Mary Crowley built a $400 million company from her garage—all while putting God first. On today’s edition of Family Talk, Dr. James Dobson shares a classic conversation with the late Mary Crowley, founder of Home Interiors and Gifts. She shares how faith, generosity, and biblical priorities transformed her life from being a single mother to becoming a business pioneer. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/707/29?v=20251111
Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I’m Roger Marsh, and whether you’re listening at home or on the go, you are in for something special on today’s Family Talk broadcast. We’re bringing you a classic conversation featuring Mary Crowley, author of the book Women Who Win, who build a business empire by believing in stay-at-home moms. It was all the way back in 1957 that Mary founded Home Interiors and Gifts in Texas, based on the simple idea that women selling home decor through party-style gatherings would be successful. What began with modest sales actually grew into a really extraordinary success story. By 1983, the company was doing $400 million in business each year, powered by thousands of women working from their homes. The company became so successful that when they held a celebration, they filled an arena with 10,000 of their top saleswomen, and they featured Bob Hope and Billy Graham as special guests. But Mary’s secret wasn’t just business savvy. It was putting priorities in the right order. Mary started every company meeting by reading scripture, often turning to the Proverbs for wisdom about leadership. And here’s an interesting connection. Mary Kay Ash, who co-founded Mary Kay Cosmetics with a similar home party business model, was actually Mary Crowley’s sister-in-law. Go figure. In her book, Women Who Win, Mary Crowley addresses a challenge many women still face today, and that is a lack of self-confidence. Her message is both simple and yet powerful. You are designed for fulfillment, and God has a plan for your life. Mary Crowley believed that by honoring God and serving others, women could find success both at home as well as in the business world. So let’s listen now to these timeless principles from Mary Crowley talking with our own Dr. James Dobson on this very special edition of Family Talk.
SPEAKER 03 :
I would like to say this is one of the most generous women I have ever met. She supports Christian causes all across this country. And your generosity is legendary, Mary. So you have taken what God has given you and shared it with so many causes that you believe in. But where did all that start? How did you get into business?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I got in business 27 years ago. Actually, I’d been in direct selling business before that, but now my kids were grown, and I saw a need. There was a need for American women to decorate their homes with excitement and with care. And from a coordinated line of accessories, I found that women were not sure of what to do, and I’d worked for furniture companies. And so we started the business to give women an opportunity to work from their homes and be there when the kids got home from school, and still use their creative genius, which God gave every woman. Every woman is a genius. Some just don’t know it yet or haven’t developed yet. And this is the idea of the business. And we had twin goals. One was to honor God, because I knew by then that if we didn’t honor Him, we would not be successful. Now, that doesn’t mean that people who do not belong to the Lord, and there are lots of successful people, quote, in the world, they can be successful. But if I’ve made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and my Master, that I cannot be successful if I do not honor Him. Somehow along the line, he’ll let me fall flat on my face. And I’ve done that a few times too.
SPEAKER 03 :
I believe that’s true.
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely. So it had to honor him. And then it had to bless and serve people. The whole world wants service. They can buy products. They can buy merchandise. They can buy lots of things. But we want genuine, caring, personal service. And that was our goal, to do that. And in so doing, to help the woman who was showing and selling our accessories to find fulfillment in herself and to have a fellowship of her sisters. You know, America needs places where people can go to belong, to find a support team. When our great-grandmothers came across the prairies, they had quilting bees and canning bees, and they had support teams for one another in their difficult times and in their joyous times. So we have built support teams all across America, and the fellowship is as important as the salesmanship. And so that’s how we started. We started from our garage, very, very small. My son and my daughter and myself and a few friends, people that invested and believed in us, and It’s grown beyond my wildest imagination, and it’s pretty wild.
SPEAKER 03 :
To the woman who is at home, where you were when you started. I don’t know what your circumstances were, but let’s suppose that she feels somewhat unfulfilled and somewhat frustrated. She wants to do something significant with her life. Maybe the kids now are in the teen years, and she knows they’re going to be gone before too long, and she’s wondering what now. What do you say to her? How does she begin to put it all together and find out who she is? Does that necessarily mean she’s got to be successful in business like you are in order to find yourself?
SPEAKER 02 :
No. Again, I come back to the measure of success for each person. Success is a moving target. Mm-hmm. When you’ve got little kids at home, sometimes it’s just getting through the day. And then as they go into school and you begin to have other time, and then it may be reading good books and getting yourself, your mind activated again. Maybe it’s starting an exercise program, whatever it is, that the measure of success that makes you feel fulfilled, it’s different for everybody. And each person has to learn to define their own. Otherwise, they are always trying to fulfill somebody else’s plan.
SPEAKER 03 :
Why do you think that moving target is so difficult for American women to hit? Why do you think so many American women are frustrated?
SPEAKER 02 :
because they are trying to find their measure of fulfillment in what they’re hearing, either on TV or maybe radio or reading in some magazine, instead of trying to find out what God’s game plan is for them. I heard a wonderful interview with Walter Payton not long ago, and he defined something that was so great. The interviewer asked him, is your measure of success 100 yards gained in a game, as is the measure of success for a ball game for a running back? And he said, no. My measure of success is following the game plan designed for that game to the very best of my ability. And I thought that was a wonderful way to illustrate what, you know, everybody, God has a game plan for my life, for your life, for every woman out there with little kids or big kids or no kids. And if somebody tried to just copy mine, they might get very frustrated. I have a high energy level. And I can do a lot of things. Others might not. You know, we’re all made differently.
SPEAKER 03 :
Could it be that God’s game plan for a particular woman would be to stay home and take care of three little kids under six years of age for this period of her life? Society is telling her that that’s nobody’s game plan. Could that be God’s game plan for some people?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, he says that in his word, and then he also says that older women should help the younger women. And I think this is where, again, I was talking about a support team. A lot of young women with little children are feeling so alienated and so unsupported because maybe her parents or his parents do not live close. Society has not built a support team around them in our today’s world. That’s where they need to find a support team. They have to have fellowship with other women. And maybe it’s a Bible class. Maybe it’s a home interior show. Maybe it’s coming in part-time. Or maybe it’s simply finding other group of women who have uplifting, motivating things to put in their hours. Otherwise, sometimes we do recruit mothers with young kids because she’s sitting there watching the daytime dramas and living in a fantasy world, and that is no good for her. And so if we can enlighten her and lift her up and give her something to do part-time that will fulfill her desires and create, you know, we try to develop her creative talents. Women want to be accepted, understood, and developed, right? They don’t want to stay static. They want to be developed. So whatever. If you’re sitting out there and you’re thinking, well, I’m not being developed, then you find something that develops your mind, your spirit, your being, and don’t sit there and get… caught in that daytime drama trap. That’s what happens to a lot of women who are home with little kids, Dr. Dobson. That’s what happens to them. And so then just being at home with the children does not minister to their spirit or does not even help them to be good mothers unless they must have a plan to be a successful mother and a successful wife and woman.
SPEAKER 03 :
Mary, what do you say to the person who is very frustrated in their present job? Do you have any advice to a person who just feels they’re in a dead-end trap? Change it. Absolutely. But it costs money. I’m making more money than I could make someplace else. Yeah, but it’s not making you happy, so what good is it? But I’ve got to feed my family.
SPEAKER 02 :
Find another way to feed them. No, it isn’t really worth it. If people are frustrated in their jobs, unless there is a real way that they can change the frustration in that job, if it’s their attitude, then they better change the attitude. But if it’s the job itself and there is no hope of fulfillment, then change the job. Life’s too short and too wonderful to waste it on frustration. Now, we’ll have frustrations in all jobs. People need to realize that there are days of frustration in any job. And you can’t expect a frustration-free job. At the end of the day, there must be something that you feel that you’ve accomplished in the lives of other people or in going forward in your measure of success or something that you have done that is an accomplishment at the end of every day. Oh, there’ll be days you think, well, what did I accomplish today? I’ve just not even gotten through the mail. I didn’t get through the dishes. I didn’t get through the too many. You know, we live in the day of distractomania. But you can find something, some life that you touched, something that you did that made the doing worthwhile.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think you’ve put your finger on really the critical issue having to do with the support team. I’ve tried to write and talk about that because I find many women know they need that but don’t know how to go and get it. I was counseling with a young mother just the other day in my office, and she said, I don’t have anybody. I don’t have any close friends. The one I had turned her back on me. And this is a very bright woman who’s a schoolteacher and is very capable, very verbal, very able to get out and meet the world. Oh, I need to recruit her. And yet I find many women like that don’t know how to take the first step. There is a lack of confidence perhaps to go outside that front door and maybe somebody will hurt me or reject me and it’s just easier or seems easier to pull in and let the four walls collapse. I guess you’re really addressing that problem.
SPEAKER 02 :
We do. We address that problem a great deal. And you hit it when you said lack of confidence. One time I took a poll all across America from thousands of women, asked them what were their three greatest problems, personality-wise, society-wise, business-wise, or family-wise. And north, south, east, and west… There was no names on the papers. It was lack of self-confidence, low esteem. I was just floored. Here’s the greatest nation in the earth, the highest educational level for all women, the greatest opportunities. So I set about my goal is to help every woman I meet or that hear the sound of my voice to feel better about herself, to realize you are designed for success. fulfillment. God has a plan for your life, but I fully believe that they cannot find it till they find that absolute, till they realize that God is their creator, He’s their maker, and then they begin to understand what is the character of God. He loves, He cares, He’s just, He’s fair, He has great things for us. And once you find that, you see, people often say to me, well, haven’t you been discriminated against as a woman? Well, maybe I just didn’t have sense enough to know it. But you see, if somebody tries to put me down, it diminishes them, not me. My self-worth is tied up in the character of God himself. And once any woman finds that out, she’s redeemed. She’s free to be herself and then free to have the confidence to say to somebody, look, I need some help. I want to get to know some people. And how do you turn people with low self-esteem into good salespeople? Well, first of all, they have to learn what selling really is. They have an idea that selling is going out and talking and convincing people. No, it is not. True selling is serving a need in that person. And women are very good at understanding that once you find what this person needs and help them fill the need… Women are in the habit of filling needs of children, of husbands, of their nurturers by very nature. And once they realize that it’s a natural for them to be able to find the need and to fill it and to help the person in a serving way, they realize that it isn’t something big out there that they have to learn, but it’s something that they already have, a natural… ability to do. We just need to develop that ability and help them see what it really is. It’s a matter of learning what selling really is. Most people think of it as something that you talk and that you convince. No, it’s finding out person to person what her needs and desires and likes are, what she needs in her life, what she needs in her home, and then I can help you find that. I can help you Express your love for your family on the wall or in the figurines or the way that you even arrange a bouquet of flowers. And women are natural nurturers and natural helpers in this area. So once she finds out that she already has the natural ability, we just help her develop it.
SPEAKER 03 :
You know, my book, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, is based on this same thing we’re talking about here, where I ask over 10,000 women to rank order the sources of depression in their lives. And it blew me away, too, that the number one source of depression in young, middle-class, seemingly happily married Christian women was— was low self-esteem. 50% of the original test group that I based this little study on put that number one, and 80% put it in the top five. So this pervasive lack of confidence, lack of self-worth, is extremely widespread in our culture. And I think, again, it comes back to television to some degree, where every woman feels like she’s got to be beautiful and young and successful and the object of somebody’s great romantic love and attention in order to feel acceptable and to feel the confidence necessary to cope with life. And unfortunately, that support system just often isn’t there.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and not everybody is young and slim and gorgeous.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, unfortunately. What do you do, Mary, when you’re looking eye to eye with a very powerful male corporate executive who has the authority to move great numbers of people and so on? You being a woman, do you look eye to eye with him?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, absolutely. Oh, I thoroughly enjoy him. I’m on lots of boards where I’m the only woman. But I don’t come in and try to be a pushy female. Let me be sure that I do say that. I am there to make a contribution, not to compete. And with that complete positive attitude, I never have any difficulty there. Because God made us to have special roles and special talents and special abilities. And I can greet and meet and deal with people Corporate executives or presidents or whatever.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s now. You’ve got 39,000 people on your staff. What about when you had one? What about when you were beginning? Did you have that kind of confidence or did it grow through the years?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, part of it is growing through the years, but I always had a lot of confidence. Well, the good Lord born me on April Fool’s Day. That was wonderful, because most people worry about making a fool of themselves, and they won’t do things that are going to make a fool. I didn’t have to worry about that. You’d already gotten the title. I’d already gotten the title, yeah. But part of it comes from the fact that my grandparents taught me to place the Bible as one of our priorities. Not long ago, I gave a speech to young people, and I took a TV guide and a Bible with me, and I held them up. I said, all of you have these two books in your home. Which one do you refer to the most next week? Dr. Alan Redpath from England recently spoke, and he said, in England, we used to base our morality on the Bible. Now we base it on TV. And I thought, you know, that’s exactly what’s happening in America, really. And so in looking at the Bible… God is who He says He is in His book. I am who He says I am in His book. And since He’s who He is and I’m who He says I am, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
SPEAKER 03 :
Who does He say you are, Mary?
SPEAKER 02 :
He says that I am a child of His. If I believe in Jesus Christ, I’m joint heirs with Him. Wow! What kind of a promise that is. And then, oh, you know, many, many places he says, you talk about giving over in Thessalonians where he says, if you will give and share that all grace will be given in all situations and all your needs will be met. Now, that is a pretty powerful promise. And I’ve been claiming those for years. Tithing to me is the secret of it. You see, what I can make is not for me to be hoarding. It’s a channel. It’s a channel. It’s kind of like forgiveness. Forgiveness is not given to us in a cup. It’s given to us in a pipeline. So what I receive is to be given. You can’t out-give God. He just multiplies it. I am just amazed at Him.
SPEAKER 03 :
What do you say to the people who just feel like they can’t tithe? Mary, they just can’t pay their bills now. And they are $75 short every week and just isn’t enough to go around. And the kids need shoes and there’s a hole in the roof. And we’re trying to put our oldest boy into Christian schools. How in the world am I going to give any money to the Lord’s kingdom?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I go back to when I started tithing, and I was in just that same situation. I had two kids. I was a single parent. I was raising two kids. The war was on. I was working for an insurance company. My income had not risen like other people’s had. It was pledge time at the First Baptist Church in Dallas, and I always pledged and gave, but I didn’t think I could tithe. So a particular night, though, the kids were asleep, and I was wrestling with that, and I was telling the Lord all the reasons I could not tithe. And I thought of that verse in Proverbs, you know, but is the Lord convinced? He speaks to us through our creative genius mind that he gives us. Well, Mary, you’re not doing such a hot job of it yourself. Why don’t you give me a chance? I said, okay, Lord, I check tithe. It’s your problem. It’s your management of my life. I’m going to bed. So then I had to explain to our housekeeper and the kids, you know, And we had to take it out first, because if you don’t take it out first… It won’t be there. And we ate oatmeal quite a bit there in the beginning, and some of them would grumble and everything. But something happens. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand God’s mathematics. But within two months’ time, I was able to get out of debt. From that day to this, we didn’t suddenly have a lot of money. But something did happen, and I can guarantee… That if you give God’s management of your money, he has management of your life. Things change. It really is true. I cannot explain it.
SPEAKER 03 :
It really is true.
SPEAKER 02 :
I challenge people. I’ve challenged. I teach classes. I told you people, 150 people single by death or divorced. A lot of them have aging parents and a lot of problems. I challenge them every year. I say, okay, you tithe for six months. And at the end of six months, if you’re not better off than you are now, I’ll pick up the tab for the difference.
SPEAKER 03 :
You just said that to three million people.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right. And I have never yet had anybody take me up on it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Jesus spoke more about money than any other subject. So it must be extremely important to our spiritual welfare as well as to our financial welfare.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it’s exciting.
SPEAKER 03 :
Mary, we have a great deal of love for you, as I’ve said, for the kind of person you are, what you represent, not what you give, but who you are. You love the Lord, and it shows in everything that you do. And it’s been a pleasure meeting your staff. Some of your people came with you today, and they’re sitting in the gallery over there watching us broadcast today. And I just hope that… You’ll continue doing the great work that you’re doing. And I just trust the Lord will be very close to you in this coming year.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you. It’s been a joy to be here. And I guess I would like to say to every person out there, trust Him, try Him, prove Him. He will never let you down.
SPEAKER 03 :
You really mean that?
SPEAKER 02 :
I really mean that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Have you found that true of your entire lifetime?
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely. See, I’ve learned that Christianity is not a way of doing certain things. It’s a certain way of doing all things. And I can absolutely say, without any doubt at all, if you really trust Him, He has a better plan for your life than you can have for yourself. And I am amazed at what He’s done with one little orphan gal
SPEAKER 03 :
bless you Mary our prayers and our thoughts will be with you thank you
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, Christianity is not a way of doing certain things. It’s actually a certain way of doing all things. What a great thought to wrap up today’s edition of Family Talk featuring the late Mary Crowley. Now, today on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, this timeless wisdom featuring Dr. Dobson and his guest Mary Crowley discussing the issues of finding purpose, building confidence, and trusting God’s plan for your life. Now, if you missed any part of today’s program, you’d like to hear it again, or maybe share it with someone who needs a word of encouragement today, go to drjamesdobson.org. Or if it’s easier, click into jdfi.net. Well, the National Day of Prayer is approaching. It’s coming up next Thursday, May the 7th. It’s a day that carries deep significance for the ministry here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Our own Shirley Dobson served as chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force for 25 years, helping to spark over 43,000 prayer gatherings all across the country in a single year alone. And that commitment to calling our nation to prayer is a legacy that we are honored to carry forward here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Visit JDFI.net for a special booklet, an interview featuring Shirley Dobson, and more resources to prepare your heart for the National Day of Prayer. You’ll find them all at JDFI.net. Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, it’s our goal to help you and your family grow closer to God and to each other. But these daily broadcasts and resources are only made possible through the generous support of friends like you who share our vision for strong, faith-filled families. Your tax-deductible donation today will help us continue broadcasting messages of hope and practical wisdom to millions of listeners in America and all over the world. To make a secure donation, go to JDFI.net. Well, I’m Roger Marsh and from all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
