I have been creating and selling for as long as I can remember. As a young child who grew up in the southern US state of South Carolina, I was selling corn and watermelon on the side of Farmer Road at the ripe age of 4 years old. My grandmother, Betty, owned farmland, the majority of which she inherited from her father, Kinard. He died just 9 months after my birth, but my third child shares his middle name. Kinard Pierce / Jonas Pierce.
Even at four, I was a deal maker. I negotiated with my grandmother, saying "for every nine watermelons I sell, I get to eat the tenth one all by myself." She agreed to my terms of 10% commission, not imagining I would do a BIG screaming song and dance, the kind with full blown jazz hands and a red frilly dance costume, to get the attention of whomever was driving up the road, heading our way. We had so many customers that year. A handful of repeat customers even. I filled my belly with watermelon all summer long and that is how my entrepreneurial career began.
Having incredibly young parents meant that my family members shared the responsibility of raising me - aunts and uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, and for a while there, even great-great grandparents. It is the diversity and exposure to a variety of role models and authority figures early in life that contributes to my personality today. I would bet there are not too many folks who recall sitting on the lap of their great grandma (Nannie, her real name was Nettie), watching Days of Our Lives, while great grandpa (Monroe, pronounced MUuuuNnnroooohhhw...with a long southern drawl) tended the garden and worked the farm.
My sales career, although it began with corn and watermelon, developed at a rapid pace when my paternal grandparents, whom I called Mama Jean and Daddy Bud, moved from South Carolina to Texas during my third-grade year. Daddy Bud worked for Owens Corning Fiberglass. He transferred to Texas to help open a new plant. Given that my parents had recently divorced and that my mother was barely an adult herself at the time, it was clear we would all be moving to Texas together.
Now, I am not sure if you have ever moved before. Many have the fortune of living in one spot for most of their lives. That is not my story. But here is one thing I can tell you for sure about a kid from a farming community in the deep south relocating to a suburban neighborhood in the north Texas panhandle during the middle of third grade:
You better learn to sell friendship skills. Fast.
From day one at Puckett Elementary School, no one understood a word I said. My pronunciation and accent were so thick that even the simplest word "butter" sounded more like buuuhhhdderrrr. Then of course, there was my social awkwardness which still exists to this day. My clothing was country, my hobbies were country (we can talk about my love of cows another time), and my singing was full blown Loretta Lynn and Waylon Jennings c-o-u-n-t-r-y. I would walk through the halls singing Jolene at the top of my lungs, telling everyone I wanted to be on stage at the Grand Old Opry one day. I got the oddest looks and no one even knew what the Grand Old Opry was. I was the perfect bait for hungry sharks on the playground. It was a rough patch in childhood that most certainly made me learn to sell the more positive attributes of my character, while masking the less desirable ones, to anyone offering even the remote possibility of friendship. And I do mean anyone. Even the mean kids. Friendship often came at the price of lunch money and personal self-esteem.
There were bumps and bruises along the journey to young adulthood, which were both self-inflicted as well as the result of family dysfunction. All of it, however, involved me learning to reinvent myself repeatedly. As it turned out, moving to Amarillo, Texas would be the first of more than thirty moves throughout my lifetime. That little girl who sold corn and watermelon with a side of song and dance also learned to support herself financially as a teenager by selling handmade Christmas wreaths and Homecoming Mums.
What is a Homecoming Mum, you ask? Southern Living does a much better job at explaining this than I ever could.
While other seniors in high school were applying for university and planning what to wear for prom, I was working three jobs and nurturing the ambitious part of myself through competing in the DECA Emerging Leaders competition. (https://www.deca.org) My high school claim to fame was winning Top Ten Emerging Leaders of DECA on a national level and my entrepreneurial pitch was first in the nation that year. It was a huge event with coverage in newspapers and television. I even flew to Denver, Colorado to participate and give my pitch. However, I graduated from a high school in north Texas. Since my award was unrelated to football, no one cared. My achievements at this massive nationwide competition went completely unnoticed, which is quite possibly when I learned to build and create for the love of building and creating, and nothing more.
Shortly after graduating from high school, I moved back to South Carolina to spend the summer with my grandmother Betty. This was THE YEAR (1992) that I, still to this day, believe I made the best and riskiest decision of my life. I met a guy and at the age of eighteen, with $300 cash and a one-way plane ticket, moved to Germany. I did not speak a word of German, but I was head over heels in love with this incredible human. He was smart, had a funnier accent than I did, piqued my curiosity, and he challenged my intelligence. That guy is Ingo. We have now been married 30 years and have four amazing kids. And yes, he still fascinates me.
After later completing a degree in Business Administration, with an emphasis on Finance & Marketing, I went on to create small businesses. Of course, like everything else in life, I have experienced both success and failure over the years. I have owned everything from a children’s hair and photo studio to a parenting and childbirth education business, to a travel agency, to a multilingual immersion school. When my oldest two children were small, I went back to earn a master’s and certified in Early Childhood Education as a Licensed Facilities Director. I then created and ran a parent cooperative preschool. Later, I became the center director for multiple national chain preschools before going on to study Midwifery. I have created three nonprofit foundations in my lifetime. The first was a collaboration with a dear friend who lost her young son to cancer. The second was a platform for connecting mothers facing severe hardship due to cancer or debilitating illness during pregnancy with birth and caregiver support. The third was a nonprofit focused on raising money and awareness to support women and children fleeing the war in Ukraine. Despite having been a part of so many exhilarating business projects and adventures, I am thankful to now be at a stage in life---the stage I have been working towards and waiting on for years---to dive more deeply into my work with the creation of Magical Christmas Markets.
I turn fifty next summer, the BIG 5-0, which means that I will officially be old enough to play the role of Ms. Santa Clause. And I am THRILLED! At age 42, when cancer reared its ugly head in my life, I did not know if I would ever grow old enough to fulfill this dream. Yet here we are. As I was showing Ingo the website for Magical Christmas Markets, eagerly discussing content creation and search engine optimization amongst other nerdy things, he asked me the most important question of all:
"What is your goal for Magical Christmas Markets? Is it to make money, to spread joy, to travel? What do you want to achieve?"
My answer: ALL OF THE ABOVE, but mostly, I just cannot wait to be Ms. Clause. Sometimes, it really is as simple as that.
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