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"Judy George\nIn 2008, it looked like it was the end of the road for Judy George. The company she started, furniture store Domain Home, had succumbed to the financial crisis. Though George was still the CEO, the company\u2019s new private equity owners were taking it into Chapter 11 to recoup whatever they could. But the finishing school-educated mother of four has never stayed down for long. Her recovery time from the bankruptcy and personal fallout? About a week. Then it was back to work on a new company.\u00A0\nToday, George is 72 and the owner of Judy George International, a new home furnishings venture she started with her partner, designer Kim Salmela. The company\u2019s mattresses are in 600 Sleepy\u2019s stores, and it has plans to license a range of home furnishings designs. The company projects revenue this year of $35 million. George talked with Fortune about life as a working mom, cultivating a superhuman drive to succeed, and overcoming even the most public of failures.\nWhen I was 16, I interviewed to be the national junior spokesperson for the March of Dimes. It was right after the polio epidemics, and I just wanted to do something. I didn\u2019t join on the national level because my mother wouldn&amp;#8217;t let me travel, but I became the New England March of Dimes spokesperson. That was the beginning really of my love of presenting ideas and getting feedback that made me feel good. I don&amp;#8217;t want to speak for everybody, but I think that sometimes entrepreneurs are very needy people. And the need isn&amp;#8217;t necessarily emotional. It&amp;#8217;s the need to do something important in their life. I was very needy.\nI got married at 19 after I completed finishing school at the ChandlerSchool for Women. My mother wanted me to get an education in attracting a rich husband. That&amp;#8217;s what finishing schools in those days were all about. So I went absolutely crazy with boredom.\nMORE:\u00A0VOTE &amp;#8211; Businessperson of the Year: Reader&amp;#8217;s Choice\nThat was when I began creating ideas and sending them out to companies. I would write down pitches for products, TV shows, newspaper columns. By the time I was 26, I had four children, a year-and-a-half apart. I sent in these ideas to companies really everywhere just to keep myself sane. Two of them caught on: A television show liked my idea and I became a regular guest, and I started writing a column for\u00A0The\u00A0Herald\u00A0called \u201CDecorator in the House.\u201D I always felt that if you were poor, you could create one room and make it feel good, and you wouldn&amp;#8217;t feel poor when you walked into your home. That\u2019s what the column was about. The vision behind everything was to take what only the rich and wealthy could have, and bring it to a price point where the masses could afford it.\nSo here I am, a country girl, really, married with four kids. When I applied for my first job [as director of interior design for Hamilton\u2019s Furniture in Braintree, Mass.], the owner &amp;#8212; George Hamilton &amp;#8212; originally said no because I\u2019d never had experience. I thought,\u201CI have to get this man\u2019s attention.\u201D I was thinking about that on the beach with my kids one day and I saw this plane fly overhead advertising something, I think it was Bacardi Rum. Everybody was looking at it.\nSo I went and hired a Hawker Beechcraft plane with a banner that said, &amp;#8220;George, Judy George will make you millions.&amp;#8221; And I flew it over his office every day for a week until he had the police contact me for disturbing the peace. The next week, he hired me.\nEventually his company bought the furniture store Scandinavian Design, and that\u2019s where I worked my magic. Robert Darvin, the CEO, gave me the real chance of a lifetime. Working together, in less than six years we went from $3 million to about $89 million in revenue. But then I started bringing in all these ideas again, ideas for a new store.\nOne day, I drove to work, got in, and was fired. Robert said to me, &amp;#8220;You have your own dreams. They&amp;#8217;re not mine.&amp;#8221;\nI was heartbroken. There&amp;#8217;s a lot of shame about being fired, particularly for women. I never thought I would survive it. Then I started putting a business plan together.\nThis time, I went all on my own. I hired the best law firm. I went to the best accountants. I went to Deloitte &amp;amp; Touche, and we made a deal that if they helped me put this business plan together, I would make them the accountants, but I couldn\u2019t pay them upfront. They did it. They took a risk. And they were my accountants for 20 years.\nFor startup money, I went to Bain Capital, where I met Mitt Romney. I love Mitt Romney. I\u2019m not political. I\u2019ve kept out of that. But Mitt took a chance where nobody would at Bain. And he was relatively new there. What I think Mitt did is he picked up on my passion and drive, and said, &amp;#8220;If anybody can do it, she&amp;#8217;ll do it.&amp;#8221;\nIt wasn\u2019t because I was a genius. It wasn\u2019t because I had the best idea in the world. I think the most important thing I ever did was treat people right. And guess who got me the money? It was the manufacturers and the employees who spoke so highly of me when Bain called and interviewed them. Within four years, I had $30 million in startup funding for the company.\nWe open Domain in 1986, and it really took off. The design was very different than Scandinavian [George\u2019s former employer], which is Scandinavian. I was more European. Everybody I knew wanted to be in Paris, Italy, or Spain. And so I took all those countries and developed the look.\nMORE:\u00A0The case for taking a real lunch break\nThe revenue was $68 million when I sold the company in 2002. It was one of the top furniture companies in the country. We sold it for $30 million, and I\u00A0didn&amp;#8217;t\u00A0keep the money. About 20 people at Domain benefited tremendously from the sale, because I knew I wanted to do something else, and if I was ever going to do that, I needed people to speak well of me.\nDomain changed hands again in 2006, when the bottom starting falling out of the industry, but the company that eventually bought it\u00A0wasn&amp;#8217;t\u00A0in it for the long term. They came in, and they wanted quick and easy money, and there was no way in the furniture industry that was ever going to happen. It was one of the worst economic climates for the industry since the Great Depression. They got impatient. Domain filed for bankruptcy in 2008.\nI tried to go out and buy it back, but no banks were open to anything like that.\u00A0It was the second time in my life I felt shame &amp;#8212; disappointing manufacturers who cared about me, disappointing customers who cared about me.\u00A0I worked tirelessly from my home trying to get goods and furniture to people, begging everybody who would help to get me trucks.\nI decided to go away for a week and stay with my sister and brother-in-law when the news broke. As\u00A0I&amp;#8217;m getting on a plane, somebody&amp;#8217;s handing everybody The Globe, the Sunday newspaper. And as I\u2019m walking down the aisle, people were looking up at me as if they recognized me.\u00A0I was on the front page of The Globe, with the whole story.\nI just slunk down in my seat.\u00A0And the guy opposite me says, &amp;#8220;Is this you?&amp;#8221; And it was so amazing.\u00A0He said, &amp;#8220;I&amp;#8217;m so sorry.\u00A0I know, judging from reading this article, how hard this must be for you.&amp;#8221;\nI went away for a week and came back and started on Judy George International, my new branding and design company. By the time I came back, I was ready to go to town.\nNow, I\u2019m working on the biggest deal of my life, which is Sleepy\u2019s. You know, people say, &amp;#8220;What&amp;#8217;s so exciting about selling mattresses?&amp;#8221; But we&amp;#8217;re creating more than mattresses. We&amp;#8217;re creating the whole top of the bed. They&amp;#8217;re allowing us to do headboards, something Sleepy\u2019s has never done. We&amp;#8217;ll be in 800 stores.\nMORE:\u00A0Wall Street prepares to face the music\nSo I look back, I look at my age &amp;#8212; I&amp;#8217;m 72 &amp;#8212; and I don&amp;#8217;t want to change who I am. I don&amp;#8217;t want people to think I&amp;#8217;m younger. I\u2019m not going to get a\u00A0face-lift\u00A0 I have more energy than I&amp;#8217;ve had in 25 years. I&amp;#8217;ve been given a Sleepy&amp;#8217;s management team.\u00A0I love them.\u00A0They love me.\u00A0And they&amp;#8217;re giving me, along with my partner Kim, the chance of a lifetime to do something people only dream about.\u00A0\nMY ADVICE:\nResearch everything. I do huge amounts of background research before every meeting. With investors and potential partners, I find something they\u2019ve said and I quote it back to them. I\u2019ll even pay researchers a lot of money to find out whatever I can about the people I\u2019m talking to and their company.\u00A0 When I started Domain, I took a loan out on my house so I could hire a company to do market research that I could present at investor meetings.\nLook at failure as an opening. I used to tell people they\u2019ve got to get uncomfortable with their situation. If you\u2019re making too much money, if you\u2019re not taking enough risks, you can put off really great ideas with the notion, \u201CI\u2019ll do it later,\u201D and it just doesn\u2019t happen. There\u2019s nothing like getting fired to get you uncomfortable enough to go out and live your dream.\nTake the kids. My secret weapon was my family always. My whole life of work I\u2019ve brought my kids everywhere with me. I needed to do that to prevent guilt and burnout, but it also taught me organization and people management. Now, it\u2019s my grandchildren that I go everywhere with."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2012/11/09/from-stay-at-home-mom-of-four-to-furniture-queen/>