Fast Lane to Country Lane
Putting experience to work for a family business
TOGETHERNESS: Mark and Kim Lackley based their furniture business in Vermont.
Photo by Mark Alcarez
Learn on someone else’s dime. That’s a lesson from HBS that served Kim Alley Lackley (MBA ’94) well as she made the leap from software and Internet start-ups to launching her husband’s handmade furniture business.
“I just feel like everything I’ve done has been leading to this,” says Lackley, who manages business operations for Mark Lackley Furniture Maker (www.lackley.com), a high-end furniture company in Quechee, Vermont.
Lackley began her “training” for the family business in 1988, when she took a sales job at a software start-up straight out of Yale. She was running the company by the time she left for HBS in 1992. After HBS, she helped launch Open Market, an Internet start-up that made e-commerce software, where she handled both marketing and general management.
“Everyone was always saying, ‘Why don’t you start your own business?’ ” she recalls. “My answer was that I’m the person who sets the direction and gets things done, but I don’t have an idea for a business.”
That changed when she reconnected with Mark, an old friend from Yale whom she married in 1998. “When he said he wanted to make furniture, it worked out perfectly,” says Lackley. “Mark’s the idea guy, and I’m the businessperson.”
Lackley left Open Market before her wedding and began to help Mark with selling commissioned pieces of furniture. She briefly returned to the start-up world, leading product development and marketing for a Boston-based Internet company in 2001. But she cut her time there short “because we wanted a change of lifestyle and to move to a place where we could raise a family,” says Lackley. She and Mark chose Woodstock where they bought a house, rented space for a workshop and showroom in nearby Quechee, and moved in 2002. “I dug in, doing what I love to do, which is a start-up general business. And Mark concentrated on the creative end, the design and the making of fine-wood furniture.”
By the time daughter Jane was born in 2003, Lackley had found a whole new lifestyle, one that let her use all of her business skills but left room for morning walks, dining together at every meal, volunteering in her community, and being with her daughter.
In just three years, Lackley has taken the business from one where Mark worked on specific requests for furniture, to a thriving shop with two employees who help craft unique pieces of furniture, including Shaker-style trestle tables, four-poster beds, and computer desks. Last year, Mark added a line of high-end poker tables.
“Now we’re looking for that sweet spot where we can be big enough to live the way we want to live but not so big that Mark gets distanced from being a furniture maker,” explains Lackley, who enjoys the challenge of growing a business.
“I absolutely love it,” she says. “It’s often the first thing we talk about when we wake up. It’s just a part of our life. We feel in control of our destiny.”
— Margie Kelley
