Reese Witherspoon Recalls When She ‘Couldn’t Keep the Lights on’ at Her Company

Reese Witherspoon is recalling one of the most difficult — and enlightening — moments of her career.

During production company Hello Sunshine’s second Shine Away event in Los Angeles on Saturday, Oct. 5, the founder and actress recalled the “aha moment” that helped her make a wise business decision.

While exchanging stories with fellow event panelists Octavia Spencer and Laura Dern, Witherspoon, 48, discussed how, despite tons of critical acclaim, she “couldn’t keep the lights on” at her company.

“There’s a moment in all of our lives when you realize, ‘No, wait, no one’s coming to help, no one’s coming to make that decision. For me, I have to make that decision.’ I’ve had a lot of those,” the Legally Blonde star explained. “Being a single mom when I was in my late 20s, I had to make a lot of decisions for my two kids and a lot of financial decisions too.”

“I remember I had a moment when I was right after Big Little Lies and I had self-funded my first company,” she continued, referring to Hello Sunshine, which she founded in 2016 and which absorbed her previous production company, Pacific Standard.

Given the success of the 2017 HBO drama series, as well as Pacific Standard projects like Gone Girl and Wild, Witherspoon thought Hello Sunshine would be flush. That was not the case.

Recalling her mindset at the time, she said, “Okay, well, Big Little Lies won all these Emmys and Wild and Gone Girl got all these Oscar nominations and we made 600 million in the box office.”

But the reality of the situation, Witherspoon remembered, was that she “had four employees and I couldn’t keep the lights on.”

“I remember the accountant calling me going, ‘You didn’t make enough money producing those three things to keep four employees,’ ” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m doing something wrong.’ And that’s when I had this aha moment. I was like, I need to have help. I don’t have a business plan.”

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That moment, she said, helped her “realize there’s things I didn’t know, and I had to reach out for help, and that’s when I had a friend help me create a business plan.”

“It’s also good to know what you’re not good at, and I know what I’m really good at, but it’s also important to go, I’m not good at something,” the Sweet Home Alabama star said. “So that’s when Sarah Harden came in — who’s our amazing CEO — and we had secure funding, but I had no idea how to hire executives and create infrastructure and get lawyers and business affairs and financial people.” 

Despite asking Harden “the dumbest questions you can possibly imagine” for a year, Witherspoon said that being vulnerable and asking for help is what ultimately led to the company’s success.

“I’m sure she was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She’d go home and I’d be like, ‘My business partner’s an idiot.’ Like how did she not know? But she was so patient with me and let me be vulnerable,” Witherspoon said of the Hello Sunshine CEO.

“And that vulnerability I think is what led to our success,” she added.