Jo Malone is the founder of the cosmetics and perfume business that bears her name. After selling the company to Estée Lauder in 1999, she set up the perfume company Jo Loves, which she now runs.

Q. You are now running your second business. Is it different from when you were head of your first company?

A. I miss the naïveté of running a first business, because I know what can happen. I know how far I can fall if I slip. Building a business in today’s economy is like building a tightrope with no safety net.

Q. Your first company, Jo Malone, became a huge global brand. Were you prepared for its success?

A. I never set out to create a global brand with Jo Malone. I wanted a little shop that made me enough money and used my creativity and made me happy in that way without making me work as hard as I did. But in fact what it did was make me work 10 times harder, and the word of mouth made it go much bigger and faster than we could have ever possibly imagine. We hit our five-year plan within four months. But of course if you grow at that pace, you have a different set of problems.

Q. Describe your decision-making style.

A. I’m not a conventional business woman. I’m not a conventional manager. I don’t lead in a conventional way. I’m very dyslexic. And dyslexics are often entrepreneurs because we have to get to a destination probably faster than anyone. If there is a problem or situation in the business, I can come up with a solution quicker and faster because my dyslexia taught me to do that. That’s not to say my team aren’t brilliant at thinking of solutions, but I will think of the extraordinary way of solving it.

If someone said to me, “We can take away your dyslexia and you would be able to tell right from left and read a graph,” I would say, “No thanks, I’ll live with my dyslexia.” Your brain apparently thinks differently.

My gut instinct is something I rely on every day — with the packaging of the product, for example. My instinct is telling me one thing and reality is telling something else. I rely on my gut instinct all the time in business. If something doesn’t feel right, I’m not going to do it, which can be very tricky in a team and in a small business.

Q. Why?

A. I’ll run with something because I truly believe it. If it goes wrong, it’s on my head and I’ll have to take responsibility for that, and I do. But when it’s an entrepreneurial business I can already see the product, see the shop opening in New York. I’m already there in my mind, and the reality is that I sometimes jump too quickly for the business and for the people in it.

Q. Do you remember the point when you decided you would be best off running your own business?

A. I used to work in a flower shop, and the lady who ran it had me go through hoops. I was watering flowers, and I took a bucket of water and threw it over her and told her to do it herself. I was fired.

My next boss was Justin Leblanc, who was one of the first in England to take delicatessen to a new level. I loved it there, but I gave a homeless person sitting outside a smoked salmon sandwich, and I was fired from there.

Then one day, when I was 17 and an apprentice in another flower shop, which I loved, I got a call. My mum was a beautician, and she had been taken desperately ill and I had to go back home and help. At the age of 17, I was the sole provider for the family. So I taught myself to make cosmetics. I learned how to make face creams and face masks.

It wasn’t until many, many years later that my love of the two — flowers and cosmetics — married, and I created my first fragrance. As you grow older, your passions start to collate and they become one, and that’s when sometimes great businesses are formed.

Q. What lessons in leadership and managing people have you picked up?

A. I don’t like hierarchy. Your team is the most important thing. They are your lifeline. The people that stand on the shop floor — they are the ones that tell the story every day. My job is to make sure that their life is as happy and as fulfilled as possible. I think it’s really important to let other people fulfill their dreams.

I learned a lot from my husband, who is a great people leader. I’m not so much. Running a business, you have to know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and you have to be realistic and truthful about that and allow people to do what they are good at. Let people have a voice. Credit people when credit is due. None of us are glory seekers here. Often the people who create something don’t get credit. I never want to run a business like that.

Q. How do you build a team?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/business/global/10iht-manager10.html?partner=rss&emc=rss