p>After co-managing a small-town cafe with her father and then starting a retail gift-basket shop, Jill Blashack founded Tastefully Simple, a direct-sales retailer of gourmet and specialty food products. She started it in a 1,200-square-foot shed with no running water, using a pool table as a packing station.
That was 1995. Three years later, the Alexandria company’s revenues had skyrocketed to $1 million. Within just a few months, her brother and her husband both died suddenly. Dividing her energies between raising her five-year-old son and managing the expansion of her fast-growing company, she was rewarded with a 7,600 percent increase in revenues from 1999 through 2003, and Tastefully Simple moved onto the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies.
Tastefully Simple has since grown to $144 million in annual sales, and it engages more than 26,000 consultants serving as hosts at home tasting parties. More than 300 employees work in the company’s 180,000-square-foot warehouse. In 2007, Strahan became a published author when a collection of inspirational stories about her life and career was published under the title Simply Shine: Stories That Stirred the Fire. She is also in demand to give motivational speeches in which she urges, “Dream it, believe it, work it.”
