Life Lessons: Amy Hammond

One of the great influences early on was my mom.

She was a single mom raising two kids on her own, so it was great to see somebody like that who basically gave anything she had extra to us. It made you appreciate how hard you had to work to get anywhere in life.

I came from a very hardworking family. You put in the time. You weren’t on the clock. You didn’t do 8-to-5. You did what you needed to do.

I had a newspaper route when I was 7. It was the Toledo Blade. My brother and I both had it, so I can’t take all the credit. He was 10. We had about 120 houses. It was a big job for 10 and 7, especially for two little children in the wintertime. It was at 5:30 in the morning, the crack of dawn.

My mom likes to tell the story of when I thought we were destitute and needed help, so I took all the samples of laundry detergent out of the paper. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do, that the samples were for us. We had to go out and deliver all of them, knock on the door and apologize. She loves to tell it.

I’m a big believer in teaching on the fly. A situation comes up with a customer, you deal with it, and then you teach your employees exactly what happened. If it was an issue with fabric quality, you show them where the customer had the issue on that particular product, how that happened, what we did to correct it and move forward.

You worry about what’s happening in the marketplace with creditors and banks, people you rely on to run your business. You hope as a small company that you actually get paid.

You’ve got to be willing to spend money to make money. Right now in this economy that’s what people aren’t doing. They’re scaling back. They’ve put the brakes on.

You have to make some risky, gutsy moves. You can’t always be conservative.

We’re on a growth path again this year over last year, which is wonderful for us to be able to say in this economy.

We’ve all had a meeting of the minds that we don’t want to be too big.

I’ve always trusted my gut; that’s what’s gotten me this far.

If I have a good gut feeling for someone on the phone, then we bring them in for three or four interviews. Our last one we usually take them out to lunch to see how they interact with waitresses, waiters, what their manners are like. It’s a personal process for us.

We want someone who’s going to be with us for life.

We do quite a bit of spoiling throughout the year, especially at holidays.

We make a big deal on birthdays, and I personally shop for each of the employees on their birthday and try to find something special instead of just getting them a gift card. Those are the things we try to do to make them feel special and let them know how important they are.

I can’t say in the beginning I wasn’t here all the time.

As we’ve grown, we’ve put in an infrastructure of employees and a team office environment together. We’re not here on the weekends. We’re here if we need to be, and we’re certainly doing things from our home office.