“You’ve got to be bold. If you sit back and you just sort of watch what everyone else is doing and wait for things to happen, you will lose and you wil go out of business.” ~ Jean Thompson
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Jean Thompson is a full-on chocoholic and has been for as long as she can remember. It’s therefore befitting that she is the Owner and CEO of Seattle Chocolate Company, one of the Northwest’s premiere chocolate companies.
As the Owner of Seattle Chocolate for 16 years now, Jean still brings an amazing amount of enthusiasm and excitement to running the company. In this conversation, she talks about how she continues to think about being innovate and disruptive in an industry that has perhaps become stagnant (that’s my word), by being a certain way. She wanted people to see chocolate in a different way. And she gets into those specifics.
She also reflects on how she questioned her own abilities at running the company when the recession hit and sales fell flat but she kept moving forward and came out the other side on top (while other chocolate companies went under).
What came out of that time was JCOCO, a slightly higher end chocolate with a philanthropic arm that has, to date, provided 2.7 million meals to those in need in just the past 5 years.
We wrapped up with some of Jean’s wonderful insights into travel and, of course, being bold.
With that, please enjoy this conversation with Jean Thompson!
Connect with Jean
Seattle Chocolate | JCOCO | Instagram (Seattle Chocolate) | Instagram (JCOCO) | Twitter (Seattle Chocolate) | Twitter (JCOCO)
Mentioned in this episode
Good to Great by Jack Collins (Amazon)
Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute (Amazon)
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sink (Amazon)
Connect with me
You can friend me on Facebook and follow me on Instagram. Ladies, join our Be Bold Facebook community where you’ll find support, encouragement and inspiration from other women doing their best to Be Bold.
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Be Bold,
Beth
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