In 1993, Ed Carson was euhporic over the birth of his granddaugther Elise when he happened to look at a Hershey's chocolate bar and think to himself, "Here She Is." Armed with a computer, a printer and a great imagination, Ed soon had a stack of pink wrappers announcing Elise's arrival. And in addition to little Elise, CARSON Wrapped Hershey's Chocolates was also born.

My wife Sharon and I purchased the company in 2003. Now, eighteen years after Ed's first design, we continue to take great pride in the fact that we are licensed by HERSHEY and consider it a great privilege to offer our custom wrappers for the finest chocolate produced in North America We offer a full array of original Hershey's chocolate, from miniature bars to the gigantic five-pound bar to customers around the world.

Sweet Rewards

When we purchased the company, Sharon and I basically divided the business in half; we each have our own areas of concentration and responsibility. Sharon has final say on all things creative, including areas of design, sales and marketing. Associates in many departments work collaboratively, providing input and ideas under her leadership.

I handle all areas of business operations - all legal and financial matters, vendor relations, capital expenditures and our growth and expansion strategies. While we each have our own areas of focus when it comes to the really big decisions, Sharon and I reach them together.

We love the environment we have worked so hard to create, the group of people we get to work with every day and the customers we get to serve. It's very uplifiting to share in some of the most wonderful events of peoples lives - the birth of children, weddings, birthday parties, holidays and religious celebrations. Some of our most popular wrapper designs include images and photos, so every week we see hundreds of new babies, fairy princesses and wild cowboys celebrating their birthdays, and couples celebrating 50th wedding anniversaries. It is a glimpse into the positive events in people's daily lives and allows a special kind of positive energy to permeate our entire building.

Hard Lessons

Some of our most important decisions came soon after we purchased the business. Our first lesson as business buyers: quick closings and failing to ask the right questions leads to quick regret. Shortly after our purchase, Sharon and I discovered that we had just jumped on a sinking ship. While we knew we had bought a ship that needed repairs, we had misjudged the nature of the damage. We purchased a business with nearly 50 employees that was just breaking even every year.

We committed ourselves to doing any and everything necessary to get all of our employees on board with us as the new owners and to survive whatever was going to come our way. We had invested everything we had into this new business and sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves was only going to ensure our demise.

We knew that we could increase efficiency to affect the bottom line, but we did not see the sharp decline in sales that was headed our way due to some miscalculated marketing decisions made just before our arrival.

One of CARSON's major marketing efforts was distributing over four million printed inserts within the hospital gift bags given to each new mother in the United States after her baby was born. This was the source of virtually all of our new birth announcement orders. Right before we took control, a former manager became upset with the pricing and pulled out of almost all of these programs. It was a few months before we saw the massive drop in sales and were able to figure out why it was happening. It then took us several more months to smooth things over with the vendor and to eventually begin inluding the programs in the gift bags once again.

You don't have to be successful to behave succesfully, but when you do behave successfully, you can reach success a lot faster I wouldn't say that we "willed" ourselves to succeed , because that is just not possible or realistic (you can, however, will yourself to be unsuccessful if you accept failure). What we did was will ourselves to behave in ways that would creat a path to success. We were optimstic, honest, fair, hardworking and fully committed to our company and the team members who work with us.

Family Dynamics

A family-run business from the start, CARSON Wrapped Hershey's Chocolates remained that way after we purchased it. Along with our teenage daughters, Sharon and I have welcomed many other Carson family members to work with us over the years, but more importantly, we remain small enough to believe that we are all family here. To have a family you have to have trust, and we have spent a lot of time building trust within our team. We plan events together and have a monthly meeting where we all eat together as well. You have to visit our blog, Wrapping About (www.carsonbars.typepad.com) and watch our youtube videos to get a true flavor of our family environment.

All of our sales information is displayed by day, week and month on big monistors installed throughout the building. Some people think it is crazy for a company of our size to display this information, but we have never hesitated to do it. We also share successes with our team members through our incentive program. After all, how can you ask someone to believe in you as a leader and to commit to a goal, if you don't share the information and rewards needed to allow them to fully understand the nature of the accomplishment?

The Digital Age of Marketing

Thirty to forty percent of our business is from repeat customers or by referrral, so we definitely understand the word-of-mouth nature of social networking. We are fortunate that we hae a product that gets passed out and shared with others, and we quickly began to understand the power of applications like Facebook and Twitter, and their potential to help us grow the business even further.

We are probably most excited about our blog, because it gives our customers a glimpse inside of our business and an introduction to the people who work together to create the products we sell. We allow our customers to see who we are behind the scenes. Historically, this has been difficult for a catalouge and internet-based business like ours.

I am certain that when we lookback on this time period 10 to 15 years from now, we will see that it was a launching pad for some of the greatest technology and communication innovations that our world has ever seen. Things have changed so rapidly in just the last five years and the pace of change is getting even faster. With the new technologies that now characterize today's marketplace, consumers drive product and service providers to be on target and give them what they specifically want. Those who ignore the social power of their customers, and the new generation of customers on the horizon, will no doubt fail in short order. These are very exciting times indeed, and businesses either need to get with the social program or get our of the way.

On Optimism

Clearly the hardest time to stay optimstic, in both business and life, is when things are not going as planned and even more so when things are going horribly wrong. Setbacks are tough, but unexpected setbacks can be debilitating, even to someone with an entrepreneurial spirit who wants to move forward.

After several years of triple-digit gorwth in most of our markets, the recession came to visit us late in 2008 and it was clear we were not going to escape a business slowdown. While it was challenging to manage the growth of our company, nothing quite prepared us for managing a slowdown. Being forced to lay off valued members of our team was absolutely miserable, but we used it as a positive opportunity to become more efficient inour operations with the goal of ensuring that anyone laid off would hav ea job to return to as soon as the economy improved. They say, "Don't waste a good recession" and we didn't. We tightened our belts, did more with less and held our margins. We learned more about the true nature and foundation of our business than we ever could have otherwise. Success hides a lot of sins and we saw them all clearly when the curtain was pulled back. After just one year of declining sales in 2009, we are again growing by double digits as a much better commpany that we were before the recession.

We have customers in every continent and ship to faraway places like Japan, Asia, Australia and all of Europe. Our customer base is as wide as the markets we sell to and we create cstom designs for any occasion you could possibly imagine.

Our order size varies from 36 Hershey's bars to as many as 300,000 (for a single customer, shopped to almost 1,000 locations, all scheduled to arrive on the same date). Our customers are looking for announcements, party favors and promotional giveaways - generally personalized custom products that are affordable and very unique and we try to deliver this in every order.

We do not fear making mistakes, but we do not accept them as defining either. We even quit calling them mistakes a long time ago because of some of our worst mistakes have created our best opportunities and successes. There is no value in dwelling on mistakes as long as you are able to take away something positive and find a learning opportunity in them; otherwise "mistake" just becomes another wrod for "failure".