“It’s easy in a crisis like this to become immobilized.” Spanx CEO Sara Blakely on how she's helping women make it to the other side

I reached Sara Blakely “somewhere in Florida” for this week’s This is Working. Blakely, the founder and CEO of Spanx, along with her husband, Jesse Itzler, and their four kids, had packed up some things, rented an RV and took off from their Atlanta home as a way to quarantine on the move. Before we went live, Sara and Jesse scrambled through and around the RV searching for enough network strength to be able to reach the world. 

The experience of watching Blakely’s phone bounce around an RV park struck me a perfect metaphor for how Blakely has built her business and managed through this pandemic: Have a goal, don’t stop moving until you connect and work every angle. As she explained in our interview, one of the first things she told her employees when it was clear that the virus was going to lead to a worldwide slowdown was that the way out was in someone’s head somewhere in the company. “I said, ‘I don't care if you're the receptionist. I don't care if you're in logistics or finance. I want a product submission from everybody because I do believe that times like this foster innovation.’”

I was eager to talk with Blakely for This is Working both to hear how Spanx was managing the crisis and to talk about her early decision to put her own money toward women entrepreneurs crushed by the virus. 

On the former, she was as upfront as she always is. “Spanx is deeply affected, like so many other businesses,” she said. “We are in the retail space, which obviously has had an enormous impact during this time. So our sales are significantly down. We've had to buckle down.” She said having zero-based budgeting — every department has to make the case for receiving any funds — has helped it to stay nimble and her experience in launching and guiding Spanx through other economic downturns is instructive. “It’s easy in a crisis like this to become immobilized.”

But it was when she talked about giving back that the members’ comments really seemed to light up. In mid-March, Blakely launched the Red Backpack Fund, a self-funded program to give 1,000 female-owned small businesses $5,000 each to help them push through. “I am a business owner,” she said. “I've been a small business owner and even though Spanx, the brand grew and is global now, I still operate like a small business owner. I just care deeply about entrepreneurs. They're the backbone of our community.”

She's not just talking the talk now. We’ve been doing This is Working in its new, live format for over a month now. Each week, I’ve talked with people deeply invested in helping us get to the other side of this crisis, whether that’s a global health champion like Bill Gates or the CEO of a deeply impacted business like Airbnb’s Brian Chesky. None of them generated the same kind of excitement in advance that Blakely did. 

I think the reason for that is that Blakely has spent 20 years developing an authentic connection with her customers and fans. For the entirety of Spanx’ existence, Blakely’s story has been the company’s story: How she created footless pantyhose to solve her problem of needing “body-shaping” support in any outfit; saving up $5,000 in her job selling fax machines door-to-door; cold-calling her way into a new industry, into manufacturing and into nationwide distribution; putting herself always on the frontline of sales. Her story is accessible and the path seems achievable. 

During the decade-long expansion, Blakely's story was a fun dream to imagine; during a downturn, it might be the kind of path that people are forced to embrace. “A lot of people would say, ‘This is not the time to be starting a business, especially in retail,’” she said. They said the same thing to her when she had a fledgling company just after Sept. 11. “I just moved forward. I moved forward with everything I could. I just didn’t let the macro environment overwhelm me. If you have a good product, if you’re solving a problem, if you are making a product or service better than anything else out there, it’s always a good time to start a business.”

Edited excerpts below. You can subscribe to this newsletter at lnkd.in/tiw and the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the silver lining of starting up right now:

“There's a lot of benefits to starting a business right now and and staying true to your purpose because this is a time where a lot of businesses are going to retract. Maybe you'll have less competition. Maybe people will be more willing to invest in you because of what you're offering and if you're staying true to your purpose.”

On how Spanx moved to long-term thinking after navigating the initial crisis:

Entrepreneurs in general are people ... who take obstacles and turn them into opportunities. So once we handled the really extreme stuff that was happening to the business overnight, then we got together and said where are the opportunities and where do we want to go from here? Do we want to change things in our assortment? And how do we want to invent this new normal for our customers? The narrative for all of your customers has changed, so your narrative has to change… We’ve had some specific product ideas that I don’t want to share now but that you can expect to see soon.” 

On the most important thing to think about when launching (hint: it’s not the business plan):

"Make sure you're really focused on the product. I mean, product is king. If there's anything I have focused on from day one for 20 years, it's the product. And still to this day, I am in the fit room once a week trying on every single product that Spanx sells. And if I don't like it and the team doesn't like it and if it doesn't fit right. We don't sell it, we don't launch it. A lot of times we feel like we don't have enough experience or we're not buttoned up enough or we don't have it all figured out and I'm saying, ‘Just go and you will figure it out along the way.’”

On how to sell when budgets are crunched:

“The advice is the same whether there's a pandemic or not and that is: What's in it for me? The WIIFM. I learned that way back in my sales days and that is, stay very true to: What are you offering? What's in it for the customer? Lead with purpose. Lead with your story. 

I have been so deeply connected to wanting to help women and that has been the ethos of Spanx for 20 years. And I've stayed so connected to that purpose. The consumer feels that purpose and you'll feel that purpose and it will make you stand out. Obviously it needs to be authentic. And I always say to people: When you're trying to find your purpose or your why, what makes you cry? What really pulls at your heartstrings? There’s your why. And for me it's just women not getting the potential that they deserve simply because they're women. 

And I think especially now, during a pandemic, when people are hurting and scared, peace of mind and how are you going to help them is a big part of it. People don't want to feel like they're just being sold to. They want to feel like you’re there for them.”