Story

Results not reasons…. I have heard this so many times but didn’t truly know how important it would be in my life.

My mother was one of the most organized sales professionals I have ever known growing up and my father was a genius technology geek. I was blessed to have two of the most amazing parents in the world. They seamlessly transitioned in and out of entrepreneurial businesses and corporate jobs, it was simply a way of life. They could start a business, build it, sell it and then transition into a new position with a company only to start over and do it again.

While I was always impressed with my parents, I had a desire to learn the operations side of a business. My mother was always pushing me to do more, do better and reminded me I was always bigger than the positions I had in life. She pushed me to accept a position at the corporate headquarters of a retailer in the north west, Lamonts Apparel when I was 21 years old. She was adamant that I needed a corporate background and pushed hard for me to make this move even though I was not sold on the idea.

At the age of 21 I moved into corporate and made a total of 24K per year which was my first experience at having a great mentor in corporate America. I can remember vividly sitting in my bosses office, Mr. Dan Russell, the VP of Operations and Logistics, while he was wrapping up phone calls or finishing talking to Dave Tyler who was the Director of Distribution. I don’t think he even realized that he was my first corporate mentor and coach.

The first lesson came from learning to wait and master being patient, while developing your listening skills, which I call “eves dropping”. The lesson I learned was to focus on paying attention, which kept me in a learning mode…..every moment was an opportunity to learn. While others my age were irritated that they were required to wait, think about what they had to do next or simply count the hours till they could go home, I focused on listening intently. I developed my skill to just listen.

Dan Russel was calm and cool, yet assertive. He listened, processed information quickly and then made decisions without hesitation. He was cordial with everyone in the company and I never heard a negative word from his mouth. Throughout the company there was always chatter and talk about people, processes, pay and much more, but he never participated or complained. I followed his lead, by choosing these stand out attributes to become part of who I am.

The area of the company that I was assigned to create was new to the industry, called vendor relations, compliance and floor ready merchandising. This job responsibility was a huge cost cutting initiative for which I was solely responsible. Dan stressed to me that there were 3 companies who had created and lead these initiatives: Federated department stores, Saks and the May Company. I would be provided with a travel budget to attend these industry conferences. He asked me to concentrate on finding out who the leaders were and use my time to connect with those individuals. My position was to ask questions, listen and come back with a workable plan to implement these new initiatives. He stressed that I focus on the top leaders from these companies instead of making friends with the crowd of people attending. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but I later learned this level of focus was needed in many areas of my life and business.

After being there for 2 years, I had learned, created and implemented some of the largest cost cutting initiatives and became a leader in the industry conferences and trade committees. Additionally, I was taken under the wing of the top two leaders Lisa Lichtenberg, EVP of Technology and Logistics for Federated department stores and Mary Lou Woods, VP of Technology and Logistics for Saks Stores.

I volunteered to help them with initiatives, events and soon started speaking at national conferences such as the VICS (Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Standards) committee and the UCC (Uniform Code Council). I was traveling one to three times per quarter and was saving the company close to 3 Million dollars per year from new vendor compliance initiatives.

Mary and Lisa were all about the process, technology and money. Everything always started and ended with the financial impact to the company. I quickly learned financial impact was a critical focus area in communication and presentations.

In 1998 my life changed quickly. I learned I was pregnant and going to have a baby. I would soon be a single mom. I purchased my first home in West Seattle, a 1400 square foot “Bungalo” for $280,000. On Friday the 13th of November, 1998 I had the biggest blessing of my life, Torel. I was determined to make it work and hired a live-in nanny to help me with my son while I traveled. With a 6 week maternity leave, I was back to work and didn’t stop a beat. Still traveling and working 10 – 15 hours a day, I took my son on many trips and learned how to utilize nanny’s at hotels and temporary child care services from coast to coast.

Professionally, my focused efforts did not go unnoticed. One day I was sitting in my office and my phone rang. It was a woman by the name of Sheren Huntzinger, VP of Logistics and Distribution for Nordstrom in downtown Seattle. She quickly mentioned that she had been following my activities with the associations, seen what I had done for Lamonts Apparel through articles she had read on the Internet. She invited me to have lunch with her at the Brooklyn in downtown Seattle the following week. I was 24 years old and extremely nervous about the meeting, but I still said yes.

I quickly called my master mentors, my mother and father, and told them about the meeting. My dad reminded me about the many lessons he had given me in purchasing a car. Don’t get to excited, stay calm, cool and in control. Then my mother reminded me that most importantly, know that you are worth more than you are currently being paid because you add continuous value and are focused on learning the right things that effect the bottom line impact to the company.

I attended the meeting with my palms sweating, just trying to remember what my mother and father had said and all the lessons I had learned from Dan, Lisa, and Mary. I still remember how the food was arranged on the plate, salmon laying over a bed of asparagus with rice and the smells of the restaurant.

This meeting held a new level of importance as money was extremely tight being a single mother. I was essentially responsible for taking care of all expenses for my son, the nanny and myself, along with the cost of living in Seattle. Most people don’t realize how expensive it is to travel because of all the things in your personal life you have to outsource. So, I was anxious about the possibility of taking a large financial leap as my mother indicated was warranted.

Sheren was about 5 foot 5 and one of the strongest women I have ever met. She was so confident and bold, but also kind and soft spoken. She emphasized that she wanted me to help Nordstrom create a Vendor Compliance and Supply Chain Management department as well as she was interested in me getting them involved in the industry trade associations. I did a lot of listening, kept my cool and was offered a position making 24K more than I was in my prior position, starting at $55K per year. I slowly walked from the restaurant, turned the corner to the parking garage, called my mom and dad and as soon as I saw Sheren was no longer in sight, I freaked out and burst into excitement.

I started with Nordstrom 2 weeks later. Sheren was my biggest mentor, providing much of the same guidance as the others, but she pushed me to advance quicker. She told me to walk 5 steps ahead and I would reach my goals faster. Sheren coached me to run my new department, like I was the VP. I learned to walk like the VP, talk like the VP, dress like the VP, write emails and recaps like the VP and run meetings like the VP. I focused on my presentation skills and meeting mastery. She wanted me in the lime light at the industry events as Nordstrom team members would never take a back seat, they were leaders. She taught me the Nordstrom culture. Service, coffee, standards and processes, black clothes, fast walking and talking. Those that know me, know this culture stuck and is part of who I am today.

I successfully created the entire vendor compliance, supply chain management and vendor collaboration programs at Nordstrom and implemented them with over 10,000 vendors across the world. These initiatives were worth over 15 Million dollars to the company’s bottom line. At this point, there was one Vendor that was a slight “problem child” for the program and just happened to be the number one growing and sales product within the company, Tommy Bahama. Their lack of experience in dealing with large retailer compliance guidelines and technology was literally bringing Nordstrom distribution centers to it’s knees on every shipment.

We tried to fix the challenges and it was finally determined that I would need to move over to their company to help them get everything in place to do business with this size of a retailer and their associated compliance requirements. Everything from EDI, Logistics, Transportation, Customer Service, AP/AR and their entire supply chain. The transition to Director of their Supply Chain Compliance Division occurred at age 26 and my salary grew with it by over 20K. Pushing six figures and having created 3 supply chain departments, it was getting redundant, but I was damn good at it.

I spent 2 years with Tommy Bahama repeating the same process. Being a leader within the retail industry while leading committees such as the VCF (Vendor Compliance Federation) and the CPFR (Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment) where just a couple. I was continually being written up in trade publications, websites and eventually was published in the Wall Street Journal on the front page of the business section.

My son about to start kindergarten soon and had traveled to over 30 states nation wide. Guilt was starting to set in because I was spending such little time with him and rarely being home. Many of my family members thought that I was a workaholic, who simply loved to live life in the fast lane. They were wrong, I just wanted to get to the place I could slow down, sooner than I had seen any of my elders or mentors. They all seemed to be working so hard for so long and I didn’t understand why they had so little time to travel, spend time with their families or enjoy life. It just didn’t make sense to me, but I continued to push forward.

At the 2 year mark I received a call from a man named Blade Corwin who was a partner at an executive recruiting firm, Seitchik Corwin and Sietchik. He had read about me on the Internet and wanted to fly me out to Richardson Texas to interview for the head position at Fossil watches, who was responsible for creating a Vendor Compliance and Supply Chain Management division of the company.

This time I negotiated not only my salary, but I pre-negotiated my staff, budget and technology needs to start up the new division. Having done this a few times, I now wanted to avoid the political process of begging for headcount, budget and systems. It worked.

The interview was definitely different this time around. I interviewed with over 30 people and the senior team. This was definitely not Seattle. Quickly some conversations that I had never had to address before became apparently topics for consideration. One – I did not have a degree. Two – I had a dozen tattoos. Three – I was a single mother with a bi-racial child about to relocate to a state thousands of miles away from family, friends and a support system.

This was different. Since I had been traveling for approximately 2 weeks every other month for the past years, I wanted to ensure that my travel schedule with Fossil would eventually be managed by someone who I trained to replace me. With no support system and a son who was starting kindergartem I knew it was a matter of time before I had obligations to be a mother at T-Ball, Soccer and Parent Teacher meetings.

I also could feel this burring desire to do something different. I started to feel like I might have been leading the wrong life. This was very disturbing because in everyone’s eyes I was beyond successful and was on the perfect path. Something just wasn’t right. Yet, 30 days after my interview my son and I were placing our Seattle home on the market and relocating to Dallas Texas.

After a couple years with Fossil I found myself frustrated because I couldn’t take care of my staff. Raises were done on a curve. I was slowly feeling more and more like this was entirely wrong. I was working constantly, rarely seeing my child, while dragging him all over the US leaving him with nanny’s in hotels and strangers in every city.

I began thinking about what it would be like to be an entrepreneur. Is it possible? What would I do? How would I replace this 6 figure salary and a million other questions. I was totally distracted with this new purpose and vision. Thankfully I had hired and trained a man, William Preston, who would eventually be my successor at Fossil and later in life, my future business partner.

Shortly after my son started school, my corporate path ended. I woke up on that next Monday, went to the mail box and thought, “oh my God”, what did I do. I stood in the drive way with a hand full of bills, a boat, a house, an Infinity QX56, a child going into the 2nd grade and no job.

The next month my parents came to visit from Seattle and we talked for hours. They were so positive and motivating, they encouraged me to get into real estate and financing. While that was the path that allowed me to replace my income quickly, I was not that interested in real estate or mortgage, I was more interested in how to market and run a business. So, I thought back to everything I had learned in corporate and came up with some principles I would later live by with my heart and soul:
Find leaders who are where I want to be, who I want to be like and listen to them.
Focus on relationships that encourage growth and push me to be better.
Constantly study and listen.
Start with the end in mind, have clarity on what you want and remove all obstacles that don’t help you get there.
Don’t just learn a trade, learn how to market a trade.
Never trade your time for cash if you want freedom in the end.
Never have a one time sale that requires you to always be on the hunt.
Know that everyone has been unemployed every moment of their life. They are constantly marketing themselves to others to get hired personally and professionally.
Become a presenter – realize that every phone call, meeting, conversations or email is a presentation – master your presentation skills.
Never talk bad about anyone else, never.
Make your own economy, focus on the end result.
Leverage technology to bend time.
Learn how to convert time to Cash!
Master old school principals of marketing and integrate those principals using today’s technology.
Never use the excuse “I don’t have enough time”. You are probably not using your time correctly if you run out of it and don’t have the funds to add resources.
Walk 5 steps ahead. Your behavior and thinking will create your path (good or bad).

As my parents suggested, I dove into Mortgage and Real Estate. Our mortgage company grew to over 100 loan officers and the real estate business had 30 Realtors in the first 2 years. 100% of my time was dedicated to providing marketing services to help them build their business by leveraging the things that had worked very well for me in my career progression. The focus areas included:
The Internet
Relationships
Referrals
Financial Value Propositions
Technology
Processes
Presentations

I created a company creed that has been ingrained in the culture of our team and company. This creed will change the way you think, operate and your overall decisions.

I promise to protect and leverage my time, money, resources, relationships and technology.

I wanted to study entrepreneurs to see how they think, what they do, how they spend their time and resources and what they are missing to succeed. I was curious why there is only a 1% success rate with entrepreneurs and was determined to figure out what pieces were missing.

Our company developed a training program called Business Blitz which eventually was not only attended by our team, but their peers, clients and strategic partners. This was where I studied their thoughts, actions and personalities.

Within my corporate life, I had become a high level business strategy, supply chain, and logistics. I had trained sales organizations and lead board meetings. I became a certified project manager (PMP) and acquired a black belt in Six Sigma. But I never had to hunt to eat.

As a part of our training programs, we created an in house referral rewards program called The Compliments Card designed to help increase the rate of referrals from clients. This program eventually spun off into it’s own business with one of the first clients investing over 10K per month into the program and was picked up by Costco Wholesale as a holiday gift item.

Our successes came from a lifetime of marketing systems that worked, our core marketing technology was growing and it rapidly turned into another company CI Web Group, a division of Compliments international, LLC.

Eventually, we began receiving requests from businesses across the nation to implement what we defined as the Fusion Marketing System into their business. This system was comprised of a web based marketing engine (website/blog), social media publishing system, search engine optimization methodology we created called tailgate SEO, video marketing technologies, contact relationship management integration, conversion strategies and an ongoing training program focused on Strategy, Technology and Behavior.

I tell you this, because, throughout life we have many lessons and opportunities presented, yet undiscovered, simply because people are not looking for these open doors, nuggets of knowledge, leaders to follow or lessons to learn. I choose to pay close attention to the fact that technology, more specifically the Internet had served my life well. Every opportunity I ever received in my career advancements was through the visibility provided through the Internet. Throughout my life, there were a core set of drivers that allowed me to transform and progress quickly. Understanding the technology, the strategy and the behaviors necessary to advance and progress.

Our company adopted these same principles within our core and worked hard to develop a client training program geared to achieve a much higher success rate because it’s balanced approach, providing the technology, strategy and behavioral development. Today this training program serves as a business incubation center for small to mid size businesses and sales professionals. Our organization has trained thousands of businesses across hundreds of different industries.

Practicing what we preach, CI Web Group grew to a multi million dollar business within a 3 year time frame through implementing the lessons, tools and technologies that powered my life, career progression and passion for helping others.

I am blessed to now be a nationally recognized speaker, successful entrepreneur and am in the process of authoring my first book thanks to a little push from my mentor, Tony Jeary. Tony is a coach to the worlds top 500 CEO’s and an author of 38 books. His methodology of Strategic Acceleration is founded on three core principals:
Clarity (Without clarity you cannot focus)
Focus (Without focus you cannot execute)
Execution

Tony embodies everything I believe in, personally and professionally.

I am currently 36 years old and love life. My son, Torel is now 13 years old and I rarely miss school or sporting events. I travel once a quarter and vacation a minimum of 4 times per year. I have balance. I have peace. I have a love for life and appreciation for helping others achieve their goals. I take time every day to experience life and share those experiences with others. Our team at CI Web Group and our clients are constantly growing personally and professionally. I find that we attract those who want the same things in life and are willing to put in the work to accomplish their goals. Our network is full of accountability partners, we are not alone. Getting to this point has not been fast, nor free, nor easy… but, it has been and will continue to be the most rewarding journey to be shared with family, friends and partners.

There were a million REASONS I could have given to why I couldn’t do something. From being a single mom, having no family locally, having no support, having a bi-racial child in a state that holds many different opinions, having no degree, almost going broke investing everything I had into the businesses, the mortgage and real estate industry collapsing, the economy being crushed, not having enough time, not having experience, not having education, migraines…. what ever!

If I allowed any of these Reasons to get in my way, I WOULD NOT HAVE ACHIEVED ANY REAL RESULTS!

I thank my parents for encouraging, believing and pushing me to get more and do more. I thank the few mentors in my life who to this day, don’t know what a huge influence they were on my life. I thank my team for believing in the dream and giving it everything they have to create a future they all will be proud to have created together. I thank my son, for loving me unconditionally, even when he thought mom “always worked on an airplane somewhere in “You Nork”, for understanding why I work so hard and for being a great vacation buddy! I love you Torel.

by Jennifer Bagley, CEO of CI Web Group
www.ciwebgroup.com
www.jenniferbagley.com