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Richelieu Dennis of Sundial Brands on Building a Business vs. a Career

Richelieu Dennis, the chief executive of Sundial Brands.Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

This interview with Richelieu Dennis, chief executive of Sundial Brands, a beauty products company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What were your early years like?

A. I was born and raised in Liberia in West Africa. My mother is Sierra Leonean and my father’s Liberian. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of civil unrest in both countries, so when something would happen in Liberia, we’d go to Sierra Leone, and when something would happen in Sierra Leone, we’d go back to Liberia. We moved to save our lives.

How dangerous was it day-to-day?

There were a lot of times when you’d go to school one morning and you’d come home and certain people in the neighborhood would be gone and you’d never see them again. There were student protests, and people were shot, beaten and put in prison.

I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to go to college in the United States. By the time I graduated, we had a full-blown civil war in both Liberia and Sierra Leone. I couldn’t go home. We started making soap and selling it on the street. We built up the company to where it is today.

Tell me about your parents.

My father ran an insurance company, but he passed away when I was 8. My mother was an economist working for the government of Liberia. But both my grandmothers were entrepreneurs in rural West Africa.

I learned from them early on that business could impact the future of generations, just based on your ideas and your willingness to drive those ideas to fruition. When it’s your only option, there’s a certain level of stick-to-itiveness that gets ingrained.

What are the influences of your parents and grandparents on your leadership style?

Well, it’s hard not to see influences of my mother because she’s my business partner, and she’s cracking the whip all day on me. We started the business together, along with my college roommate, Nyema Tubman. Except for my college years, I’ve lived with my mother all my life.

Not to split hairs, but is she living with you, rather than you living with her?

Yeah, but she will never describe it that way. I also have four daughters, so I am heavily influenced by women.

My mother is a very compassionate leader. She’s very focused on the idea that it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it, and that people always remember how you make them feel. So treat them the way that you want to be treated and make them feel the way that you want to feel.

That has been a guiding principle for me around leadership.

It must have been a bit of a culture shock coming to the U.S. for the first time.

Part of the culture shock was all of a sudden not having to worry about where I was when the sun went down. It would be 8 o’clock and nobody’s running inside because of government curfews.

It wasn’t just the freedom to move, but also the freedom to express an idea and go after it, was quite shocking for me.

What were some early leadership lessons?

The biggest speed bump for me early on was that when I hired people, I expected them to be as good as they said they were on their résumé. So I had to work with them a lot more than I anticipated in order to get them up to speed.

Because we were building everything from scratch, we didn’t have the infrastructure in place to support what they knew how to do. A lot of people can come in and run something. Even fewer people can build it. So I needed to start building and laying in foundations and infrastructure and process in order for these people to be successful.

Other insights along the way?

I learned how to reach out to people, to seek out mentors, to understand how to do things. At first I didn’t realize I could do it. But even competitors were receptive and willing to talk to me. I try to do that now myself. If there’s something that I’ve learned along the way that I can pass along, I’m always happy to help people.

You faced a backlash on social media last spring for an ad that featured mostly white women. It struck many as wrongheaded, given that many of your customers are women of color.

The ad didn’t go through proper channels, and we immediately owned our mistake and set out to restore trust. A critical lesson I learned is that we have to make sure all our employees, particularly new hires, have a full immersion in our culture. We’ve nearly doubled in size in the last two years and we’re experiencing some challenges that come with that growth.

How do you hire?

The big thing I want to understand in an interview is whether somebody is coming here to build a business or to build a career. I think you can build a career by building a business. I don’t think you can build a business by simply building a career.

The second thing is, are you going to contribute to building our cultural infrastructure? That requires flexibility of thought, which is as important as diversity of thought. It might mean giving up an office to work in an open layout.

I can get a pretty good sense of what matters to them by the questions they ask me, rather than the questions I ask them.

What career and life advice do you give to new college grads?

To get to a certain level of leadership and success, you have to have conviction in what you’re doing. You have to have the stomach to stick to what you’re doing because the challenges that you’ll face, whether you’re building a business or leading people, are going to be many.

So make sure that you’re willing to stick with what you believe in. We’ve been doing this for 26 years. It took me 16 years just to get our products on a retailer’s shelf.

Each week, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about leadership. Follow him on Twitter: @nytcorneroffice. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Building a Career by Building a Business. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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