Ingram's

October 2010

Not long after their oldest children enrolled for first grade, Bonnie Kelly and Teresa Walsh began a journey that would take them to the pinnacle of business success in the Kansas City region. They’ve been nearly inseparable since that first meeting in 1985, working together as room mothers and then as fledgling business owners, testing various ways to make money as stay-at-home moms.

Then they hit on the winning formulation. It combined their love for silver jewelry, their passion for design and their desire to really make something of a business—together. The seed capital for that vision amounted to $25 from each household’s grocery fund. Starting with a series of informal jewelry parties, their business became “formal” with the launch of Silpada Designs from Kelly’s basement in 1997.

Every year, for more than a decade, annual growth exceeded 100 percent. Silpada now has more than 300 employees at its corporate offices in Lenexa and more than 28,000 sales representatives around the world, and has seen revenues soar to roughly $280 million a year. Earlier this year, Kelly and Walsh agreed to sell the company to Avon Products for a minimum of $650 million, perhaps the largest business sales in the region for 2010. You’ll burn out a calculator trying to compute the ROI on that $50 pinched from their cookie jars.

The biggest challenge to getting from there to here, they said, came in 2001, after annual revenues tripled from $1 million the year before. “We quickly realized we had to put an infrastructure in place to support what we saw as some dramatic growth in the coming years,” they said—and yes, they even respond to interview questions as a duo. “From that point, Silpada has taken a proactive business approach to stay ahead of the growth.”

The biggest lesson they learned from that, they said, was that the commitment to quality trumps all, and not just for the customer. It has to be a win-win-win for the company, its employees and its representatives as well, they said.

For a quarter-century, each has served as mentor to the other. “We are energized by each other’s passion to help other women look and feel their very best,” they said. “As best friends, we balance each other and play off of each other’s strengths. And, most importantly, we can always count on each other.”

Their story is the classic American Dream fulfilled, and one that they wish to pass along to legions of women hoping to achieve it themselves.

“It’s important that you balance your growth and never lose sight of your customers, representatives and employees. It also helps when you’re passionate about what you do,” Kelly and Walsh said. “Every day, we are inspired by the individual stories this business creates . . . the women who have solely supported their families, the women who have found new friends, the women who have experienced their self-confidence soar—the list goes on.”

Each of those success stories, they said, proves the value of surrounding yourself with people who believe in you and support you. And if you have that? “You realize,” they said, that “there are no limits to what you can achieve.”

View article at Ingramsonline.com

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