We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lisa Hladish a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Lisa, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
I’ve always grown up with a healthy dose of confidence and self-esteem. From a young age, I was very much a tomboy and developed my confidence from cultivating relationships with family & friends and the ability to get things done. For a young girl, I was lucky enough not to build my self-esteem on the way I looked, but on the way I behaved and made others feel. It wasn’t until I was 10 years into running Paper Daisies that I began to struggle with insecurity and a lack of confidence.
I came from a creative background, with a degree in Art Education. I spent my first professional years as a high school art teacher and became experienced in managing a group of teenagers. Even though my background prepared me to supervise and manage a variety of difficult situations, it never prepared me to lead a group of peers, who in many ways were smarter and more experienced than me. This created quite a bit of insecurity and a true lack of leadership on my part. I found myself struggling to confront issues with our team head on because I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I would cringe at the thought of giving performance reviews. I kept thinking to myself, “how can I sit across from another person and tell them they need to be doing a better job, when I had so many things I needed to improve in myself”. What I began to understand, is that people crave feedback. They need it to perform at their best and I was failing as a leader when I was too weak to provide it. I was very fortunate to have a strong business partner and COO, Windsor Gray, who was naturally gifted in providing direct feedback. She encouraged me by helping create processes that took some of the emotions away. We had our team read the book, Radical Candor, and it completely changed the way we operated.
We also implemented EOS, an Entrepreneurial Operating System based off of Traction. This was a game changer in the structure of our company and allowed us to promote a true leadership team. By implementing EOS, I was able to remove myself from a lot of the tasks that I had been holding onto and focus on being a better leader and visionary for the company. I was able to let go of control and trust in our team and the benefits started pouring in. I realized at this point, that I had not been performing at my best being pulled in so many different directions. And in trying to wear so many hats, it slowly ate away at my confidence because I really wasn’t doing a great job with any of it. When I let the incredible team we had brought together step up and take true responsibilities off my plate, I was able to focus on what I do best and what our company needed most. My confidence started to return and I think everyone at the studio noticed it. Reflecting back, I believe what brought my self-esteem and confidence back was implementing processes/systems, promoting a strong leadership team and dealing with internal “people” issues head-on. It was a lot of failing, learning and doing something different over and over, but in the end, I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. And I’m proud of myself for recognizing my weaknesses and working to improve them.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I love this question because quite honestly, I never wanted to have a business, let alone scale one up. I accidentally started Paper Daisies when I got married and could not find an invitation suite that fit the vision I had in my head. My mom, Glory, and I decided to design and make our own wedding stationery. Little did I know, that by mailing the invitations we’d designed ourselves, we would create interest in my friends and family about who created them and if they could also have their invitations made. So a business was accidentally born, and I knew nothing about running a business.
Since then we’ve grown a little bit! I’ve partnered with my sister, Windsor Gray, who is our incredible COO and we’ve built a strong team of amazing people who all share our core values. We have a beautiful 5,300 sq ft studio and design, print and produce over 500 jobs per year.
We are in the process of building a brand new website that we believe will greatly improve the process of ordering wedding stationery through a website. Our team is super excited about offering more creative items, like fun and unique seating chart designs and sculpted blind emboss options. Our focus is bringing these fun details to clients and planners in an easy and enjoyable platform where they’ll get to work one-on-one with designers who really care and have fun throughout the process.
Our culture is the best part of our business. We attract incredibly fun, authentic people and love working with couples and planners who really enjoy the planning and design process that goes into a wedding or large event. We are industry experts and take pride in sharing our wealth of knowledge with the people we work with. Our vision is to be your favorite paper people by setting you up for success and making you feel like family.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I learned everything the hard way, the long way, the wrong way, the slow way…basically I’m an expert because I’ve failed so many times, but continued to keep moving forward. So probably the most important quality that has had the most impact on me was perseverance…I will not give up. No matter how hard it is, how down I get, how hopeless I might feel, I just won’t give up. Sometimes it feels like a disease I wish I didn’t have, but then when I get to experience true growth, I understand how powerful that quality is. And I know that the only way to get to where I’ve gotten is to go through the really difficult times and not everyone gets to experience the fulfillment of building a business and watching it grow.
Another skill or quality that I believe has made me successful in this business is having good people skills. And I mean that with both our clients and planners as well as our team and vendors that I work alongside with. I genuinely like people and I have the benefit of choosing who I work with. I’ve built many close, strong friendships with the Paper Daisies team, our wedding planners, past and current clients and vendors who have served us for years. They know we will bend over backwards for them and vice versa. I’ve had printers work through the night for us, planners drive hours for meetings because they prefer to use us over their local contacts and a team that has proven again and again, that they are the most dedicated people to our mission and each other. We did a fun project with our team and made t-shirts based off of our strengths. My design read, “I 
everything + everyone”. That pretty much sums that up!
The last thing I wanted to mention that I believe sets me apart is my years of experience in this business and industry. It’s not an easy industry to step into and wedding stationery is about as complicated and detail oriented as you can get. There are so many moving pieces, lots of last minute changes, and an emotional element that isn’t necessarily common in other industries. I fully believe you cannot be a true expert if you haven’t put the time in and had excessive experiences to provide you with the knowledge it takes to be an expert. I’ve had 20 years of weddings, both big and small, intimate and large, simple and complicated. I’ve pretty much lived through every emergency situation you can imagine and can predict how things will happen when something goes awry. I spend a good amount of my time at my job educating and sharing these experiences so someone else doesn’t have to suffer. As a team we’re always focused on lessons learned or how we can improve processes. I love the knowledge we’ve accumulated over the years and have so much fun sharing it with others.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
I have two books that have played a huge role in how I’ve developed as a leader. The first is called Radical Candor, by Kim Scott. This is a book every people-pleasing business leader needs to read. If you find yourself struggling with having difficult conversations with your peers or in professional relationships, this book is a must read. For years, as Paper Daisies grew, I refused to give constructive feedback for fear of hurting people’s feelings. For a time, I could get away with this and the business didn’t suffer. But as we continued to scale, the issues increased and magnified, and I continued to shy away from any conflict. I could tell it was damaging to the company, but I still didn’t step up and make necessary changes. Even though we were holding regular reviews, they weren’t completely honest and team members weren’t getting the respect they deserved. After reading Radical Candor, everything for me started to change. I was able to repair relationships that had been damaged and make huge changes in myself as a leader. We incorporated this new mindset with the rest of our team and encouraged them to have more direct conversations with each other and face issues head on. It’s been such a game changer for our culture and I’ve actually had to work way less in this area because everyone on the team is taking responsibility for their own actions and holding each other accountable.
The second book that I have just finished reading is called Who Not How, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. This book has helped me realize I don’t need to know how to do everything in order to scale. Instead I can learn to leverage my relationships and partnerships to help me accomplish what I want that I either cannot do myself or do not have the knowledge or experience to do. This has been really fun to focus on and the name of the book says it all. It also brings in one of my best qualities, which is being a people person. I love creating relationships and helping other people accomplish their goals. Now I try to find ways we can help each other and it’s making scaling our business so much easier and enjoyable. For example, we are building a new e-commerce website. This is definitely not my specialty. But I have relationships through my membership in the Entrepreneur’s Organization and immediately reached out to a few developer friends, who were more than happy to help guide us. One of them had asked me to sit on a panel he held for his team and share my experiences with some software they had developed. So he was more than happy to spend a few hours with Windsor and I reviewing our thoughts around the new website. He saved us so much time, pointed us in the right direction, and connected us with companies that could do what we needed. This was a perfect example of the concept of Who Not How and it didn’t cost me anything but a little bit of time.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.paper-daisies.com
- Instagram: @paperdaisiesstationery
- Facebook: @paperdaisiesstationery
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paperdaisiesstationery/
Image Credits
Laura Watson, Sara France, The Willets
