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You Need It? She Sells It

"If we're not selling one thing, we're selling something else," Sharon Evans, president of C.F.J. Manufacturing, tells correspondent Melinda Murphy. "Somebody asked me once, 'What do you sell?' And I said, 'What do you need?'"

Evans shares her rags-to-riches story in The Early Show's "Going For It" series.

Today, Evans is a manufacturing mogul. Her company will do more than $30 million in business this year.

C.F.J. Manufacturing makes jewelry, promotional items and all sorts of trinkets, including the stuff many companies hand out to their clients and employees. It's one of the leaders in that industry.

Evans explains, "We build service-award programs for some of the world's largest corporations. And we ship to 160 countries doing that."

But Evans didn't start out as a businesswoman. Believe it or not, she was a stay-at-home mom.

She says, "Kids got home at three o'clock in the afternoon. The cookies were on the table. Dinner was on the table at six."

But then she got divorced, and even with her ex-husband paying child support, money was suddenly tight.

"I became very fearful that we weren't going to be able to pay rent," Evans says. "I was discussing some medical bills with him. He said to me, 'You might want to consider changing the children's lifestyle.'"
Her ex's comment ticked her off so much, she vowed she'd find a way to provide her children with the lifestyle they deserved. But that wasn't going to be easy.

"Unfortunately," she says, "I did not finish my college education. I did not have any basic career experience."

But she had worked one Christmas at a jewelry store. So in desperation, she opened one herself: a tiny store that grew quickly and last year brought in $5 million.

She says, "When I first started the business I didn't have the money to display gold."

So she improvised, using wax molds as samples of what she could make.

Evans explains, "I literally went out in the back alley with a can of gold spray paint and I spray painted the waxes. I sold off of these."

That was a smart move, but some other lessons, like production control, she had to learn the hard way.

"We had something like 248 uncompleted jobs Christmas Eve morning," she says. "There were these people packed into that little space looking at me like it's Christmas Eve and where's my jewelry? You know, there weren't any ho-ho smiles on their faces. And I just burst out crying."

But she got through that first Christmas and the business flourished, mostly because Evans charged only a modest 10 percent markup. And as she began to branch out, that philosophy landed her some big clients, like J.C. Penney, Pepsi, Frito Lay, and Quaker.

And that's just a few of them. To get here, Evans worked 14-hour days, seven days a week, often with her kids in tow.

In fact today, both of her daughters are part of the business. One helps in the manufacturing arm; the other works in the jewelry business. Both appreciate the sacrifices their mother made.

Trying to hold back tears, daughter Kim Sissen says, "You're a daughter who's proud of your mother. But you are an employee who's proud of your boss."

Asked about the overall lesson that she has learned, she says, "You can do anything you want to do. I'm obviously proof of that."

Evans has come a long way from her ex-husband telling her she needed to downsize. Today, she's happily remarried and lives in a 7,000-square-foot home. She credits the divorce as the catalyst to her success.

"I am who I am today because of that and that was not a bad thing," she says. "It was not a bad thing at all. It turned out OK."

Evans' company, C.F.J. Manufacturing, is estimated to be worth $50 million. But she says she still works at least 10 hours a day, six days a week.

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