PPB May 2021

In addition to her business, volunteerism is also something that Gilley holds close to her heart. Overture Promotions is a partner of A Safe Place, a nonprofit domestic violence shelter in the distributor’s same community, and has assisted with designing t-shirts and giveaways for the organization’s events, and supports its services. The distributorship also takes care of its own with its “Overture Family Fund,” which allows employees to donate to a fund that provides grants to team members in need. In her personal life, Gilley has served on the board of directors for RISE International from 2007-2012, a nonprofit that builds schools in post-civil war, rural Angola, Africa, and she volunteers as an administrator for The Moms Group, a support group for more than 120 mothers of children with special needs, which she co-founded and has been involved with for the past 12 years. Gilley has many strategies in place to continue growing the business and is also continuously focused on improving its customer service. “We obsess about customer service,” she says. “We have invested in technology to improve our responsiveness. We keep asking, ‘How can we do this better?’ While our baseline is responding quickly and communicating efficiently, the goal is anticipating what customers need before they tell us.” When asked as a leader and the CEO of a distributor, how she approaches challenge and change, Gilley says, “Head on. Get smart people together and lay out all the options and risks. Get more information so you reduce risk. Make a plan and start to execute. Regroup to see if your assumptions are holding. If not, pivot. Be willing to have difficult conversations, which can sometimes mean owning your failures or bad decisions. If the challenge is a broken process, get stakeholders together to walk through the process and figure out ways to make it work better. Keep your eye on the big-picture things—it’s easy to get so focused on the day-to-day that you miss big things that aren’t working or are looming in the future. We start our weekly management meeting with a ‘forest, not trees’ conversation.” Danielle Renda is associate editor of PPB. JoAnn Gi l l ey | MAY 2021 | 79 THINK