How Susan Tynan Disrupted a Dusty Old Industry

There’s no getting around it: An entrepreneur must take risks in order to succeed – and with risk comes fear.

As the founder and CEO of Framebridge , Susan Tynan has experienced that fear: when investors questioned her business model; when production problems created serious backlogs; when she was forced to close one of her factories.

How was she able to weather the toughest times? By truly believing in her idea and having the will to see it through, as she told me on my podcast Deep Purpose.

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That idea first emerged after Tynan went on a hiking trip with her sister and came back with four beautiful National Parks posters. She went to a local store to have them framed and was dismayed to receive a bill for $1,600. She unwillingly handed over the money, while thinking to herself: There has to be a better way.

She recalled: “I believed that people had wonderful things that they wanted to commemorate, and they'd do it more if framing were easy.” She was convinced that this was “a dusty industry nobody was looking at,” where pieces of the traditional value chain could be removed or transferred online with a substantial downward effect on cost.

Tynan was well equipped – in terms of family background, education and work experience – to run her own startup. Her father was president of a tugboat company in Ohio “who really felt responsible for the welfare of his team,” she said, and invested in his employees’ future success.

After graduating from the University of Virginia and getting an MBA from Harvard Business School, she worked for a few startups and then served for two years in the Obama administration as a management advisor. She then further honed her startup skills at LivingSocial, the online experience site that was acquired by Groupon. She also worked briefly at Taxi Magic, a pre-Uber car sharing service.

What she learned from her previous startup experiences, she said, was to understand the value of speed, and that speed often matters more than perfection. At the same time, speed should not undermine the customer experience: “I really think the long-term best interest of the business is the long-term best interest of the customer.”

In some cases that has meant spending more money in the name of consumer preference. As a result, some investors have said, “This is more of a capital-intensive endeavor than I signed up for,” she said. At one point she asked herself: Why hasn’t this been done before? And the answer, she realized, was that it was incredibly hard to do.

?“You have to be good at manufacturing, technology, design and retail, she explained. “It's hard to pull it all together.” But she was willing to put in the hard, all-consuming work – and warns aspiring entrepreneurs that they will need to do the same.

What makes an entrepreneur successful in the face of numerous obstacles? Part of it is sheer obstinacy, she said. But above all, “I really think it's vision. I think it's the ability to look beyond the pain, the short-term pain, because you believe in what you're building.”

?Since its inception as an online-only store in 2014, Framebridge, which is based in Washington, D.C. has expanded to 280 employees. In addition to its online operations – where customers email or mail their items to be framed –, the company also operates 19 physical stores on the East Coast and Midwest.

At the heart of this expansion, though, is a commitment to Framebridge’s purpose of helping people “celebrate everything [they] love – big, little, and in-between.” As she told me, “Every day, we frame thousands of items that are either the pinnacle of someone's career or something just deeply memorable.” ?In her role as CEO, Tynan makes sure to tell stories that highlight these moments, whether it’s memorializing a beloved pet or commemorating an industry award. She admitted that it was an aspect of her job that she underestimated at first. But it’s those stories, ultimately, that help her and her team at Framebridge keep the faith when times get tough.