Jennifer Moss Quotes

I agreed with them at the time that my brother, who is younger than me, was a better choice to lead the company,” Jennifer says. “He was more level-headed, he was less emotional and he was more consistent. So that was the plan.”

I had to pivot very quickly and start to identify a couple of chains that we could gain to make up for the loss. That's the year I started to really earn my stripes and gain the respect of my coworkers and peers. At the end of the season, I was able to recapture 89% of the sales. It was tough. But that customer had done over a million dollars with us in 2016.

I will never forget the day we lost our largest customer in 2017. It was Feb. 16 at 2 p.m. when he walked in,' she recalls. 'We were doing 30% of our business with this one customer at the time. And they walked in and said, 'We're liquidating the business. I hope we told you soon enough.' And my dad sat there and said, 'I've got 70% of the seed planted. No, you didn't tell us soon enough.' So I hit the ground running. We were in the middle of launching a wholesale houseplant program at the time, so I was already on the road trying to pitch that program,

I've set a gigantic goal for myself. I'm going to be in the best shape of my life by the time I'm 40. I just turned 38 in March, so I've got time,' she says. 'But part of that journey is getting really strong and getting my athlete body back. I'm strong, but I want to be this bad ass who handles it like a boss. So I told myself, 'I'm doing it. There's nothing standing in my way.'

Heart-forward means a few things,' she says. 'I can be a caring person and really support your team and your people without being a pushover. It also means that I always want to leave people better than when I found them.

I've had so many people say to me, 'how can we get better, we've never had time to heal, we've never had time to recover, it's always business as usual. It's always about GDP. It's always about productivity and doing more with less, and we've never just had the leader pause and say: 'you're probably still hurting, and how can I help that?'

The book really is to help leaders understand that there are these very fundamental important pro-social traits that we need to be adopting within our cultures, to move the needle and to give employees time to heal,

We’re not looking to the edges, where there's really special things that are superpowers of people who are neurodivergent – there's the coolest superpowers, and we're just not taking advantage of that in a way that's going to make us better.”

That should not be a badge of honor. We need to define what 'above and beyond' looks like,' Moss said. 'If above and beyond is you working 70 hours a week, and that's what I expect, then let's be explicit about that.

Fundamentally, employees are going 'why am I here? Life's too short,' she said. 'If we don't realize that people are constantly asking themselves, why am I here? What is the point? If we don't give them the point, then they'll leave or quit or quiet-quit, remain disengaged.

Leaders are sort of looking to move on,” she said. “There's been some great things that have happened – flexibility and remote work and more conversations around mental health in the workplace, destigmatizing burnout … huge investments made in mental health and wellbeing, but we're still feeling like they're not being actualized at work.”

At Sulfur, we created studio spaces, but more than that, we created this sense of community through the artists in the studios, the artists that we show, and the people who come to our events and to all the programming we do. Now, more artists feel they can stay and work in Savannah and have that community. We just need to keep making that space to keep them here, and to make Savannah an art destination.

“I think it was always assumed that you graduate SCAD and move to L.A. or New York or another big city both for work and for the opportunity for community.,

“We were filling this void that maybe people didn’t even know was there. We’ve grown, but at our core are the studios and the space for artists to work and connect.” We discuss how the organization has changed from simply being about “art for artists" to sharing their vision with the community, to reaching outside of Savannah through an international artist residency and showing contemporary work from artists throughout the southeast.

I’m not a religious person but I find something bigger than myself and something inspiriting in nature. I see connections – the same patterns that are on a microscopic scale are on a macroscopic scale, and the way the world has organized itself into these super-efficient and beautiful patterns. I love reading science books about physics and nature and learning amazing little details about the natural world. My first instinct as an artist is to be representational, but if I abstract my work, it pulls the viewer to spend a little more time with it.”