I’ve never had any ambitions to grow this business beyond taking care of the needs of my family, but it turned out to be much more than I could handle alone. So I hired my good friend Mike to help out part time… and then (quickly) full time. After a couple years, when we realized that Mike was spending a ton of his time on customer service, I hired my sister-in-law, Elise, to manage that aspect for us.
Besides the biannual editing help we get from Megan Fitzpatrick and Jim McConnell, every single aspect of running this independent magazine from storage to shipping to editing to writing to photography to design to distributor correspondence to taxes, etc… has been Mike and me.
But the business side of this business is never something I felt I was particularly attuned to. Because we’re inclined to let M&T grow organically, I’ve been able to keep up with it all for a while. As this publication’s reach ever widens, I’m now struggling to keep up with the load of administrative work.
And then Elise had a baby. Because she needed to step away from customer service (we totally understand), and our administrative needs have grown, I’ve decided to take a new employee on board. Grace Cox is a family friend who has excelled at precisely this kind of work for years, but has been anxious to walk away from the corporate world. Grace is a perfect fit for our new administrative position.
If you’ve corresponded with Elise about customer service issues over the past few years, you will know she will be missed. She’s done an excellent job taking care of sometimes complex customer inquiries. We will always be grateful to Elise for her hard work. And now we are looking forward to Grace carrying the baton, as well as taking over our shipping and administrative tasks. Grace is an awesome lady and a perfect fit for the M&T team – she shares our values of humane business practice, she’s pumped about learning more about woodworking and blacksmithing, and I bet you’ll be seeing her around at events we do. Readers, meet our newest team member, Grace Cox…
Grace Cox lives in mid-coast Maine with her husband, daughter, and son. Her passion for cultivating relationships and helping others along with her pursuit of personal growth and new knowledge sparked her journey with Mortise & Tenon. Equipped with a vast background in customer relations and project management, she looks forward every day to communication through customer service and providing assistance behind the scenes for M&T. Grace loves nature and can be found spending much of her free time paddling, hiking, and exploring the outdoors with her family.
-Joshua