Welcome to the GiltTrips podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Lockhart. As a goldsmith and
gemologist, I'll be speaking 24 carat on all things jewelry, metals, and gems. Join
me plus a few friends to demystify both materials and designs as your private jeweler. Let's
tune in on these topics and get golden. In today's episode, I'm offering a companion
talk as far as becoming the mentor. The first thing that I want to address as a myth is
that you have to get to somewhere in order to have enough to mentor somebody. That is
not necessarily true. Never undersell what your experience is or what you have experienced
because it doesn't feel like expertise. Jewelry is one of those strange industries, much like
the arts, dance, music, painting, I could go on, where it's a strange axis of expansion
of your skills and the deepening of your knowledge and wisdom. At any given time, you may have
exactly the right key to somebody else's lock, regardless of your tenure in your career,
or dues in the industry, or the hours logged into mastery. Like the last episode, I'm
going to break the sound into five areas. And the first one is training, which is a
mixed bag. It can seem like both heaven and hell, depending on your strengths and limitations,
as well as those of the people that you are trying to develop. But some of my greatest
stories on passing the torch or paying it forward come from training. The two examples
I'd like to share involve the training of a team and that of an individual. At my job
with the estate collection, where eventually I became some unofficial operations manager,
it became obvious to me that we had the right people in the wrong positions. The extrovert
couldn't focus or complete tasks in the back of house, such as inventory, which is pretty
critical. The introvert was on the sales floor. And if she did engage in conversation, it
quickly derailed into her comfort zones of topics and never ended up converting the
interest in a piece or clientelling or even capturing the lead. At some point, I pitched
the owner and said, Hey, this sounds creative. It sounds a little nuts. Maybe it'll come
across as too playful. But why not swap Annie and Lisa as far as responsibilities for just
five days? Let's see what Lisa can do on the floor with customers. And let's see what Annie
does with administrative responsibilities. Wouldn't you know that both of them ended
up being in their own personal heavens and absolutely thriving at their new opportunities?
It wasn't too long after that they were given each other's jobs permanently. The second
example is an individual. When I was working in manufacturing, we had a retail showroom.
It was the president, me, a field representative and a project manager. We were starting to
grow and obviously needed, for lack of better words, a receptionist. The budget for the
role, which means the pay wasn't great. We got ourselves a pretty young girl with zero
background in jewelry and very little experience outside of hosting at a restaurant. While the
president thought this would possibly convert, it was a disaster. She ended up interrupting
$20,000 diamond engagement ring design appointments and sales for a $10 jewelry repair question.
To the point where it was clogging business so much that I turned to Larry, the president,
and said, I'm going to make you a deal. Let me bootcamp her as far as training for a week.
At the end of the week, we genuinely test her, like a written exam. If she passes, let's
give her a better title and a raise. And if she can't, please eliminate the position I
will take on the repair department without even absorbing her paycheck because it is
that detrimental to what we're trying to do as far as a business. It's one of my favorite
stories because she worked really hard to crash course a lot of these terms and to learn to
critically think and creatively solve and learn strategy. And when you take a phone
call, how you vet that, and when somebody wants to interrupt her bosses, what is the
best possible response? I could see her sweat a little bit, but she was also really going
for it. And when I gave her the exam, which she finished, I turned it over to the president
and said, he's going to grade your answers, and I'm going to step away. I've got an errand
to do. I knew what I paid forward to her was fail proof. And I went down the street and
I bought her a congratulatory gift. I came back, the exam was graded, and I approached
her in a very somber and sober mode. Your score speaks volumes. And she got very nervous.
And I said, you have one last question to answer. Will you accept the role and responsibility
of repair manager? And she started to cry a little bit. And it was so heartwarming because
what she said next was beautiful. I've never been proud of my work before. And I handed
her her personalized executive planner. She went on for five more years with that company
after I left. The next thing that you should consider cultivating in others is leadership.
It can be lonely at the top. So why not replicate and give it to others? Because the more the
merrier. One of the challenges in something as structured as any industry, but especially
jewelry because it's often tenure and talent based as far as advancements is the idea of
permission of all the careers that I've worked in, because some of them have been outside
jewelry, it takes an extra level of grit to ask for more in jewelry. Is it correlated
to the fact that the stakes are a little higher as far as luxury and value and psychology and
emotional sentiments of our clients and our products? I don't know that speculation, but
finding ways to impart self generated competence, confidence, certainty and charisma in your
employees, your peers, your colleagues, if you're an advisor, like I am, your clients,
your accounts, your contractors, the list goes on. But seeing that crawl to walk to run
in somebody's relationship with themselves and who they show up as to themself, their
colleagues, their peers, their accounts and their clients. For me, it's both precious
and priceless. The next thing I want to speak about is profit. Now, it may seem unorthodox
or counterintuitive to suggest to someone else how to make a little bit of money. I'm
not saying do a TED talk or create a mastermind on how you want to go and become successful.
Many will think that it's dog eat dog and every man for himself. But there's a long
game is the strong game beauty in showing someone who is so close on their own idea
how to turn that in to monetization, profit, sales, you name it. My favorite example is
the owner of a showroom out in Crown Point, Indiana. And he was churning and burning
and chugging up that mountain. Then we had an easy chat about expenses. And I said you're
going to get a lot closer towards your annual goal. If you can trim the fat and build the
muscle. You're in Indiana. Why are you shipping goods out two days to New York, paying New
York prices and getting it shipped two days back to you. That is time and money not well
spent. Lo and behold, the year he found local vendors, he increased his profit margin by
29%. While I have a background in marketing communications, I promise I'm not giving a
TED talk on branding. But that is the subject I'd like to discuss as far as my fourth way
to pay it forward and mentor. Let's substitute the word branding for identity cohesion. And
if you've got something that you can help someone who's trying to be everything to everyone,
which spoiler alert, if you're everything, you're nothing. If you're everybody, you're
nobody because there's no relatability. You're not identifiable. Cohesion could be explained
in a power of three. Who are you? How are you doing it? And what is it about? And last
thing, events. It's one of the easiest ways that someone's grabbed my hand. And it's how
I grab the hand of others and pull them up the hill. Events blend easy invitation, possible
socialization, introduction of new product and a fostering of community, or at worst,
reestablishing yourself as a venue. Events have done wonderful things. Even when they
didn't yield the sales that we wanted. Our upside was exposure, connection, referral,
character and reputation, implanted seeds for future collaborations as a standalone
address or as part of a quote unquote neighborhood crawl. My wish is that this sparked some creativity
as far as your generosity of what you know, what you think you know, and what you don't
know that you actually know that could benefit your peer, your partner, your employees, your
colleagues and my personal favorite, the next generation of jewelers.
Thank you for listening and learning with me. I would love you to share this project
with people finding rare beauty in today's world and throughout our times. Until the
next episode, keep your own story sparkling.