Pivoting in Business: Beth and Lee Wilson’s Career Twist From Escape Rooms to Candles
Written and Photographed by Bailey Hughes
Beth and Lee Wilson own Wisdom House Co, a candle company in Jackson. But it was not always candles. In fact, there were escape rooms, a reality TV show, vintage furniture flipping, and a marriage built on taking turns in the spotlight.
Lee and Beth met in college; he studied English literature, she studied communications. After they married, they moved to Louisville so Lee could attend seminary. A job in university ministry eventually brought them to Jackson, where Lee spent about seven years working at Union University while Beth earned her MBA and ran competitively for the school's cross country team.
Toward the end of Lee's time at Union, the two of them stumbled into their first business almost by accident.
"I was aging out of working at Union, so that's when Escape Rooms happened, and obviously that's like a natural leap, right?" Lee joked. "From doing ministry and discipleship to locking people in rooms for fun."
The business expanded into Middle Tennessee and Texas, and it grew fast enough that Lee eventually got recruited onto Hunted, a CBS reality show that dropped him into the wilderness as a fugitive tracked by professional manhunters. He won.
The Wilsons describe their whole marriage as an exercise in taking turns, one person chasing the big, exciting thing while the other holds everything steady at home. That was true when Beth was training for the Boston Marathon, and it was true again when Lee left to film Hunted.
"That's still what we do today," Lee said, "just in a different way, with candles."
At its peak, Jackson Escape Rooms had grown to about six locations. By the end of 2019, the Wilsons decided it was time to sell most of them and figure out what came next. Beth explained the thinking simply: they knew how to run a business, so they trusted they could build another one. The side project she'd been tinkering with – a small furniture-flipping venture called Wisdom House, named after their neighborhood street, seeded with $5,000 of Lee's winnings from Hunted – became the main focus instead.
Wisdom House started as a Wednesday furniture flip: vintage pieces, staged and sold online. It didn't last long. A surprise fourth pregnancy made the driving and hauling unsustainable.
"It's hard to go pick up couches in Selmer when you're pregnant with your fourth child," Lee said.
But Beth is quick to point out that the pregnancy wasn't the only thing pushing her toward a change. The vintage business had a hard ceiling.
"No matter what I did, I couldn't sell more than maybe $3,000 a month," she said. "Which is a great hobby. But is it gonna do anything more than that? Probably not."
There was something else missing, too. Customers loved asking where a piece came from, and Beth rarely had a real answer to give them.
"I would tell them, ‘I just don't know, man. I picked it up in Selmer,’" she shrugged.
She wanted to make something herself instead. Something she could speak to from start to finish. The slower months of COVID gave her room to test it. She started experimenting with concrete candle vessels, mixing and pouring them herself.
"If you want a story, you can buy a concrete candle and know I'm mixing it from the dirt," she said.
Lee sees the shift less as one decision and more as several things converging at once.
"Every pivot is very multifaceted," he said. "It's a personal decision, but your situation demands it too: a change in the market, a change in your family."
Wisdom House officially launched as a candle company in 2021. Three years later, the Wilsons moved production out of their home and into their current studio after one of their managers at the time joked that there were a few too many cobwebs in the basement setup.
Ask the Wilsons whether they've ever been afraid the business wouldn't work, and the answer comes fast, from both of them in unison: "Every day."
"I think what we tell ourselves is, ‘we've always figured it out’," Lee added.
Running a small business is less about creative inspiration and more about constant troubleshooting. A wax pump breaks. A customer disappears without paying a $40,000 invoice. An Etsy shop gets shut down with no explanation.
For Lee, the appeal of both businesses traces back to the same thing: what happens for the people on the other side of it. He remembers the escape rooms less for the puzzles themselves and more for the moments they created - a grandmother noticing something strange on the wall, a family working something out together.
"What you created is not as exciting as what it creates for other people in their experience of it," he said. He sees candles the same way now, just from a greater distance. "We don't get to see it, but we get to hear about it," Beth said.
"A candle will burn out and go away, but the people will not,” Lee said with genuine confidence.
Now, the Wilsons aren't looking for another leap. They are actually right where they want to be.
"I don't know that we have another pivot left in us," Beth laughed.
They have watched enough small businesses close to know that growth without discipline can undo everything. Some of that discipline, she credits to Lee's time in theCO's CO.STARTERS program, where he was assigned The Lean Startup. The lesson stuck: limit the variations, focus on what you're good at.
"That's a tactic that still plays out for me today," she said.
Lee's advice to anyone facing their own pivot points back to that same program.
"Go through CO.STARTERS and put your ideas to the test," he said. "Friends and family will just want to support you. CO.STARTERS gives you the pushback you need."
Beth's guidance is a little more practical: don't leap all at once, keep the income coming in, and give yourself room on the side to test whether the new idea is worth building.
"And whatever you do, don't quit your job right away," she advised.
Through all of it, the escape rooms, the reality show, the furniture, the candles, Beth and Lee have run every version of the business as a team, and neither one describes it as a compromise.
"I feel like at this point in our lives, we don't know any other way," Lee said.
Beth agrees, and she's not shy about why.
"There's not anybody else that I trust as much," she said, looking at Lee. "There's an understanding of stress, an understanding of problem solving, but because we're in the same space, it can just exist, and we don't have to talk about it all the time."
Ten years, two very different businesses, and a lot of figuring it out along the way, that trust is still what holds the whole thing together, and for once, they get to enjoy the spotlight together.
Lee smiles and looks at Beth with dearing eyes. "It's pretty worth it when you get to work with your favorite person doing what you love."
Shop Wisdom House Co.'s candles atwisdomhouseco.com, or find them on Etsy atWisdomHouseCo. Follow along onInstagram andFacebook at @wisdomhousedesign for new scents, restocks, and more.