emails, no office, and plenty of time to think—I began to reflect on what I wanted the company to stand for. I jotted down notes that eventually became our core values and mission statement. I brought these notes back and memorialized them into a beautiful handbook full of my thoughts and original art from our creative director and senior graphic artist. The handbook is not your typical dry employee rule book, either: it solidifies our motto, which is to “inspire confidence.” It also includes our mission, to “build a culture of creative problem solvers.” I recently received a note from a junior employee, Jordyn Staff, saying she used her Mixology story for a college essay, and it’s clear we are doing just that. It reads, in part:

Mixology’s motto is: “Inspire Confidence.” That’s exactly what it’s done for me. I am no longer the underqualified fifteen-year-old limited to personal and family styling. Now, I’m the eighteen-year-old who has been through three managers and become part of a retail family. It’s given me a platform to inspire younger customers who come in looking for that same confidence I had been so desperately looking for when I first walked into the store.

Our handbook, which was inspired by the quarterly magazine put out by the company Rituals, also includes tips such as what successful people do before 8 a.m., information on the history of the company, and a look into how we define success as an organization.

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