With Love and Quiches (15 page)

At some point in the mid-eighties, we implemented a time and attendance system that required employees to punch in and out using their hand, like fingerprinting. This system was better than punch cards because now no one could punch their friends in or out without their being there. One morning an employee came to Tom and, holding up his hand, which was now missing two fingers (
not
from an on-the-job accident, I am happy to report), explained that he could not punch in. The payroll company advised us to have the employee use his other hand,
turned over
! It worked, though I will never know how or why. Technology and Love and Quiches kept marching on, but it wasn’t until the nineties that everything started to leap forward at warp speed.

In the early eighties, Irwin and I decided to see what all of these national industry trade shows were all about, so we flew into Chicago to take a look at the gigantic National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show held there each May. We wandered up and down the aisles like nobodies and were amazed at the size of this show! No one among our competitors was yet exhibiting; it was just the Sara Lees of the world. We accepted and enjoyed dinner invitations from some of our suppliers who were exhibiting, and they started to introduce us around. The best of these meals was the
one at Le Perroquet, where we dined on fine classical French cuisine. (Le Perroquet quickly became a favorite, and eventually,
we
were the ones taking
our
customers there.)

We also attended the International Flight Services Association’s (IFSA’s) yearly show, which was much smaller, more focused, and much more closed to newcomers. Because we had already done some airline business in the New York area, however, we met some of the menu planners more easily and picked up Ozark Airlines (now defunct), our first significant airline account. We started servicing them with desserts through the special breed of distributors that catered exclusively to the airline industry, one of which we had already picked up to distribute for us throughout the Northeast.

Winning Ozark prompted us to join IFSA as a member, and we started to exhibit at the annual show. In our first year exhibiting, we picked up TWA as an account, and we were making almost all of their coach desserts by 1984. TWA was a very big account! We were supplying them with eight-inch single-layer cakes in three flavors and pre-cutting them into twenty portions. Since the cakes weighed only about eighteen ounces each, these had to be the world’s smallest portions!

In 1985 billionaire financier Carl Icahn bought TWA, and the next year, TWA bought Ozark Airlines. We knew Carl prior to this, since he and Irwin had been army buddies and we were all from the Rockaways in Queens. We were friends, but working with him in his capacity as owner of TWA taught us a crucial lesson. Shortly after the purchase, Carl invited me up to his offices in Westchester as a supplier representative in a meeting with his head honchos. I soon realized I was more of a sacrificial lamb, although I don’t think Carl had intentionally meant for that to happen. But he had hired a few killer sharks to cut costs to the bone, and soon after that meeting, we found ourselves in a bidding war with another small cake company from Chicago to keep this business, which already had a very thin profit margin. At first, we kept inching down our price, but we finally just said, “We are done here,” and walked away. The small Chicago bakery kept bidding,
but they didn’t know they were now bidding against themselves. They got the business, but the company failed within the next year or two.

Once again, we learned this most important lesson: If you can’t make a profit while working with a particular customer, you need to learn when it’s time to walk away. Had we slashed our prices as low as Carl and TWA wanted us to go, we would’ve ended up in trouble. Fortunately, we could let the account go and not suffer too much because I’d learned another crucial business lesson: Never let any one customer account for more business than you can afford to lose, just in case you
do
have to say “no” one day. If a customer is dangerously important, that is your signal to go after new growth. It feels relentless, but that is the reality of almost any business.

We walked away from TWA, used the experience to become a little stronger and a little smarter, and went after other airline business to make up the loss. We had nobody but ourselves in our corner when this bidding war took place, and another lesson learned was this: if we wanted serious growth in this segment, we would need a strong and well-connected broker to help us do it.

We found our fit with McGuire & Associates in 1987, and we have partnered with them ever since. Little by little, as a major supplier we picked up just about every one of the domestic airlines and quite a few of the international ones as well. It took us about ten years to go from outsider to insider, but contrary to what the public may think about airline food, the buyers, executive chefs, and menu planners are
very
serious about the food they serve, and we have always had to do our best to live up to their standards and never lose their trust. The executive chefs of both Pan Am and Eastern became mentors and advisors to me in the airline segment, and of course we remained friends. In later years, as the original airline giants began to disappear one by one (besides these mentioned earlier, now TWA among them), some of the buyers moved to the other side of the desk, and several joined McGuire & Associates. Some of the original buyers I used to sell to are now professionals I
am selling
with
! They brought a tremendous amount of expertise to the table, not to mention their excellent contacts.

Because we were making progress exhibiting at the yearly IFSA show, we decided to take a shot at exhibiting at the supersized National Restaurant Association (NRA) show in Chicago. At the time, the smaller booths were all crowded together on the lower level, and that’s where we ended up. We didn’t give out samples because we have always held the opinion that the trade-show freeloaders would elbow away the real buyers, preventing them from getting near the booth. But there was a lot of cooking and frying going on around us—not very pleasant—and the show was a very long five days instead of the current four. It was grueling, but we came back the next year, and the year after, and the year after … we’ve been exhibitors for about thirty years now!

And as I grew older and my crew grew younger, a tradition took hold at the Love and Quiches booth that always made my day. At 5:00 p.m., when the show closed, a group of us would change into our walking gear and walk back downtown to our hotel about five miles away. It seems like a crazy idea after spending the whole day on your feet, but it actually has always had the opposite effect—we were energized. Chicago is a great city, and I’ve always looked forward to this show just so that I could spend a few days there.

After our first year exhibiting, the NRA show in Chicago quickly became very important to our expansion. It has consistently provided enough leads to keep us busy all year long. Tens of thousands of visitors attend each year from all over the world, and it is at this show that we have attracted many of our biggest and most important clients.

Yet, looking back, I can’t help comparing those days to where we are now. In our first few years at the show, we just piled our cakes on top of the boxes, but then, little by little, we started to display them much more artistically. By the 1990s, a photo of our booth made page one in the business section of the
Chicago Tribune
! Today our booth is
much larger and we send our entire team of talented chefs, who spend two days setting up and decorating the booth with gorgeous platings of our desserts and quiches and artfully arranging our products in the refrigerated display cases, as well as setting up our backdrop, decorative touches, and seating area. Once again, we’ve come a very long way.

We expanded the horizon for our sales force, as well. We had always promoted people from within the company, and many of our employees grew into their roles, but we knew we needed to attract some outside talent to keep up the momentum. We recruited some experienced sales veterans from within the foodservice industry in the Northeast, but this time we hired ones who understood what needed to be done, and we were skilled at picking the right brokers to represent us along the Eastern Seaboard. One salesman came out of the Moore’s Onion Rings division of the Clorox Company, for example, and he was experienced in operations and production as well.

During this time, in addition to attending these national shows, Elaine (who had morphed into our marketing director, among other things) and I went to some smaller distributor shows, where we also met some brokers who agreed to represent us and taught us how to work a show. Instead of standing behind the display waiting for somebody to stop, we learned to stand in front and lasso them in. We learned to work the aisles! We
had
to because hardly anybody had ever heard of us. If you wanted to network, you
had
to get out there to do it.

Despite all the conferences I’ve been to and all the people I’ve gotten to know, in my heart of hearts, I have never been comfortable with small talk, and I find it somewhat difficult to talk to strangers. But that doesn’t alter the fact that networking is a crucial element in most businesses, and I have always done what I had to do. (As a result, by the way, I have met and forged relationships with people from all over the world, and I have found some
true
friendships in the equation.)

Another important chapter in my absorption into the industry centers came through the Roundtable for Women in Foodservice, which was formed with the help of a US Small Business Administration
(SBA) loan in the mid-eighties in New York to serve as a resource for women from all areas of the trade: restaurant owners, chefs, nutritionists, food writers, and the like. I was invited to serve on the founding board of directors. We held monthly meetings and instructional seminars, traded job information, mentored younger women, and provided other services. During the next few years, chapters of the Roundtable opened in other metropolitan areas such as LA, Dallas, and Chicago. We held an annual luncheon during the NRA show in Chicago to attract members and attention—in other words,
networking!
This was, to my knowledge, the first broadly based organization formed to help advance women in my particular industry. The Women’s Foodservice Forum, which currently has twenty-two thousand members, would overrun us by the turn of the century (I am active in that organization, too), but the Roundtable was first to bring me together with many women whose passions, like mine, resided at the intersection of business and food.

We were still marching inexorably forward, but this was still long before everybody was walking around armed with laptops, cell phones, and BlackBerrys. Everything in sales moved along at a slower pace even as our computerization efforts speeded up. So it was at these shows that our relationships were forged, one by one. And now, today, we exhibit at shows worldwide.

By the late 1980s, thanks to our relentless pursuit of new business, we were doing about $6 million in volume, soon to grow to $8 million and more as we crossed over into the early nineties. We took a lot of steps and made changes during the second half of the eighties to help prepare us for the next decade. Some of them were deliberate; others, as usual, just happened.

We had our bakery kosher-certified when it became apparent that all retail in-store bakery departments, all airlines, most hotel chains,
and many other segments of the industry demanded it for all baked products. I remember the certification process was very trying and costly. We had to send out all of our pans—thousands by then—to be re-glazed, or else we would have had to replace them. All of the equipment had to be scrubbed down and sterilized. The most frightening process involved the ovens: we were required to raise the temperature above 1,000 degrees and run them at that temperature for more than eight hours! I asked, “How about 800 degrees for ten hours?” No deal. The rabbi said “No!” Somehow we got through it, but it took an army of mechanics to ensure that we didn’t destroy our ovens in the process.

(I recently read in the
New York Times
about the very same process being required in the White House for just one kosher event. In that instance, only one hour at 500 degrees did it. I guess the president has more influence and got a better deal.)

Becoming kosher-certified meant giving up our quiche Lorraine. It broke my heart at first, but since we were fast becoming more of a dessert company, I got over it for the greater good. As a matter of fact, desserts were gaining so much ground with us that by the early nineties, and as we grew nationally, the majority of our product development was in that arena. Sometimes at trade shows the same people would ask over and over again, “When did you people start making desserts?”

We decided that because the dessert segment of our product mix was growing by leaps and bounds, we needed a better name to connote our sweet goods. We knew that the name of a business is vitally important, so we thought about it carefully. We trademarked Susan’s Sweet Talk in the mid-eighties and described it as a division of our company, printing it as a subheading on all of our boxes, sell sheets, business cards, and the like. But while the ink was drying, we began to realize that the name Love and Quiches had achieved significant recognition throughout our industry, and that, try as we might, it would be a struggle to get anyone to connect “Susan’s Sweet Talk” with “Love and Quiches.”