Jenny Harris: from Booking Flights to Phase 3 Executive Vice President

Jenny Harris, Executive VP, Phase 3

Can you imagine a travel agent working her way up to becoming a powerhouse in print? If you can’t, think again. That’s exactly what Jenny Harris, executive vice president of Phase 3 Marketing and Communications did.  

Before finding a career in print, Harris graduated with a degree in marketing from Auburn University. She jokes that she, like most college graduates, had no clue what she wanted to do with her life.  

“I was recruited by American Express. I had experience in the travel industry. That's how I paid my way through college. I was a travel agent and that's kind of where I started in the working world. And then eventually that evolved into me owning my own business, which I owned for almost five years,” Harris says.  

Harris’ apartment locating business, helped people find places to live in the cool and hip places in town. She eventually sold her business, but because the internet was then becoming more popular, she realized she couldn’t go back to being a travel agent.  

“I didn't know what in the world I was going to do. So, I handed my resume over to a headhunter and ended up in front of the general manager at C2 Media, which had been Chroma Copy before they changed their name to C2 Media,” Harris says. “I had zero experience other than I bought print for the company that I owned, but I didn't know anything about it, but I knew sales.”  

So, Harris took her sales expertise and ran. She was hired as a sales rep for C2 in November of 1999. The rest is history. It was at C2 where Harris was able to get her feet wet in print and learn more about digital printing. But when C2 attempted to go public, Harris was laid off.  

“When that didn’t work out, the general manager of the Atlanta office took three of us to start Phase 3. I was one of two salespeople, and we were working out of my living room and didn't have any printing equipment,” Harris says.  

When Harris started working at Phase 3, she was a single mom, and she says, at the time, failure was not an option.  

“I was recently divorced, there was no plan b. My most important job has always been being a mother, but I had to have the means to do that,” Harris says.  

So, she got to work. And once again, she honed in on her sales skills. She’d been selling print for just shy of two years and was working off the relationships she’d built. In fact, she says in the early days of Phase 3, relationship-building was all they had.  

“We didn’t have an office, we didn’t have equipment, I was begging people to trust me. That's the side that I started on and can say firsthand what it takes to be successful on the sales side,” Harris says.  

She then moved into sales management, and from there she went on to run the Atlanta production facility for five years in conjunction with running the sales side. Fast forward to today, Harris now manages over 100 people and is responsible for the company’s sales, customer experience, branded merchandise, business development, and marketing teams.  

“Our ownership is very invested in their people, and I have been very lucky and was afforded the opportunity to learn to do a lot of things,” Harris says.  

However, she’ll never forget the days when she didn’t even have an office chair.  

“I chuckle when I talk to some of our sales team members now where I'm like, ‘You're lucky if you have a chair.’ It took me, no lie, probably two years before the owner bought me a chair. Because when I asked him for one, he was like, ‘What do you need a chair for? You need to be out selling, don't sit down, drop your stuff off, and get out of the office,’” Harris laughs.  

And for as hard as she worked to get herself where she is today, and how hard she continues to work — Harris believes in being kind to herself as a working mom who is balancing her career and her family of six.  

She wears having a career and being a mom as a badge of honor that she’s extremely fortunate to have, but she’s also realistic with herself with what she can do in a day, and she believes other women should be too.  

“It’s about having real conversations, and that includes having a real conversation with myself, you know, and making the agreement with myself that I am, I'm going to be kind to me. In other words, I'm going to be a realist about what I can get done in 24 hours and not beat myself up over things. And I’m going to stay positive because negativity doesn't help anything,” Harris says.  

She continues, “Working moms in any scenario have to do what's right for them, and whatever that balance is, that's what it is. Don't be too hard on yourself. It's of course important to launch a brand, but the school recital is also very important.”