After working with Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma and Disney, Kecia Hielscher became the owner of Formulary 55. Her experience shows which big-company practices translate well to a small business—and which ones do not.
Key Takeaways
- Kecia Hielscher brought decades of customer, retail, merchandising and product-development experience into her ownership of Formulary 55.
- Her corporate experience taught her that customers experience a brand as a whole, not as separate marketing, product and service departments.
- Small businesses can borrow the discipline of larger companies without copying their layers of bureaucracy.
- Formulary 55’s selective retail strategy shows why more distribution is not necessarily better distribution.
- Hielscher has learned that some of the hardest growth decisions involve turning down opportunities that do not fit the brand.
- Small businesses have advantages large corporations often lose, including speed, proximity to customers and the ability to change direction quickly.
- Corporate financial experience did not fully prepare Hielscher for how immediate cash flow, inventory and risk become when the business is your own.
There is a reason LearningFromBigBoys spends so much time looking at companies such as Apple, Nordstrom and other major brands. A small business may never have their budgets, staffs or distribution networks, but that does not mean there is nothing worth borrowing from the way they operate.
The trick is figuring out what to borrow. Copying a giant company’s organizational structure would be ridiculous for most small businesses, but borrowing its discipline around customers, products, branding and decision-making can be enormously useful.
Kecia Hielscher has seen that difference from both sides.
Before becoming the owner, CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Formulary 55, Hielscher spent decades working for major consumer companies, including Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma and Disney. She eventually left corporate life and acquired Formulary 55, an established bath, body and home fragrance company with its own products, customers and identity.
That transition did not mean abandoning everything she had learned in larger organizations. In many ways, those years became part of her advantage. At the same time, ownership forced her to learn things that are much easier to understand intellectually when someone else’s company, cash and inventory are on the line.
Her experience is a good reminder that small businesses should not try to behave like scaled-down corporations. They should take the parts of big-company thinking that improve the business while protecting the speed, closeness and flexibility that come with being small.
Table of Contents
The First Big-Company Lesson: The Customer Doesn’t See Departments
One of the most important ideas Hielscher brought into Formulary 55 came from watching how premium consumer companies think about the customer experience.
“Those companies taught me that the customer experience is built through thousands of details,” she said. Product, packaging, merchandising, service and storytelling all have to reinforce one another.
That sounds obvious until you look at how many businesses operate. Marketing may promise one thing while the product experience communicates something else. The website can feel polished while the packaging looks like an afterthought, or an attractive product can be undermined by confusing customer service and inconsistent communication.
Customers do not mentally divide those experiences into departments. To them, it is all the same company.
That was one reason we previously looked at how Nordstrom uses email to engage customers. The useful lesson was never simply “send emails like Nordstrom.” It was how the retailer uses presentation, merchandising, service and communication to reinforce the larger experience customers expect from the brand.
For a small business, consistency can actually be easier to achieve because fewer people and departments are involved. The owner may be able to influence everything from the website and packaging to the wording of an email, which gives a small company an opportunity to make all those pieces feel as if they belong together.
SCORE’s guidance on building a strong small-business customer experience is useful for owners who want to examine that experience more systematically rather than treating customer service as something that happens only when a customer complains.
Protect What Customers Already Value
Hielscher faced another challenge that would not exist if she had started Formulary 55 from scratch: she bought a company people already knew.
That meant she inherited something valuable, but also something fragile. Existing customers had expectations about the products, fragrances, craftsmanship and overall character of the company, so changing everything simply because there was a new owner could easily have destroyed part of what she had purchased.
Her approach was to start with a basic question: Why do customers already love us?
She identified authenticity, craftsmanship, fragrance and the tactile quality of the products as parts of Formulary 55 that were worth protecting. At the same time, she believed there was room to make the overall presentation more intentional, strengthen product development and create clearer standards around the brand.
That balance between preserving and improving is especially important when taking over an established business. The new owner naturally wants to make an impact, but changing something and improving something are not necessarily the same thing.
We explored that side of her acquisition in more depth on PowerHomeBiz in What Buying Formulary 55 Taught Kecia Hielscher About Growing an Existing Brand. The larger lesson applies even to entrepreneurs who did not acquire their companies: before changing a product, customer experience or brand identity, understand which parts customers consider essential.
The SBA’s resources on market research and competitive analysis can also help small businesses put more structure around that question. Understanding your customers and competitive position is much more useful than making changes based solely on what the owner personally likes.
Bigger Distribution Is Not Automatically Better Distribution
Large retailers spend enormous amounts of time thinking about channels, positioning and where products belong. Small companies sometimes reduce that decision to one question: How can we get in front of more people?
Hielscher does not look at distribution that way.
Formulary 55 has focused heavily on independent boutiques, spas and specialty retailers instead of trying to be available everywhere possible. For a brand built around fragrance, gifting, craftsmanship and presentation, those retailers can do something a giant online marketplace may not do as well: place the product in the right context and have a person actually recommend it.
As Hielscher put it, she would rather build the right distribution than simply the widest distribution.
That is a branding decision disguised as a sales decision.
Where customers encounter a product influences how they perceive it. A handcrafted fragrance product sitting inside a carefully curated boutique tells a different story than exactly the same product appearing among thousands of unrelated search results on a marketplace.
Small businesses therefore need to think beyond reach. More potential customers sound attractive, but the more important question is whether a sales channel brings the right customers while supporting the positioning and economics of the business.
LearningFromBigBoys has looked at the same principle from another angle in our discussion of understanding your target market through the example of Ralph Lauren. Companies become easier to position when they are clear about who they want to serve instead of constantly broadening themselves in an effort to appeal to everyone.
The SBA makes a similar practical case for studying market segments and competitors when determining where a business has an advantage.
Learning to Say No Is Part of Brand Strategy
One of Hielscher’s harder lessons as an owner has been that growth opportunities are not automatically good opportunities.
A large retailer can bring revenue, exposure and thousands of potential new customers. For a smaller brand, saying no to that kind of opportunity can feel almost irresponsible, particularly when the numbers look attractive in the short term.
Hielscher has nevertheless walked away from opportunities when she believed the placement was wrong for Formulary 55. She described two such decisions as particularly difficult, but looking back, she believes saying no helped protect the brand equity and the level at which she wanted the company to compete.
This is one of those lessons that is easier to admire in a giant company than practice in your own small business.
Large companies regularly kill products, turn down partnerships and walk away from projects that do not fit the strategy. An entrepreneur who has fought for every sale may be much more reluctant to do the same thing.
Yet saying yes to everything can eventually leave a brand without a clear identity. The problem is not simply that the wrong opportunity consumes time; it can also change pricing expectations, retailer relationships and the way customers think about the product.
LearningFromBigBoys has discussed this kind of focus before in Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs. One of the recurring lessons from Apple’s approach was that focus requires eliminating opportunities as well as pursuing them.
The scale is obviously different for Formulary 55, but the principle travels well. A strategy is not much of a strategy if every attractive opportunity can override it.
Small Businesses Should Borrow Discipline, Not Bureaucracy
It would be easy to assume that someone coming out of major corporations would try to install more layers, meetings and processes in a small company.
Hielscher found that one of Formulary 55’s greatest advantages is precisely the opposite.
If she sees something going wrong, she can walk into the production space, speak directly with the people making the products and change it. The distance between spotting a problem and acting on it can be extremely short.
That kind of speed becomes harder as organizations grow.
A large company may have resources a small business cannot match, but those resources usually come with more people, approvals and competing priorities. A small owner may not have a research department or a dozen analysts, but she may be able to hear the same customer complaint three times in a week and make a change before the next week begins.
That responsiveness is an asset, and small businesses should be careful not to engineer it out of themselves as they become more organized.
Processes are valuable when they prevent errors, preserve quality or make work easier to repeat. They become a problem when employees start following procedures that no longer serve a useful purpose simply because “that’s the process.”
The best lesson to bring down from a large organization is therefore not bureaucracy. It is discipline: paying attention to quality, understanding the customer, knowing the numbers, setting standards and following through consistently.
“Beautiful Ideas Still Have to Sell”
Hielscher’s background in retail also taught her to evaluate products from two directions at once.
She could appreciate the creative side of a product—its design, fragrance, packaging and story—but her corporate career taught her that those things eventually need to produce a commercial result.
“Beautiful ideas still have to sell,” she said.
That line could apply to almost any small business.
Entrepreneurs are often emotionally attached to what they create, particularly when the product reflects their taste or personality. That passion can be an enormous advantage, but it can also make it harder to accept when the marketplace is not responding.
Large retailers cannot afford to keep treating a product as successful simply because someone internally loves it. They look at sell-through, margins, inventory movement, customer response and whether merchandise earns its space.
Hielscher applies that thinking to Formulary 55’s relationships with retailers as well. A product should not merely look good on a boutique shelf; it needs to sell through for the retailer carrying it.
This is another place where small businesses can benefit from big-company thinking without needing big-company tools. Even a very small seller can track which products move, which ones customers repurchase, what gets returned, what sits too long and what generates interest without generating purchases.
The numbers do not replace creativity. They help the business understand whether its creativity is connecting with customers.
Marketing Dollars Have to Compete With Everything Else
One of Hielscher’s early experiences as owner also changed the way she thinks about marketing.
Formulary 55 made two marketing investments that produced disappointing returns: one with a niche print publication and another through a monthly sample-box company. Both sounded as though they could provide valuable awareness and sales, but neither delivered what the company expected.
Her response was not to decide that marketing does not work. Instead, she became stricter about comparing a marketing opportunity with every other way the company could spend the same money.
Could the dollar generate more value in advertising, or would it be better invested in raw materials? Would product development create a better return? Does the team need resources more urgently? Is additional inventory more important?
That way of thinking is particularly important in a smaller company because capital is finite.
A large corporation can fund several experiments and absorb some failures. When a small business makes a poor $20,000 investment, the consequences may affect inventory, hiring or other projects the company now cannot afford.
The SBA’s guidance on managing a business and its finances discusses tools such as cost-benefit analysis for weighing the strengths and weaknesses of business decisions. That framework fits closely with the habit Hielscher developed after those early marketing disappointments: every dollar should be compared with its alternatives.
Marketing claims themselves also need discipline. The FTC’s Advertising and Marketing guidance for businesses is a useful reference for small companies developing advertising, product claims and promotional materials, particularly brands operating in categories where ingredient or product claims can influence a buying decision.
Corporate Life Could Not Prepare Her for Everything
Hielscher’s corporate experience gave her a considerable head start, but ownership exposed the limits of that preparation.
In a large organization, there is usually someone to call. Finance has specialists. Human resources has specialists. Operations, legal, technology and merchandising may all have their own teams.
In a small business, even when other people help solve a problem, responsibility eventually works its way back to the owner.
That became especially obvious with money.
Hielscher has said one of her early mistakes was believing that carefully watching the profit-and-loss statement would be enough. In her corporate career, entire departments managed cash flow, and unless there was a serious issue, it did not necessarily become part of her everyday work.
Ownership made cash flow much more personal.
An inventory mistake is no longer an abstract line on a corporate report. An unexpected repair, equipment failure or slow month can directly affect what the company can afford to do next.
Today, she says she reviews the P&L monthly, monitors cash flow at least weekly and maintains a cushion for unexpected expenses.
That is a particularly useful lesson for entrepreneurs moving from senior corporate roles into ownership. Their years of experience absolutely matter, but there will still be parts of small-business management they have never had to handle at this level of detail.
There Is a Personal Side to Leaving Corporate Life, Too
Looking only at Hielscher’s retail and branding experience misses part of the story.
Taking everything you have learned inside established organizations and applying it to your own company requires a very different relationship with risk. The final decision is now yours, and so are the consequences.
Hielscher has talked candidly about reaching a point where she had to push past fear and ask herself, “Why not me? Why not now?” She had experimented with entrepreneurship previously, including consulting and jewelry businesses, but buying Formulary 55 was a much larger commitment to herself as an owner.
For readers interested in that side of her story, our sister site WomenHomeBusiness published the full Q&A, Kecia Hielscher on Leaving Corporate Life, Buying Formulary 55 and Betting on Herself. The interview goes deeper into the transition from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, how her relationship with risk changed and why she believes experienced women sometimes underestimate how transferable their professional skills really are.
Her experience is a useful counterpoint to the idea that entrepreneurship requires throwing away your previous career and beginning again.
Sometimes the career is the preparation.
What Small Businesses Should Really Learn From the Big Boys
The value of studying large companies has never been about pretending your ten-person business is Disney or Nordstrom.
It is about looking closely enough to separate the principles from the scale.
Hielscher took customer focus, merchandising discipline, attention to detail and the belief that every part of a brand experience should work together from her corporate career. She did not need a giant organization to apply those lessons at Formulary 55.
At the same time, becoming a small-business owner taught her to value things that can disappear inside giant companies: speed, direct access to customers, close contact with production and the ability to make a decision without sending it through five levels of approval.
That combination may be the real advantage.
Small businesses do not have to choose between being professionally run and being entrepreneurial. They can learn from how sophisticated companies think while remaining small enough to move quickly, stay close to customers and change course when something is not working.
The goal is not to become one of the big boys.
It is to become better at being small.
