Carrie McComb still remembers being shocked during her first few months at Brilliant (asi/146116), when founder Millie Tadewaldt, the 2025 Distributor Entrepreneur of the Year, told her to stick around – if she didn’t like a particular policy, chances are it’d probably change in the next few weeks.

McComb, now the distributor’s chief operations officer, didn’t know what to think at first. But, five years later, she says it’s that type of adaptability and willingness to evolve based on employee feedback that has pushed Brilliant to the success it knows today.

The Brilliant (asi/146116) team always feels connected, despite being a remote workplace. Employees enjoy in-person meetups.

“We’re not married to anything. If it needs to evolve, we’ll evolve it – we’ll make a change,” McComb says. “We’re not the Wild West by any means, but we like to make sure we’re adapting to the business’s needs, but also that everyone’s along for the journey.”

For Senior Director of Creative Strategy Tommy Gomez, the 2023 Distributor Up-and-Comer Salesperson of the Year, watching that journey has given him a true sense of ownership over Brilliant as a company and also his work within it. In some ways, he said, it reminded him of his background in marketing in the nonprofit space – feeling like everyone was collectively working toward a greater mission – but there was also an acknowledgement of everyone’s clear individual strengths. That, in turn, made it easier not only to get work done, but to build a team.

“If you create an environment where folks are only coming to each other for business-critical needs or questions, you’ve taken all the fun out of it,” Gomez says. “One thing feeds the other.”

Kylie Kost, for example, knew when she started at the company a year and a half ago that she was going to have to create Brilliant’s marketing strategy from the ground up. But she realized from her first week alone that she had the support of the full team behind her – a Slack inbox full of coffee chat invites welcoming her to the company and the knowledge that senior leadership was as willing as anyone to roll up their sleeves and get it done.

“At Brilliant, they give you your own highway to do what you want with the role, and it really has been that this past year,” Kost says. “There’s just a lot of trust and ability to pursue life outside of work, while also getting your work done at a healthy level.”

The Brilliant team gets together once a year at an offsite, but employees who live in the same city also often connect for happy hours or coffees.

At the end of the day, Brilliant tries to ensure its employees know how things work – through comprehensive onboarding, an open forum for questions and an easily accessible Notion knowledge base – and then feel comfortable enough to question them.

In fact, it’s one of the team’s core values. Informally known as “down to clown,” it essentially ensures that the team keeps an open mind to almost anything, especially employee feedback, which creates a work environment rooted in transparency, respect and room to grow.

“We have a bias toward yes,” McComb says. “But that doesn’t mean say yes to everything – that means question it, figure out if it makes sense, and then, let’s try it.”