With Love and Quiches (21 page)

We have also instituted an overall company initiative to identify improvement opportunities. We no longer have problems; we have
opportunities
instead. We invite participation and input in identifying such opportunities at all levels, and we’ve put incentive bonus plans in place for positive results. These incentives encourage teamwork on all levels. But good ideas are nothing if they don’t move from innovation to execution, so we make sure to act, not just to plan. In this competitive environment,
we are dancing as fast as we can
; a medium-sized company can do well in any economic climate if all the parts are running well.

There is no question that we needed to learn to spend money to make money. So we did. We have just spent millions of dollars in capital improvements, particularly high-speed online equipment for cutting and packaging our products as they make their way out the door. We are striving to finally move completely away from
Push
(pushing product through the plant through obstacles) to
Pull
(pulling product smoothly forward through efficient automation). Every new piece of equipment costs a fortune, but we are doing it one step at a time, and the return on investment is often immediate.

It has taken forty years, but another important step we took with
total
agreement was to form a board of advisors. We invited key industry and business leaders from outside to serve as an advisory board in order to help us make our growth plans become reality. Our board is made up of four outside members, as well as our executive team, and we meet for a full day quarterly (or more often if something needing immediate attention comes up). In addition to their vast industry knowledge and experience, our four board advisors offer a perspective unencumbered by the emotions of being involved with the business day-to-day. (They also have extensive contacts, a plus for sure.) A board of advisors gets paid for each day they sit, plus travel expenses, so the decision to form one should not be taken lightly. We needed to have reached a certain level before it even occurred to us, but now the process is indispensable. As we review our progress, the outside members tell it to us like it is, which can be pretty intense. And
then
we go out for a great dinner just like old friends!

With all of these positive initiatives, I feel as if Love and Quiches has finally positioned itself to weather the storms that, inevitably, are still to come. I still worry—it is part of my job description and I do it
very
well—but I don’t have to do it quite as much as I used to.

________

Where do we go from here? The walls are crowding in on us again. We need more office space, more state-of-the-art high-speed equipment and space for it on the production floor, more warehouse space, more frozen storage, more of
everything
. The planning stages for addressing those needs have already been set in motion and some steps already taken. We have a five-year plan in place to accomplish all of this, and I have total faith in our ability to do it. Our progress forward through the decades has been a bit more painful than we would have wished, but that pain just made the victories that much sweeter.

As your business takes form and grows, you’re going to find yourself facing new realities over and over. You’ll outgrow facilities, go head to head against new competitors, and face the challenge of building teams within the organization. The answer to these opportunities is this: always be willing to take your company to the next level. If you don’t keep moving forward in a competitive business, you may find yourself moving in the wrong direction. Get comfortable with revolutionizing and evolving because the more of it you do, the stronger your business will be.

A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.
—Tecumseh

A
ll of us who are running businesses today compete in an exceedingly fast new world. To succeed in this environment, we have to develop a company culture that can keep pace with that world. The heart of our business is its culture, one that is cohesive and well nurtured. Without this mission, a company is likely to end up directionless, stagnant, and fractured. At Love and Quiches, we’ve worked hard to build a culture that unifies our people and enlists all of them in maintaining our agility, supplying us with new ideas and new thinking, and keeping our customers loyal. Our
people
are the most important component of our operation, as they must be in yours.

Our company mission provides critical direction. To reach its goals, every business should have a mission statement that focuses on culture.
Our brand promise is: “To Always Deliver Ultimate Taste, Quality, Innovation & Value to Our Customers Across the Globe.” It has taken a thousand baby steps to get there, but now our entire organization is critical to that effort.

In one form or another, we have always taken steps to come together as a team, even if in the earlier years it was merely Team Building 101. We’ve never been just a collection of people doing their jobs. We’ve always strived to be a real team, one that’s made up of people who fit the culture of the company. The strength of our teams and their team-work informs our success.

Ever since we started hiring, we have employed some
very
smart people—if not always formally educated ones—who helped move the organization forward. These include a production worker who became one of our best quality assurance directors; a line worker who is now our operations director; a truck driver who became our IT manager (and who then, as mentioned earlier, moved on to a top position with the New York Jets); and of course Don, our first driver, who ended up running the back of the house. Then there was Karen, who started as a receptionist thirty years ago and recently retired in a position very close to running the company.

There were a lot more. If we saw that they had it in them, we gave them the chance. We sent many of them to school and provided other formal training. We promote within the company cautiously, though, keeping in mind the Peter Principle: elevating workers to the point of incompetency is not good for them or for the company. (On the other side of the coin, we
never
single out an employee for public humiliation, no matter how grievous the error.)

We keep track of many of the Love and Quiches alumni, and we have watched them all grow up and start families. They are constantly stopping in to say hello, even now, decades later—a real testament to the culture of this place.

In spite of the rosy picture I have been painting here, things were rarely perfect or easy. No matter how great your team spirit is, there will always be some problems between employees; it is a business, after all, not a love affair. As we grew, employees started to offer their input, which we encouraged, but as is often the case, not everyone saw things in exactly the same way. So I often honed my newfound leadership skills by moderating differences of opinion between employees. It was all part of the job. And, inevitably, there is some jockeying for position. I am relieved that today we deal with these issues on a much more formalized basis through our more structured human resources department.

Whether your company has an HR department or isn’t quite big enough for that yet, promoting collaboration is the key to keeping your team culturally vibrant. Some companies promote healthy competition between departments and teams, but to my way of thinking,
too
much competition isn’t very healthy. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, collaboration is a far better way to go, and that is the type of team interaction we strongly promote.

In our company, we maintain detailed job descriptions; everybody knows exactly what is expected of them, and it follows that they know exactly where they stand. Nobody has to waste time looking over his or her shoulder, as is often the case in larger corporations. We all know that, sink or swim, we are in this together, and we can get a lot more done this way. Along one wall in our employee lounge, for instance, we have an organizational chart that turns the traditional format on its head. The top line includes all of the line leaders; the next line lists the supervisors they answer to, then the managers, the directors, on down to the executive team at the bottom. It’s just one of the many ways in which we show our people that it doesn’t matter where you are on the org chart; each person is a vital part of our team’s success.

Of course, providing plenty of opportunities for your employees to bond and have fun together is a great way to develop culture and increase collaboration. Since the beginning, we’ve always thrown parties for our crew. In 2008, however, we made a joint decision with middle management to scale back our many extravagances. The yearly
events in the park were just too distracting and time-consuming to plan when we needed to concentrate on the very survival of the business. Each step we take is commensurate with the economic climate we find ourselves in, whatever year, whatever time. And because of our long tradition of blowouts, this step was not an easy one to take. But major decisions like these were no longer made just at the top, and we decided, together, that this needed doing.

We didn’t cut the fun out entirely, and coming together to celebrate remains an important part of our culture. We still hold quarterly fiestas in the employee lounge, where we bring in delicious and varied catered food, and top management does the serving. We still have music and dancing, and we do it several times on each fiesta day so that each shift can have its party. We all dance, mix, and match, but some of the Latin dance songs seem
never
to end, and my feet pay the price. During these fiestas we are a family; when there is work to be done, we are a team.

Through all the years, some of them difficult, we have managed to maintain our esprit de corps. This was demonstrated vividly by the amazing behavior of all 250-plus of us in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which fell on Halloween in 2012. All of Long Island was decimated by the storm, and our Freeport facility suffered extensive damage.
Everybody
on our staff showed up, wanting to know what they could do to help. Once our electricity was restored—which was within two days, since our village has its own power company, unique for Long Island—everybody pitched in no matter their position in the company, hands and knees on the ground, whatever it took, and we were up and running within seventy-two hours. They were magnificent.

At Love and Quiches, our culture thrives on having the very best team members seated on our bus. That means that we don’t want to hire good people—we want the
great
people. We have taken off the rose-colored glasses, and we realize that weak links affect the whole,
and can inhibit our overall success. As a result, we devote a lot of our energy to building our teams and making sure our hires are both a good fit culturally and in line with what we need to accomplish. We promote from within or recruit from outside to get the best people on board. And of course it is not only getting the
right people
on the bus; it is also putting them in the
right seat.

As you may have noted throughout the book, we have always been rather color and gender blind in our hiring policy, and this diversity turned out to be fundamental to our processes. We learned that innovation can come from
anywhere
, and we throw a wide net to get it.

It is a great skill to know how to hire right the first time. Love at first sight will never do, nor will a gut feeling that this or that person is the answer to all your prayers. That never works, and only rarely does hiring someone from a competitor work well. If you think back to some of my stories, we made some colossal mistakes—more painful because they were so very costly.

But as the years passed, our hiring practices have evolved. Besides using some of the free or nominal-cost online services, we don’t hesitate to use a search agency for important hires; they have access to a wider range of candidates than we do and prescreen them before offering them up to be interviewed. After that, it is up to us to make the right decisions. We look for people with a good track record and problem-solving skills.

And we no longer make all hiring decisions at the top. When we are evaluating a candidate, we now have them meet and speak with a few people within the team they will be joining to make sure the cultural fit is there. Afterward, the department director selects the optimal candidate.

Our constant learning never stops. We now use the STAR job interview technique to evaluate the candidate’s problem-solving skills. The questions in this process are designed by behavioral psychologists: We ask every candidate to describe a
difficult situation
they found themselves in, the
path
they took to resolve the issues, the specific
actions
they implemented, and the
end result
. Many large companies use this process, and if it is good enough for Sara Lee, it is good enough for us. Of course, each candidate’s past experience and qualifications are also key to the hiring process. In particular we take a hard look at the candidate’s employment history because we’ve found that a person who changes jobs constantly (called a “jumper”), even if he or she claims to have been looking for the right place to finally pursue a career, is not a good bet.

Although there are two schools of thought on the subject, we have never discouraged nepotism. We have employed married couples, children, siblings, and so on, without any issues. But employees who are dating one another present a trickier situation, particularly if there comes a bitter or volatile breakup. It is hard to control these liaisons, yet I do not believe in interfering in people’s lives as long as it doesn’t affect performance on the job. I know some larger corporations have unbending rules in this regard, but we never have. (Remember, we even held a wedding right on the production floor in the early days!)