Laura Lankford

I attribute my success to hard work, dedication, and persistence. You never give up. You look at the goal ahead, and you just keep doing what it takes until it's achieved. But honestly, I'd give it all to being number one in customer service. I take a lot of pride in working with my guests and making sure their experience from start to finish is nothing but exceptional. I follow up with them about their jewelry and make sure their pieces are doing well and being taken care of. I also think my background as a hair colorist for 20 years really taught me how to connect with customers. When you're doing someone's hair, it's a very intimate setting, and I naturally gravitated toward learning their journey and finding that connection with my customer. That's where I got the best experience in learning how to work with people, understanding what they need, what they want, and what they expect.

I would tell her to take every opportunity to educate herself as fully as she can, in whatever field she's doing. Strive to be the best. Expect that you're going to be the best. Do everything that it takes to get there. There's no shortcuts. To me, nowadays, it's not who you know or things like that. You really have to take control over your own life, as far as giving yourself what you need to make it happen. I'm a big believer in education. If you can't speak confidently about what you're doing, especially when you're in sales, you have to love what you sell. If you don't love what you sell, people are going to know that, they're going to see it, and they're not going to want it. You must have a passion in sales for what you're selling. I'm also a big believer that you never stop learning. When new opportunities come up, if I have the time, I try to engage and learn more. There's never a stop to learning.

The biggest challenge is definitely the competition. When lab-grown diamonds were introduced to the market about 5-6 years ago for people to actually physically go see, there wasn't a big market because they weren't accessible to view. You had to order them offline, and people didn't trust it. But now that lab-grown has been on the market over 5 years, there's so much competition. Instead of having 5 stores within a 10-mile radius that sell lab-grown diamonds, we now have about 30. The competition is fierce. People are being very savvy with their purchases and pricing things out. I have no control over pricing with my company as a manager and sales associate. Our company is very good and has very competitive prices. We don't run sales and keep the prices consistent and low, but there's so many other places now where you can go and they'll negotiate on pricing, where we don't. Unfortunately, some of my larger sales, like $30,000 or $50,000 sales, can get lost because someone priced us out by $5,000 or $6,000, which I can't do anything about. That's a big challenge, and it's becoming more and more every year. As for opportunities, there's always opportunities to get better, to be better in my field, to be most up-to-date on everything going on. That's always an opportunity.

Honesty would be my definite number one. I expect a lot from myself, so I think I do expect a lot from others that I work with. I think they understand that just because I do have a very strong work ethic on everything, whether it's showing up on time or going the extra mile when it's needed, things like that. That's very important to me. Loyalty is also very important. I have high standards for myself and the people I work with, and I believe in giving your all to everything you do.