Do you have a passion for starting your own business? Lee and Beth Wilson are local entrepreneurs with extensive experience starting businesses from the ground up. From an escape room, running from the law on a reality tv show, and making candles, they share their entrepreneurship story on the newest Pocket Change Podcast episode.
"That's really a window into how our marriage works," said Lee. "We take turns. We take turns with the ideas. We take turns with the big exciting things."
After pursuing ministry, the Wilsons moved to Jackson from Louisville, Kentucky, for a position with campus ministry at Union University. From there, a friend of Lee's opened some successful escape rooms on Union's campus. Lee became interested in pursuing this project full-time to open escape rooms for the Jackson community, and they expanded to other communities like Waco, Texas, and Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Since escape rooms weren't standard for small-town communities then, the Wilsons gained some attention from an unexpected organization—the CBS Network. CBS had an idea for a show called Hunted, where fake fugitives had to try to escape from real law enforcement officials. The network cast Lee since he had experience with escape rooms to see if that skill set could impact actually "escaping" the law. The Wilsons' strategic goal for the show was to be the most memorable.
Wisdom House started as a furniture flipping business and then transitioned into a candle-making business. Candle-making is Beth's passion, and Lee has been an encouraging presence throughout building the company. Last year, they experienced significant growth at almost 200%, and they are hoping to reach $1 million in sales in 2025.
To learn more about Wisdom House or to purchase a candle, visit wisdomhouse.com or go to their Etsy Shop.
The Pocket Change Podcast is presented by Leaders Credit Union. Visit leaderscu.com to begin your financial journey with us!
Shea:
Hey, this is Shea,
Carrie:
and this is Carrie.
Shea:
Welcome to the Pocket Change Podcast.
Carrie:
Where you'll learn better ways to spend, save, and invest, and take control of your financial journey.
Shea:
Carrie, do you know what this smells like? Do you recognize this smell?
Carrie:
I think it smells like a champion. It says be a champion.
Shea:
It does, and it smells like if you've ever walked into Leaders...
Carrie:
Our branches, that's right.
Shea:
Our brand scent that we have. So these candles are handmade here by our guests that we're having on the podcast in Jackson. So we're excited to have them on today.
Carrie:
That's right. They have a very interesting story of how they got to where they are today, where they're making candles. So I can't wait to hear all about their journey. We're excited to welcome our guests, Lee and Beth Wilson of Wisdom House. Welcome to Pocket Change.
Beth Wilson:
Thank you.
Lee Wilson:
It's great to be here.
Carrie:
Okay, so for our listeners who don't know about your story, can you share a little bit about your journey with Wisdom House, entrepreneurship, and reality TV?
Lee Wilson:
Well, we've followed a pretty conventional path to entrepreneurship, and locking people in rooms for fun, and being on TV running from the law. We met in college at Texas A&M, so we're both originally from Texas. I studied English, she studied communications. We fell in love, got married, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where I went to seminary for a few years. From there, we thought we were going to do church planting or ministry or something in that area and ended up being invited to come and take a job, an interview for a job at Union University working in campus ministry. That's how we ended up in Jackson. Just, a friend asked us if we were interested in moving away from Louisville, and we decided to take the jump to start a family and start our life, and of course, worked in campus ministry and taught some classes and got to travel internationally and do a lot of really exciting things. In the midst of all that, we accidentally started an escape room.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, it was about six years into our time at Union, maybe seven years? Six years in?
Lee Wilson:
Yeah. I mean, our life has always been crazy together. I mean, there have been so many unexpected twists and turns. We have never really had a plan that we have stuck to and followed through to the end. There's always been some interruption. So even moving into Jackson, we moved just in time for the tornado to come through and hit campus. That changed our jobs and changed our lives. Then we've just had these opportunities that have been completely unexpected. To answer the actual question that you asked about entrepreneurship, we became entrepreneurs completely by accident. We had a really good friend, Jared Downhauer, who is just one of those creative nerds, just ideas all day long. One of his ideas was to start an escape room on campus for students at Union, and so he worked with some students to raise some money for RIFA, a local nonprofit, and he basically put together these escape rooms They were super successful, and one day, he and I were just having a meeting about something else that was going on in our lives. I asked him a couple of questions about these escape rooms. I was doing it like, sometimes you'll have a friend that's really excited about something, and you just have to entertain the conversation so you can move on to what you actually care about. So we were having one of those chats where I was just letting him talk about his new toy, this thing that he loved. He started to get my attention when he was like, "Yeah, we've had 800 people come and play in these little rooms that we had on campus at Union."
Beth Wilson:
And we were laughing about it because we were like, "Well, that's a lot of Union students." He was like, "It's not Union students at all."
Lee Wilson:
We were like, "Wait, what? Who is coming to do this activity?" He was like, "Just people," and I was like, “Well, what people? Where did they... How did you get them there? How did you get their attention?” He was like, “Well, we didn't. They just showed up." And I was like, “Wait, you got 800 people just to show up at Union without trying?" That's not normal. I mean, maybe things have changed, and that happens all the time these days, but back when we were having this conversation eight years ago, that just didn't happen. So suddenly, this part of my brain that's like, this is a mystery to be solved, got interested and started asking him more and more questions, and it turned into, instead of a conversation where I'm entertaining a friend's interest, it was like, it became my interest, and it became this ongoing talk that we would have every time we'd run into each other. There was a new idea, a new concept, a new beginning of a plan. At a certain point, we just had to decide, we're going to do it or we're going to stop talking about it, but in order to execute the plan, we had to schedule a meeting with our wives.
Beth Wilson:
That's right.
Carrie:
That's where you come in.
Beth Wilson:
That's right. We were on a very lowly budget, very lowly budget, but he was like, “Hey, I was thinking that we could take maybe $1,500 from our savings account and do this thing.” I'm like, “We only have $1,500.” This conversation came at a time where, I'm sure you can relate, where you're in a job and you're either outgrowing the job or the job is changing. It just becomes abundantly clear that you have got to make a change, and you're not quite sure if it's you or the job, but you can just feel it growing. So I would have said no. We didn't have much to our name.
Lee Wilson:
I mean, it was absurd.
Beth Wilson:
We had two kids, and I was like, “That's fine. Let's just do it.”
Carrie:
Aren't you so glad you said yes?
Beth Wilson:
I think so, but I just remember... I'm sure you've had moments in your life when you're like that, and you're like, it's honestly worth it. If this is the jump that you need for health and just to be reinvigorated, there's a spark right now, and let's chase it. So it was worth it.
Carrie:
There's a reason that seed was planted, right?
Lee Wilson:
That's right, and the magic of what happened in the on-campus escape rooms just continued straight into what we were doing because we really didn't actually have to take any money out of our account. It was the situation where we put tickets out there live, and people had immediately started buying. So by the time we had any actual bills to pay, we already had funds coming in from people who wanted to play. It was just like, "Whoa, okay, now we've got to grab a hold of this thing and figure out what is it going to be," and that was the story of the next year is we had caught this buck and bronco of an idea, and we just had to figure out how to get on its back and hold on to it. So a one week pop up expanded to three weeks. Then we shut down because we have jobs, and our bosses are like, "Hey, where have you been?"
Lee Wilson:
"Come back to work."
Lee Wilson:
"What's going on?" So we opened back up in the summer for about a month, got shut down by the fire marshal, which is its own whole other conversation, and figured out how to relocate the entire business to downtown Jackson, where most people know us from the old Jackson Junior High School building.
Lee Wilson:
Then pretty quickly, within six months from the original pop-up, we opened full-time, again, kind of by accident, because we had to relocate and we had to financially make it make sense.
Beth Wilson:
It was within that year that you got the email.
Lee Wilson:
Within the first year, we had expanded from Jackson to Waco, Texas, and pretty soon after that, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Then in the middle of all of that, I got this email asking me if I wanted to be on a TV show.
Carrie:
I mean, just a random day.
Beth Wilson:
We get asked about a lot, and I'm like, "We didn't apply." It was just... Escape rooms were really at their peak when we got into it. It was very fortunate.
Lee Wilson:
Yeah, it was the right place, right time situation. The escape rooms were popping off all over the country. They were pretty established in LA and New York City and the big cities, but were not as common in smaller communities. We were one of the first in a community of under 100,000 people, and it got some attention, and we had to figure out every step of the process, building a website, doing the marketing. We figured out how to do Facebook ads. We did all of what now feels like these small ball things, but it made the business successful, and it made us decent at getting in front of a camera and talking about what we were doing and communicating what is an escape room to people. It just so happened that at that same time, the same crew that puts together Survivor and Amazing Race and Big Brother, all these big CBS TV shows, was interested in creating this show where normal everyday people partnered up and ran as fugitives from real life law enforcement, Secret Service, Navy Seals, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, all of those letters. You know, very serious people, I mean, one of the hunters that was primarily tasked with trying to chase me and my buddy, Hilmar down, is, to my knowledge, still the US Marshal, who has the record for capturing the most murderers in the history of the US Marshal's agency.
Shea:
And you didn't murder anybody.
Beth Wilson:
That's right.
Lee Wilson:
No. So anyway, because there's this big idea happening for this show, and one of the casting directors played an escape room where she lived in Pittsburgh and walked out of it and was like, "I just was in a confined space that somebody designed to keep me stuck in there. I had to figure it out and outsmart them. I wonder if a person like this would be successful as somebody running from the law, if they could take that skill set and turn it inside out and figure out how to escape the law and get out of there with a quarter of a million dollars."
Beth Wilson:
Yeah.
Shea:
Wow.
Lee Wilson:
She sent us an email and the subject line just said "TV Show," and it was from just a little Gmail account. I read it and there was a link.
Shea:
Is it spam?
Lee Wilson:
Yeah, no, there was a link to a press release about the show.
Carrie:
We're constantly telling people, Don't click on the link.
Lee Wilson:
Well, okay, so don't click on the link, but if it's legit, you should be able to find that link, some other avenues, and then compare the two. In our case, I did all the research. I did all the hunting. I found the press release by going through CBS.
Shea:
You were hunting before you were even on the show.
Lee Wilson:
That's right. There's a reason I was cast to be on the show. So, yeah, everything was legit. Everything lined up, and I scheduled a phone call with Ellen, and we got on the phone, and her voice matched the YouTube clips that I had heard of her talking about casting for Survivor. Yeah, we just hit it off. She loved us. She wanted me and Jared to come and be on the show. So I talked to him. Jared, I mentioned it earlier, but he was our business partner with the escape rooms. He had just gotten married, and it wasn't going to work out, and so I looked at Beth and she was like, "We got babies. That's not going to happen."
Beth Wilson:
I've seen the amazing race, and I see those couples and I'm like, "You don't want me. You don't want me in this with you."
Lee Wilson:
So then I was left knowing that, okay, these people want me to be on this show, potentially. Who is the person that I will pick up the phone right now and call, and they'll be like, "Yeah, let's go"? So I sent a text message to my friend Hilmar, and I was like, "Hey, man, what are you doing?" He was like, "I'm sitting in this cafe playing chess." I think he was in Los Angeles at the time. I was like, "Cool. Hey, do you want to run from the FBI with me?" He was like, "Yeah, man, when you want me to be there?"
Beth Wilson:
No questions.
Lee Wilson:
That's him through... I mean, I knew from the beginning that he was the perfect person to run from the cops with, and it turns out he was.
Shea:
I would like to go on the record and say, I believe I've participated with my wife and friends at all the escape rooms at Jackson's escape rooms…
Lee Wilson:
That's impressive.
Shea:
when they were there, and we got out of all them. Having that on the record. It's out there now. It's going to be recorded. So there you go. Escape Room, reality show. So, Beth, what did you think about Lee going on a reality show and taking off being hunted?
Beth Wilson:
Well, like I said, we didn't have a lot going on at the time. I mean, we did, but we just were at a place where we had nothing to lose. So we had some conversations of like, “What is the chances of you actually winning?” Because we don't know about TV production. We don't know if it's rigged. So we just assumed we probably can't win this. So let's just... We'll probably get more returns if we're just memorable. So we had talked about it, and it was like, “You go and have fun and just be the most memorable. Just have fun.”
Carrie:
No pressure.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, Pressure's off, just play the game and have fun, because there's so many moving pieces with producers and cameramen that we just... It was a new show, you don't know. We didn't even get the game rules until 24 hours before, but all along, what we knew, strategically, was just be memorable. So my thought was like, “Yeah, we know that we can't talk for six weeks.” Even if he got off day one, he's going to be sequestered for four weeks for sure. So I don't know if he's won or not. “So just go. We'll be fine.”
Lee Wilson:
The plan was that we were not going to talk to each other the entire time.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, we were not.
Carrie:
You're back home with the kids, right?
Beth Wilson:
They were going to try to play up emotions. Do you miss him and all this? I was like, “I can play into that if it would be a story.”
Lee Wilson:
That was hard. It was hard that we were going to be separated from each other, but not in the way that you might think. Like, yes, we were going to miss each other. Yes, that was going to be difficult, but it's really more like the way that even Beth is talking about this right now is this is a we thing. It was always a we thing. For the eight months leading into us actually doing the show, we were talking about it. Hilmar moved to our home. He's not from Jackson. We met when he was a student at Union, but he moved back to Jackson for us to work this thing strategically, a full-time job for eight months. So we were constantly talking about ideas and approaches, and Beth was in the mix. So we were planning how to win this show, and then I was gone, and we weren't able to talk to each other
Beth Wilson:
Yeah. I mean, they're calling me. They have surveillance on me. We've turned over all of our bank, everything that you could... We turn it all over to the show, so they know everything about you. It was just agreed, if we don't talk, there's literally nothing that you can tell them.
Carrie:
To know that you had her support and you were in this together, there's really nothing to worry about.
Beth Wilson:
There also wasn't pressure of like, you better not come back without anything. It was just be memorable. That was the mantra, be memorable.
Lee Wilson:
Yeah. You can win the show by winning the show, but you can also win the show by being the one that is talking to everybody and that everybody's interested in and curious about.
Carrie:
You win the crowd.
Beth Wilson:
That's exactly right.
Lee Wilson:
So that was really our strategy going in. It's like, of course we want to win, but we want to be the most memorable people. That's what we did. I mean, we did crazy stuff. Actually, for anybody that's seen the show, they know that Beth actually did get involved and was accidentally pulled into the action. We did some ridiculous stuff.
Beth Wilson:
It was fun.
Lee Wilson:
We flew her in on a private plane.
Carrie:
Oh, wow.
Lee Wilson:
She was pregnant with our third child and announced to me that it was a boy on television.
Carrie:
So you were very memorable then.
Beth Wilson:
I was just trying to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Lee Wilson:
We pranked the hunters. This wasn't on TV. So this is a bonus cut because they didn't get it on camera, so they couldn't obviously include it in the show.
Shea:
You heard it here on the Pocket Change podcast.
Lee Wilson:
Yeah, that's right, but we actually lured the hunters to a cornfield. When they went in to interview these people that helped us, one of them came out of the cornfield and slashed the tires on the hunter's vehicle. Because the camera didn't catch it, they couldn't include it in the show. That was the stuff we were trying to do.
Beth Wilson:
Most people were on the run. They were on the offense.
Shea:
Yeah, it sounds like it.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah. So I felt great about it.
Carrie:
Okay, so you won. You won the crowd, but you also won the game. So how did it feel coming back home after winning? Were you like, had this newfound inspiration?
Lee Wilson:
Well, I mean, yes. Very much so, but the show ends with us running a very long way down this highway in Northern Georgia, carrying a quarter of a million dollars of cash in clear plastic bags. So everybody assumes that we got on the plane, flew back to Jackson and with the cash.
Shea:
Took your clear plastic bag on the plane with you. Everyone can see it.
Lee Wilson:
We actually did not get a check of actual real money for about a year.
Beth Wilson:
It was about a year later.
Lee Wilson:
So we shot the show. It aired, and then about two months after the finale, 90 days after the finale is when they cut us a check. Then we cut a big check to the government. So the money piece of it was interesting. You expect to immediately be able to go and do some stuff and go Disney, which we ended up doing, but we had to wait for a while before we could capitalize on that opportunity from the show. I think that, and really, Beth is the one to speak better about this. Being able to defeat 36 true professional manhunters that know how to track somebody on the ground. They know how to comb through your social network on Facebook and using other social medias. They know how to process your bank accounts and see how you spend money and where you spend money and who your relationships are, who you're going to lean on in a difficult situation. To be able to defeat that quality of person gives you a tremendous amount of confidence. The biggest thing that we took from the show was just the reality that I don't know anything. I'm a good guy. I've never broken the law in any significant way that I can remember. Hopefully, nobody ever catches me otherwise, but we don't have any experience running from the law.
Lee Wilson:
We don't have any experience figuring out how to outwit professional manhunters, but that's exactly what we figured out how to do when we were on the run on the show. The fact that we had the wits and the capacity and the wherewithal to outsmart the CIA and Secret Service and the FBI and Homeland Security and Navy Seals and US marshals and all of these serious people, it just gives you a tremendous amount of confidence that whatever challenges lay before you, whether it's family or whether it's in business, that you can find a solution and ultimately prevail, and whatever that may be.
Beth Wilson:
At the same time, while he was gone, I was also running the business, specifically our Waco location. We were moving from a smaller location to downtown where Magnolia and Chip and Joanna Gaines were. It was really booming, except that our building wasn't ready. We'd moved out of our old one. We were in a rough spot. I hadn't communicated any of this to Lee. We didn't have a way to talk. So he got back, and there was a sway of like, “I've got to tell him what's going on.” I just felt like it was going to be okay. He was like, “I just feel like there's nothing that I can't figure out.” It's the game piece of running a business is you move the different pieces to get different outcomes, and you have the confidence I will figure this out.
Lee Wilson:
That's amazing.
Lee Wilson:
If I can outsmart Buck and Griff,
Beth Wilson:
That's right.
Lee Wilson:
and win a quarter of a million dollars, then I can figure out Waco, Texas.
Shea:
And so you all figured that out, got that challenge overcome, and you've moved on to other ventures in your life. So we have Wisdom House now. So tell us about Wisdom House.
Beth Wilson:
Right. So up from... I was going to say up from the ashes, but that's not the case. This was... We won the show in 2017-ish, and I was like, my main job from escape rooms, our kids were still fairly young, so I was touch and go, but my main job was we would build a new room, which is a set, and it would be like, “Beth, we have this fake arm, and it needs to go inside a box.” They'd get dimensions, and they're like, “go find it.” So you're on the marketplace, you're in thrift stores, and you're just searching for some really specific things, but you also see this really cute mid-century dresser that you're like, “If I just had 100 bucks, I could flip this and bring home some money.” I was thinking, if I could just have $5,000, if we could set that aside, I think I could start something. We'll call it Wisdom House, named after the street that we live on, Wisdom Street.
Shea:
There you go.
Lee Wilson:
So at this point, she's like, “Lee, remember when you came and asked about that $1,500 to start the escape rooms? Now I have an idea.” That's really a window into how our marriage works. We take turns. We take turns with the ideas. We take turns with the big exciting things. So my big exciting things were starting escape rooms. It was going on the show. Hers was stopping everything to run cross country at Union and get her MBA as a mother of two. It was starting Wisdom House. We just go back and forth and make it work.
Beth Wilson:
We do. So Wisdom House started out of that. We set aside $5,000. Wisdom House started as, like, flipping furniture, and I remember at the time on the marketplace, there were all these groups that were selling a bunch of stuff. I thought, these pictures look like somebody just took a picture in a room with a dark light. If it would just be a little effort or a little curated.
Lee Wilson:
“Here's a lamp in my trunk. Come buy it at Target.”
Beth Wilson:
Yeah. I was like, “I bet there's something here. There's people here looking for stuff.” So I just started flipping things and would sell them on Wednesdays about, I don't know...
Carrie:
I remember. I bought stuff from you.
Beth Wilson:
Wisdom House Wednesdays, and it was so much fun.
Carrie:
I would literally wait for the time, whatever time it was. 12:00, 1:00, I can't remember.
Beth Wilson:
I think it was 12:00, yeah, noon. Every week I would be like, people came and they bought almost everything. That's how it got started.
Lee Wilson:
So we started with mid-century-modern furniture, and cool glassware, and vintage rugs and all these things that she would find on the marketplace.
Beth Wilson:
Just the pretty things that you see.
Beth Wilson:
Wisdom House existed in that concept for about a year and a half until we found out we were pregnant with our third baby.
Lee Wilson:
No, fourth baby.
Beth Wilson:
Fourth baby, and something had to give at that point. You can't be on the back roads of Tennessee being pregnant, and you're just like, let me...
Shea:
Picking up furniture.
Beth Wilson:
Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Shea:
So you transitioned to candles. Is that the next transition?
Beth Wilson:
That's pretty much the next transition. We took a little bit of time.
Lee Wilson:
Timeline-wise, at this point, we're like fall of 2019.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah.
Lee Wilson:
So that's when you found out that we were pregnant with Reed.
Beth Wilson:
No, that's when we had Reed. You're right. Okay.
Carrie:
A lot has happened, right?
Lee Wilson:
Let's revisit the timeline.
Beth Wilson:
I've got this.
Lee Wilson:
Okay.
Beth Wilson:
Okay, we transitioned to candles. I started getting interested in them in around 2019 before our last baby was born.
Carrie:
Okay.
Beth Wilson:
Really the thinking there was, “I can't flip furniture forever,” and Lee and I had a serious conversation that I was like, “You can't ever really grow this. It's only ever going to be as big as however many pieces you can put in the house. That's it.” I was like, “You're right.” I started looking at the numbers every week, and I was like, “I only ever sell this much. It's just only going to be that big.” We were pregnant, and I was like, “I think I have to think of something else.” Every home decor store, if you think about it, the thing that they sell that you take home is a candle. I was like, “I would love to make a candle,” and honestly, flipping furniture, when you flip furniture, especially thrifted stuff, you sell it, and people are like, "Tell me the story," and you're like, “I can tell you the story from when I met the furniture, which was I picked it up a month ago. I cleaned it up.” You just don't know the history. And there's a piece of you that wants to be, I made it. I did this. This is the story, and it just was not there. So a lot of things were coming together that was like, I want to put myself into something. Candles was honestly just the next... It was just the thing. Jumping ahead a little bit, but that process took about a year to test and figure out.
Shea:
You'd never made a candle before, so you're figuring it all out.
Beth Wilson:
Never made a candle before. I had a friend in Texas making them, and I bought some from her, and she told me a little bit. No, it takes a while to figure it out, and this is about the time of fall of 2019, right before COVID. We had to make some big decisions. I just lost a father. We just had a baby.
Lee Wilson:
So there was a lot of things percolating in our life, and then at about that same time, at the end of 2019, October, November, is when I started to think about, “Okay, we have these escape rooms.” At this point, I think we had six escape rooms, Jackson, Waco, and then four in Middle Tennessee. I just was looking and doing the math and thinking about these rental contracts that we had and just going, I don't feel comfortable. On paper, we're going to have to pay over a half million dollars in rent to somebody in the next two years. I'm not physically in some of these places to be able to be directly involved in making decisions that need to be made for it to be successful. So at that point, I was starting to question some of our partners, not integrity, not any of that stuff. I love the people. We're still friends that we worked with. They're great, great people. Just strategically, I was starting to lose some confidence in the direction that they were wanting to go with the businesses that they were overseeing. I just decided, I think I'm ready to be out.
Lee Wilson:
I think I'm ready to pull away from owning something in Waco or owning something in Murfreesboro. I'm tired of being the one that gets in the car, gets in the plane to go and have a hard conversation with the landlord. I'm just over that. So in December 2019, we basically said, “Hey, we want to go our separate ways. Let's figure out a buy-out deal.” January 2020, we got the check. Pretty soon after that, we found out about a little thing called COVID-19.
Shea:
Yeah, a pandemic.
Lee Wilson:
The pandemic.
Shea:
Just decided to hit.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, we closed on everything the last week of 2019.
Carrie:
Wow. Talk about perfect timing. So then what happened?
Beth Wilson:
Well, then we just had the Jackson location, and so the Jackson location was enough to provide for us. Again, we were aware that this was a peak, and now it was just going to be what it was going to be.
Lee Wilson:
Yeah, it's a fad business. Escape rooms are a fad business. I think there will always be a place for them. There's always going to be somebody that wants to go and do put-put. There's always going to be somebody that wants to go do laser tag. There are these things that come along, and they have their moment, but because it's a fad, too many people get in, and not all of them are going to make it. So we just decided that we wanted to have a smaller profile and back away from that business and figure out what was going to happen next. At the same time, we have that realization, and Beth is having the realization that being a pregnant lady/mother with an infant is not a good look for going and picking up furniture all around Tennessee. That's when the pandemic happened, and that's when we had to sit down and have a hard conversation and say, “Okay, we've got a little bit of money from selling these businesses. How long will this last? Will we figure out what's next?”
Beth Wilson:
There was like a clock.
Lee Wilson:
Who is going to be the person in this family that can really carry the weight of making money when the world is shut down? Locking people in rooms for fun is a great service and skill to the community, but it doesn't translate well into the online world, like the lockdown world that we're all living in.
Carrie:
During a pandemic, no one wanted to be in the same room together.
Lee Wilson:
That's right, and Beth Wilson is an incredibly gifted person. Everything that she does works. I always say that she is omnicompetent. Everything that she does, she is good at, and if she is not satisfied with how good she is at it, naturally, she is going to work harder than anybody else to figure out every single aspect of that thing, and she's going to master it. That's basically what happened during the pandemic, because I took over all the household responsibilities and learned firsthand how grueling it is to be the primary caregiver and cleaner. And it was a very humbling process for me. We basically let Beth, Beth.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, there was... I was testing candles still, and it wasn't finished yet. I was like, we have to figure out a way to make some money because I'm here. I was like, “Lee, how much money do we have? Can we make it till April?” He was like, “We can make it till April.” I'm like, “Can we make it to June?” He's like, “June will be tight.” I'm like, “Can we make it to July?” He was like, “I don't know.” So all along, you're checking in that year because at the time, if you remember, we didn't know how long the lockdown was going to be, but our livelihood was gone. So I was like, “What's the easiest thing that I can figure out how to do?” I just, I opened an Etsy shop and just started selling some print on demand items that I have... I Just put them out there. The reason that I did that was I was like, there's a marketplace, like with Wisdom House, how it started. There's a marketplace of people looking to buy something. How can I create a product that fits that market? Just teaching myself. It wasn't candles at the time, but it was just teaching myself the skill. That's really how it got started, and that sustained us for a year.
Carrie:
Meanwhile, you're perfecting the candles.
Beth Wilson:
Meanwhile, in the background, I'm like, “Is this the right wick? Is this?” And then people like you are like, You said that you're like day one.
Carrie:
I have been in it from the beginning, I feel like, with you guys. I remember the pandemic, stories that you would post, and the whole process. It was really fun to see you guys thrive through this.
Beth Wilson:
I didn't tell anybody that I was doing the sprint on demand stuff. I was like, this is unimportant. It'll confuse people. I did show people the candle process, and it was like, “Well, when are you going to sell these?” I was like, “I don't know.”
Beth Wilson:
And at some point...
Carrie:
We could not wait, though. That's what you did. You created that demand.
Beth Wilson:
I didn't mean to.
Carrie:
We couldn't wait.
Beth Wilson:
Honestly, it was the pandemic. We couldn't get glass, and so I started with concrete. How can I control this process?
Lee Wilson:
A big reason that that was such a major factor for us, that we wanted to control every aspect of the supply chain in creating our own product, is that one of the things that we ran into with the Etsy shop and T-shirt design is that there was a point around Mother's Day of 2020 when everybody was buying their mama T-shirt or a sweatshirt or whatever. It was also that same point in time that there were just like, boats and boats and boats lined up in the Pacific Ocean waiting to come through and unload their containers. Our T-shirts were in the boats. So we had like a thousand orders lined up that we could not fulfill.
Beth Wilson:
I'm trying so hard to make money, and you finally get some orders in. You're like, “They're coming.” I can't... Just having your hands tied. You can't control it.
Lee Wilson:
We just decided that when it came to the next thing, candles, we wanted to control it.
Beth Wilson:
We were going to control every step. Yeah, we didn't want to outsource anything. We still run the business like that now. If we don't have to outsource it, we won't.
Carrie:
That's wonderful.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, we launched the candles officially in 2021.
Carrie:
Well, I just have to say for our listeners who aren't in this room with us, the candles smell amazing. So we have some set up on our table, and I mean, they just smell... It smells so good in here.
Beth Wilson:
That's great.
Carrie:
This is the best it's ever smelled.
Beth Wilson:
Thank you.
Shea:
Talk a little bit about the success you've had with Wisdom House and the candles.
Beth Wilson:
It's been great, but we're all in on Wisdom House. Yeah, we closed the escape rooms in 2023, we closed Jackson. It was a real turning point of like, we can continue this thing, which is enough to provide probably for a single family, but it's not going to grow, but it will take a lot of attention. Or there's life in this thing that's unknown. So are we ready to jump ship and just be all in? We made that transition in the summer of 2023. There has been a ton of growth, and along with growth is growing pain.
Shea:
All the challenges.
Beth Wilson:
Right. I never get to talk about this, but I really am proud of what we have built. It has come out of our basement in a room that was probably 150 square feet. Now we are in a studio that's about 4,000 square feet, and we are trying to figure out how to stay there as long as possible. One of my employees asked me last week, “Are we going to have to move?” I'm like, “We're going to stay here as long as we can.” Our growth, I think we grew close to about 200% last year.
Carrie:
That's wonderful.
Beth Wilson:
Then we're hoping to hit a million dollars sales this year. It's been dependent on what our slow season will be. Right now we're in our slow season. I think our staff would tell you, we're busy. So I'm very, very thankful, but the growth that we experienced last year was really hard. There's a lot of lessons that you learn with that. I have an MBA. I should know these things, but when you are not taking an investment, when you're not taking out a loan and you are just bootstrapping your own growth, 200% in a year is too much.
Beth Wilson:
So, there's a lot that has come out in the past year that I'm like, if we don't slow the growth to a manageable scale, we will cannibalize our profits.
Lee Wilson:
Yeah, cannibalize our profits. Our systems will break down. Our people will break down. I mean, we've had some real crunch points. I think about we had a huge order of 35,000 candles, not this past November, the year, the November-2023. We barely made it through. It was very, very...
Beth Wilson:
You've got to buy the supplies on your summer profits for 30... All of these things, you're like, “How do businesses grow?”
Shea:
How long does it take to make one candle?
Beth Wilson:
One candle all the way through. Well, you touch it, it cures. You do this, it cures.
Carrie:
You got to watch the stories, Shea.
Beth Wilson:
I would say, I don't know, hands on a candle. I'm trying to cut that time down so we can get them in and out. I don't know. Ideally, they cure for a few days, and then you ship them, and it's got at least a week and a half under its belt before you're like, I'm ready to light it.
Carrie:
I remember watching your kids help you with all of that in the stories, too. So I think it's just great how you, as a family, have built and grown this business. Speaking of growth, since we are a financial podcast, I do have to ask you guys, what's the best financial advice that you've been given?
Lee Wilson:
I thought about this.
Beth Wilson:
I did think about this. I have two things. On the way here in the car, I was like, “They're going to ask this question.” I could go one of two ways. So I would say...
Beth Wilson:
Go both ways.
Beth Wilson:
The first is to hedge your bets. As an entrepreneur or from the outside looking in, it's like, that's a risk taker. The only way that you're successful as if you go all in. I would say that has not been the case for us. Every step that we've made, we've been like, “Why don't you keep the job at Union a little longer? Okay, now we're going to jump to candles. Why don't we keep the escape rooms a little longer?” You're just building in a little bit of a financial buffer in case a pandemic hits.
Shea:
Sure.
Beth Wilson:
Then the other thing I would say, this is what we're living right now, is just if you want to build a long term business and you don't want to take out a ton of money to do it, capital to do it, you got to slow the growth. So our goal is this year to try to grow about by 30%.
Beth Wilson:
I listened to a podcast and it was like, this is our target. I was like, that's a great number. I can do like 30%. Just figuring out what levers in the business, how much at. I do have a lot of control.
Carrie:
It's wonderful advice.
Beth Wilson:
Just slowing it a little bit. You don't want to be miserable. We've been at jobs where we got burned out. We're in our 40s. This is going to be it.
Carrie:
And this is more than a job. This is your life.
Beth Wilson:
This is our life. That's right.
Shea:
You like it. So you want to be able to continue to enjoy it.
Beth Wilson:
Yeah, you need to protect it. I don't know how many more pivots you and I have I'm sure that there will be others.
Lee Wilson:
We will pivot as many times as we need to pivot to get it done.
Carrie:
Come back in a year. We'll see what all you guys have done.
Lee Wilson:
My answer to the question is not really advice that I was given. It's more a realization that I had, and it's the best investment that I can make is to give Beth whatever money she needs to do whatever idea she has, and it will work.
Beth Wilson:
That's so sweet.
Shea:
We'll see what ideas come from people hearing this podcast. They'll be calling you like, “Beth, what is this idea?” So the last question that we have is also, it's financial-related because it's the Pocket Change podcast. If you had any extra change in your pocket, what would you spend it on?
Beth Wilson:
I know my answer.
Lee Wilson:
I'm going straight to the coffee shop, probably, because I'm a spender, not a saver. If I was a saver, I would save it up for a good bottle of whiskey, maybe. Yeah.
Shea:
Nice.
Beth Wilson:
I think that what realistically happens is I find some money in a side pocket, I put it in my wallet, and then it just makes me feel good, and then I justify a DoorDash purchase that I didn't need. Then I'm like, it somehow balances out. Like the money is still in my pocket.
Carrie:
Girl math, right?
Beth Wilson:
Girl math. It got debited, but it balances out. So DoorDash.
Carrie:
Yes, I love it. I want to know what coffee you're ordering, though.
Lee Wilson:
Oh, Turntable, ice coffee. Every time. No cream, no sugar. If it's good coffee, you don't need that stuff.
Shea:
What we're going to do with our pocket change is buy a candle.
Carrie:
That's right.
Shea:
So where can we get them?
Beth Wilson:
You can get them online at wisdomhouseco.com. That's where all of our concrete stuff is. There's a few of our custom candles. You can check out our Etsy shops, WisdomHouseCo on Etsy. Then hopefully in the future, we'll be on some more platforms. Remember, slow growth. That's right.
Shea:
Check them out there. We appreciate it.
Carrie:
Yeah. Well, we thank you guys for being here with us today. It has been such a joy to talk about your journey and how you got to where you are today.
Beth Wilson:
Thank you guys for having us.
Lee Wilson:
We've had a great time. Thanks.