If there’s anyone who knows all about doing the unsexy work to make her way on top, that would be Mary Crafts. She owns the most celebrated catering company in Utah, a multimillion-dollar empire with 250 employees. She talks to Dr. Tracey Jones about being a leader and one thing about leadership that one should realize. Mary says that for any aspiring leader, one should learn how to delegate and see that you can’t and should not do everything. It’s a matter of leading your team because no one can be like you and no one knows your vision and what you want to happen in the next 5-10 years.
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Mary Crafts - Leaders On Leadership
I am so excited because my guest is Mary Crafts. She is a living legend. From humble beginnings and dire circumstances, she invested blood, sweat, and countless tears into building what would become the most celebrated catering company in Utah. That multimillion-dollar empire became a launching pad for so much more. Mary has handed the reins of her empire to her incredibly gifted children, who have taken her company to the next level while Mary is turning her attention to helping others build their dreams. Whether those dreams are centered around business, family or personal growth, Mary is ready to engage your expertise, assets, and energy into helping others build and grow. Mary, thank you so much for being with me.
That person sounds incredible. I'd like to meet her.
I am so blessed to have crossed your path. For the readers out there because you're always like, “How did you guys intersect?” I'm always preaching, advocates, and great people connect with other great people. Mark Victor Hansen, who was on my show, connected me with Laura DiBenedetto and she had turned me on to Mary Crafts. Ask all those tremendous people in your life who they can connect you with. Mary had me on her show. I enjoy the dialogue. I'm thrilled to have you as we turn and talk about leadership.
I'm excited. I love the topic.
Mary, my father wrote a speech many decades ago called The Price of Leadership. He was known as a leadership expert. Pragmatic, real, but also motivational and joyful. He encompassed the two sides of it. He always told me, “Tracey, if you're going to be engaging in leadership and not just calling yourself a leader, you're going to have to be paying the price.” He outlines four key things that leaders have to be willing to pay. The first of those is loneliness. You and I have all heard the term. It's lonely at the top. Could you unpack for us with your storied career? I know you're transitioning to another phase of your life right now. Could you unpack for our readers what loneliness and leadership mean? Maybe share a season where you went through, how you got through it.
I have a lot of people oftentimes ask me if they're cut out to be an entrepreneur, if they should be a leader. I always compare to my life prior to this and say I worked for the state of Utah. Somebody paid my health insurance. I got an hourly wage. At 5:00, I check out and I went home. On the weekends, they were my own. If that life appeals to you, then this life is not for you because the price of leadership truly is that you never get to set it aside and say, “I'm done, it's 5:00.” That you never say, “I don't have to worry about who's paying my health insurance is taken care of.” You were not only about your own health insurance, but all of your employees and all of those who are on your team.
Being A Leader: It’s lonely being a leader because no one else is feeling those things, experiencing them the way you are and feels the weight of the responsibility the way you do.
There's a whole big piece that unless you've led something like this, you don't have a concept of the weight of responsibility. I remember the first time I ever drove into our parking lot. There was one car there besides mine. I thought, “You mean I’m responsible for her life?” When there were 100 cars in the parking lot, no one else feels the weight to that. You are the only one in your organization that feels the weight of every single family that's there and what they're relying upon you to bring to the table. There are so many things that happen in a leadership position that are yours and yours alone. It's lonely at the top because no one else is feeling those things, experiencing them the way you are and feels the weight of the responsibility the way that I do.
That is so valuable for those people that are thinking about it. It's also valuable for those of you working for somebody else. Take it easy on your entrepreneurial boss, because until your Social Security number is tied to that EIN and you signed the front of the checks and not the endorsements on the back, you don't know. I, like you, worked in other orient stock options and guaranteed retirement and they paid everything. You get out on your own. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
It's not a bad thing, but it is a real thing. I wish I would've been kinder and gentler when I was in the positions where I thought, “Anybody can do this leadership thing.” There's so much more than calling the shots, as you beautifully put out there. The next topic he talked about after loneliness is weariness. You can't just shut stuff off at 5:00 PM. I know there's a lot of balance and stuff like that going on. Mary, how do you stay refreshed as a leader so you can be the person that your people knew? How do you stay replenished?
At first, in the early years of my business, I thought of a way to get more done. When I say early years, I ran that company for 35 years. Early years for me is anything before the year 30. In the beginning, I shifted my kitchen. I thought the way to get more done was, because I was always out of time, to run between my chopping area and the stove and the walk-in cooler and the delivery van. If you ran between each one of those, you had to be able to make up 15, 20 minutes each day. Crazy stuff like that you would think. For twenty years of my business, I had four hours of sleep at night because I thought the way to get more hours in the day was simply to sleep less and care about me more and quit getting care about me less.
Put me at the bottom, be the martyr down there and then I would have time for everyone else, all the rest of my company. What I began to learn at year twenty was that if I began to put myself first, I know that's a bizarre concept to people who are leading a group, but as I began to take better care of me, I became better to care for others and learn what it was like to sleep six hours of night instead of four. It was an incredible opportunity for me. When I began to make this change, I had pushed myself to weigh 284 pounds. I was absolutely immobile, and yet I was at the top of my field in catering. I was completely successful, but inside, never enough. I had to always bring more, always work harder to prove to the world and myself that I was enough. The weariness stops when the self-love begins.
Spark is my book. What was the spark where you finally said, “According to the world, I've achieved it all?” I also reclaimed my health. What was the spark that made you go, "No, me first. Everything flows out of me." My dad always told me that if you want better outer dialogue, you got to focus on your inner dialogue. What was it that you finally said, “That's it?”
I'm not quite sure what the exact cog was the click to my head. I've tried to regain it. All I know is that for so many years, there was this foreboding of something else that should be here. I’m missing something in life. There's something not right. When I got the photos back from a 50th birthday party where all of those pounds were hanging on me and the sadness in my face surrounded by hundreds of people who were celebrating me, I sat there and wept. This is back when you went to Kmart to get your photos and not on your phone and you got the back and a few of them turned out. There was one of me standing off by myself. That's where I am, off by myself. I thought, “I never thought I would be here.”
I began asking the question, “How do I move away from the spot?” For me, I knew that I'd been on enough yo-yo diets. That wasn't the right thing. I needed to go after what the piece was that was creating that. What my fears were that was keeping me bound up. As I began to go after those fears, people say, “That must have been horrendous to lose 145 pounds.” I'm like, “It must've been, but it didn't seem that bad and hard because I was dealing more with inside.” I couldn’t do surgery and pills because those weren't the answer to what was inside of me. As I dealt with those fears, I found the way is literally just going away. I went to the gym. I started walking outside. I began to eat better, but they were a natural outgrowth of letting go of the fear of not being enough.
That's one of the things people talk about with setting goals. Before you can move to the goal, you got to first unlock your fear. You're driven, Mary. You're successful. You would have already hit that goal, but you got to back it up and target exactly what's going on. For weariness for people, without your health and even with what's going on with COVID, you'll most likely beat it if you're healthy. If you're not, it’s 2 and 3 times more deadly. Your health is one of the greatest things to help you combat the weariness of leadership. I went to war. You had to be in physical shape. Why? There's a physicality and a stamina, a leadership.
If you don't have that, no matter how great you are up here, we're still flesh and bones. Thank you for sharing that. Loneliness, weariness. The next thing my dad talked about was abandonment. He used to tell me, not to denigrate me, but he'd say, “Most people do more in a day to contribute to their failure than they do their success because we focus on what we like and want to think about and not what we ought and need to think about.” For him, abandonment was this type of hyper-focus, this single-mindedness. You don't achieve success by focusing on a million different things. How do you abandon and stay on point?
I like the use of the word abandonment because I do think that there's that sense of letting go. It's not that I'm being abandoned. It's that I'm abandoning those old habits. Stephen Covey, he lived here in my town. He wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He said the worst thing in the world are post-it notes because they allow you to organize all the things you have to do. If you do use those post-it notes, make sure you only touch them once. I thought about that at my desk, how many times I reorganized my post-it notes that I’m like, “These are the ones I'll do today. I'll save these. I didn't get this done, so I'm going to move it over here.”
You touch those post-it notes a dozen times and sometimes, “That’s no longer.” You’d crumple it up. Once you pick up a post-it notes, to not set it down and to whatever’s on there, you do. For me, that was a letting go of what I thought was important. Juggling and organizing my time was more important than doing it. When I finally realized that old phrase, just do it, that Nike shines through for a reason because they just do it. You can organize all you want. You can read all the books that you want to read. You can listen to all the podcasts you want, but until you just do it and not procrastinate and not find a reason to postpone and organize those damn post-it notes again, you're not going to ever do it. Procrastination, for me, is one of those things that I detest. I detest it in myself and others. I'm becoming more patient with it. That post-it note quote has stuck in my brain for most of my business career and to let go of what I thought worked. Organization is great, but not unless you're just doing it.
I had never heard that before and I thought I've heard it all. Somebody else was telling me about The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We were talking about the top books that have changed our lives and I was like, “That's right.” Somebody brought that up. I had not heard that. I love how you said there's a difference between a perceived and a real need. Just because somebody's pulling my attention to do something, that doesn't necessarily mean that this needs to get bumped up to the head of my list. We, as entrepreneurs, need to be conscious of our time and guard our time. Our time is valuable.
Maybe the thing I think about, this idea of abandonment, if you're an entrepreneur and you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you have to be so cautious because you don't wear all the hats. I had to abandon the idea that I could do everything better than anyone else and that if I wasn't there, things didn't get done. I had to abandon the idea that I was the only one with good ideas. That came to me clearly during the 2002 Olympics, which we had here in Salt Lake City. I had 17 gigs a day for 21 days. I had them organized in my brain. I had all these shifts and all these waiters and all these organizations I'd put together. I had it in my brain that I would show up at the first one and make sure that was going right and then I'd show up with the next one and they would have my oversight on every single one.
The first day or the time I'd got to event number two, it was over. I was like, “You did this without me? What did you do?” They said, “We just did what we do. We did this and we did this. It was great.” I had to abandon the idea that I wasn't the only one with a great idea. I had to learn to delegate because you can never grow until you can delegate. It's easy to delegate scraping dishes. It's much harder to delegate dealing with the client. The decisions on marketing, on who's going to be your right hand, those decisions you wonder, “Who else does those?” It's lonely at the top only sometimes because you make it that way.
Weariness, too. That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, it was Dan Sullivan who said, "You delegate everything except genius." There are other people, but you have to be the higher up, you have to be very intentional about your business partner and your co-leaders. They're out there as leaders.
You should know what your skillset is. I thought my skillset was being a chef and then I realized, “I can hire that.” I moved into the front office and then I thought my skillset was sales. By the time I got done describing a piece of steak, that's what they wanted to have no matter what. I thought that was my skillset, but I realized I could hire salespeople. What I couldn't hire was me. I couldn't hire the person that was looking down the road at the next five years and what I wanted to create and what I wanted to be. That's where I knew I had to be.
That is a perfect segue into the next and final point, which is vision. You dovetailed right into that. I'm an operations girl. Same as you, I can juggle a lot of different things and make budgets and beautiful things happen, but I never considered myself a visionary. My dad was like, “Tracey, a visionary is seeing what needs to be done and then doing it.” Can you share with me then, once you realize this, how did that help you hone your vision?
My beginnings were so humble. I started in my condo kitchen. I had two tiny boys, 1 and 3 years old. I would put them in a little red wagon and walk around the neighborhood selling breads and cookies to my neighbors. I always tell people, “If ever you're out of money and you need to have some cash, find two small children, put them in a red wagon.” Anybody will buy anything from you, at least in your neighborhood. People said, “Did you ever dream that when you started off with those humble beginnings that this was where you'd end up with this multimillion-dollar company and 250 employees and best of state twenty years in a row?" I looked at them very clearly and say, “Absolutely. If you don't dream it, see it and envision it, there's no way you can make it happen.”
The vision piece is so critical. You have to be able to see where you're going and mark your path. There's another thing. You have to be like Gumby. Do you remember Gumby, the green guy? You set your figure in one direction and you have your finger pointing one way, and that's Gumby, until there's a shift and then you have to reform those Mr. Gumby and go this way. If that hasn't happened with COVID, I don't know what has. My company, its focus was 100% the large event, gatherings 300 or more, the big destination wedding that came to Utah for the mountains, everything big. There is zero of that business. I don't know when the next time we’re going to have a gathering of 3,000 people in Salt Lake. Gumby had to be reshaped.
Before we had a minimum of 50 people, now Gumby’s holding up two fingers saying, “You got two at work.” You have to be flexible. You have to always be looking. If I have given my children one gift, I believe that's what I gave them, that is the ability to have vision, to be able to see where you're going and then to give your best every single day, no matter what. I'm not talking about perfectionism because perfectionism will kill you, but excellence will inspire you every day and will take you to that vision that you've dreamed.
Mary, what is the next vision for you? I hear your kids are in the company. I know you could talk to me in your time where you had me on your show in our introduction about how you're transitioning into this. Can you tell our readers about the next vision for where you're going?
I knew when I retired that I had to have something, that I could swing my legs out of my bed every morning and hit the ground with the same zest and enthusiasm energy that I had for 35 years. It wasn't to go play golf. I don't have anything against golf. I want a cute little outfit and a bag, but it was about something else. I spent time pondering that and creating a new vision for it. I knew that my vision now was empowering myself. First, always you have to start here and then others to live a fearless life, because fear is what had me by the jugular. By being able to release that, I became empowered and unbounded. I went from sorrow to summit, which is the name of my book that’s going to be published.
If I can share some of that knowledge, I will have created my vision and accomplished a mission. I do my weekly podcast. I've finished my book. I talk whenever I have the opportunity around the country. I want to share others that it is possible to do this, to let go of fears, and to change the neurotransmitters in our brain that have run the show for so many years, “You're not enough. You're always a failure. You're never going to have money. You're not good at that. Math is not a skill that women have.” How to truly get rid of those, reprogram your brain to say like, “I am a badass.” I did it at age 50 and after age 60. It’s never too late.
I have more people in my Spark courses and connected with us, 50s, 60s, 70s. The mean age is late 60s because people are like, “My ticket is not punched. It's time to go on.” I love what you're doing. I love you. I'm so excited. You're like my sister. I can't believe that we've connected. Mary, where can people connect with you?
Probably the best all-around place is on my website. My website is MaryCraftsInc.com. You'll see all about me, what I'm doing with my wellness programs, what I'm doing with Fit and Fabulous After 50, where you can find all my podcasts, about my book, about where I'm speaking, how you can hire me, topics I talk on, most importantly, my cell phone number is on it, believe it or not.
You guys need to check out her website. I saw it on there.
Being A Leader: You can read all you want, you can listen to all the podcasts all you want, but until you just do it and not procrastinate and not find a reason to postpone, you’re not ever going to do it.
People can reach out to me. I'm accessible. I'm real. I'm still finding my path, just like everyone else.
It's a beautiful journey. It's even more beautiful when you have people to share it with. Thank you, Mary. Anything else that has come to your mind about leadership that you would like to share with our leaders before we wrap things up?
One thing. That is that nothing is impossible and it's never too late. If your leadership style isn't quite what you want, if your company isn't quite what you had originally envisioned, it's never too late. If you weren't living the most beautiful, meaningful life, it's yet obtainable. I was interviewing for a company to represent me in the speaking world. This was before COVID. They said, “Mary, you have a lot of credentials. That sounds pretty good, but you're 66 years old. How long do you think you're going to do this?” I said squarely, “You tell me what the power of a 90-year-old woman coming on the stage who's a badass and saying, ‘Let's do this thing?’” They got it that I lived a certain life before. I'm going to have as many years in this life as I did in the one that didn't work. I'm living until 105. I'm going to be productive, giving, contributing, because I truly believe what I told you. Nothing is impossible and it's never too late.
Mary, I can't thank you enough. I feel like some of those things you share with me, you spoke to me, I got goosebumps a couple of times because there are some words in there of affirmation that you spoke directly to me. I want to thank you so much for being a guest on my show. I know our readers are going to be thrilled to hear your wisdom and insights too.
Thank you, Tracey. It was a delight to be here with you.
You're so welcome. For our tremendous family out there, please reach out to Mary. She's got her website. You've got her cell phone number, connect with her. If you're in any stage of your life and could use a slice of Mary Crafts like we all could, please reach out to her and follow her. If you're a fan of the show, please subscribe, like us, and leave us a comment. We answer all our comments and we'll be honored if you would do us the honor of a five-star rating. On our website, you can download a free copy of The Price of Leadership so you can hear all the things my father was talking about. The loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. It sounds scary, but not when you have the right attitude, as Mary so aptly put out. Thanks to our Tremendous family out there. Keep on paying the price of leadership, have a tremendous rest of the day.
Important Links:
Mark Victor Hansen - Previous episode
Laura DiBenedetto - Previous episode
Show - Reclaim Your Life Position with Dr. Tracey Jones
About Mary Crafts
Mary Crafts is… quite simply… a living legend. From humble beginnings and dire circumstances, she invested blood, sweat, and countless tears into building what would become the most celebrated catering company in Utah.
That multi-million dollar empire became the launching pad for so much more. Today, Mary has handed the reins of her catering empire to her incredibly gifted children who have taken her company to the next level, while Mary turns her attention to helping others build their dreams.
Whether those dreams are centered around business, family or personal growth, Mary is ready to engage her expertise, assets, and energy into helping others build and grow!