With Love and Quiches (23 page)

Although none of them matched Marvin’s influence on my career and business, there were other mentors in my life, including Jack Harris, my equipment dealer; restaurateur Stuart Levin; and two of the executive chefs at airlines Love and Quiches supplied. I picked mentors up from across the industry, wherever I could get them. If you find someone who’s open to mentoring you, even on a limited basis, jump at the opportunity. You never know who the Marvin of your business will be. My daughter, Joan, now serving as our executive VP of sales and marketing, is following in my footsteps and has more than a few mentors she looks to for advice. And now she’s doing what all of us who receive mentoring must eventually do—mentor others in return.

For any entrepreneur, a strong, well-cultivated network is a vital source of informal business education. New relationships are forged, old ones
are cemented, and opportunities are identified at trade shows, conferences, luncheons, dinners, and on and on. Each time I met somebody, I listened and learned something.

And today, of course, tremendously powerful and instant social networking is possible over the Internet.

Whatever method you use to do it, networking can ease the transition from employee—where you may have had lots of camaraderie in a larger company setting—to entrepreneur, which is a very lonely place at first. Whenever you can, network with other people who are in the same boat. Today, you have so many options for doing so. A good way to start out is to join networking organizations related to your field. The help offered there will be invaluable and may just make the difference between success and failure. These organizations connect people and support them by creating a community that fosters their ideas, provides necessary tools, and encourages them to keep going to reach their potential.

For me, that meant joining networking groups in the foodservice industry such as the Women’s Foodservice Forum. I was active in the organization for quite a while, and I am still invited to be a panelist on occasion, but Joan is the one who remains very active there. She is the quintessential networker, a perfect poster child for it all. I also joined broader groups like the National Association of Women Business Owners, which has members from every field. Andrew’s years as a very active member in the Young Presidents’ Organization has provided him with invaluable contacts and resources with thousands of members all over the world, several of which serve on our advisory board.

Another fantastic networking resource available to people starting out in my industry today are incubator kitchens, wherein aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to start a food business can rent space in already-licensed facilities. These facilities also provide classes in business basics—as well as mentoring, advice, networking, and moral support—while the aspirants are trying to figure out whether they have something. What’s more, they provide it all without the need for substantial financial outlays.

There are plenty of places to seek advice and help both locally and nationally that didn’t exist when I started out forty years ago. You will find that your chosen field is peopled with knowing, generous, sophisticated, and (mostly) loyal participants. Take advantage of that fact by networking regularly, with the goal of learning from anyone you can.

At the end of the day, of course, networking does more than support your constant learning—it also keeps the company in the public eye. Today, Love and Quiches is still learning plenty from the organizations we belong to and the events we attend, but doing so also ensures that we remain front and center.

Selling is an art, and if you watch and listen carefully, your customers can help make your business successful. Pay attention to what your customers tell you; listen to their feedback. They are another valuable source of constant learning.

I learned early on that I had an innate ability to sell, and over the years I learned to read the needs and personality of the person or organization I was targeting when I cold canvassed. I asked each and every potential customer what
they
needed in the way of products and service. That included not only the product but also the price per portion, shape of portion, packaging, ease of use in the kitchen, shelf life, and other factors.

I did my research: I checked out every prospect’s menus, and menus from similar venues before each appointment. I went in knowing which products would fit; I knew what to suggest. Now we have a cadre of sales professionals who service our customer base, and we partner with these customers to fulfill their needs exactly without sacrificing our own. Our vice president of R&D often travels to customer headquarters to work side by side with
their
executive chefs to develop products in line with their current needs. Our test kitchen gets many
of its freshest ideas from finding out what our customers want and need; after all, we wouldn’t want our customers to become bored with our offerings.

Customers want to be assured that we can fulfill their needs as authoritatively and decisively as we can, which gives us yet another reason to stay as informed as possible. They want assurance that we care that they buy from us, that we continually develop our knowledge base, and that we remain aware of the latest trends in the industry.

The other side of the coin is that we make sure our sales staff learn how to get to the
decision makers
, that they present our product to the person who has the power to say “yes” to the sale. We keep good records of our sales staff’s activities and the results of every sales call; the “no” this time around may be a “yes” the next time we contact the customer—existing or potential. (We also have learned that, on occasion, a potential buyer will hand our proposal and product samples to our competitors for duplication and a competitive bid. It happens, and there is nothing that we can do about it unless there is a signed
non-disclosure agreement
. If the project we’re pitching has a lot of R&D effort behind it, we do not proceed without such an agreement.)

In most cases, if you are a loyal supplier, the loyalty will be returned. We have been servicing some customers for decades. Sometimes, for whatever reason, customers are lost; you must accept that nothing lasts forever. But usually you will be given the right of last refusal.

As I pointed out in
Part I
of this book, the difficult economy of the early 1990s “did in” many of the smaller dessert companies—and as we all now know, those years were a mere warm-up for the coming decade. So now we have fewer competitors, but the friendly fighting between us is fierce. It took a while, but we now see that there is enough business to go around if we stay calm and focus on what we do best. There is room for all of us, and the stronger the competition,
the better our situation is because strong competition pushes us to do everything that much better.

No matter what industry you’re in, you stand to learn a lot from what the competition is doing. We make a habit of constantly watching our competitors: We look at their booths during trade shows just as they look at ours. We monitor their press, view their websites regularly, and mine the industry gossip (while minding our manners and watching our professionalism). We always keep them in our sights, look for gaps in their offerings, and fill them quickly. We are committed to the R&D process of gathering technical and market intelligence and seeing how it may benefit the company, and because we have remained private, we can quickly react to what we learn.

We strive to stand somewhat apart. There needs to be a point of difference in our products so that we can distinguish our offerings from those of our competition, as you should distinguish your offerings from those you compete with in the marketplace. Love and Quiches and our competitors all make cakes, brownies, cheesecakes, and other similar products, so the distinguishing factor may be price structure, pack size, packaging, or something else such as level of service or consulting abilities. Above all, we try to win over the market by the superb taste of our products.

________

Love and Quiches started with just an idea, yet it turned out to be a very good one. We observed a need for more varied and finer food in establishments that lacked the facilities and staff to produce such foods but had a clientele who wanted them. We had identified our market. We knew there was a need for our products and services, but if Love and Quiches was going to survive, we would have to constantly seek advice and information, and we would have to use that knowledge to enable us to deliver on our promise. As the decades passed, we did just that.

I have always asked a lot of questions, and I advise you to do so as well. The key, however, is to
listen
to the answers before deciding whether they are right or wrong for your business. You will hear a lot of hard truths, but don’t dismiss them out of hand just because the answer is not what you wanted to hear. Remember why you asked the question in the first place. I realize how hard it is to take advice when you feel that your goals are slipping through your fingers, but the advice just may be the key to helping get you back on track.

Yet sometimes it will be your gut that has the right answer. My banker (the one we nicknamed “Black Jack Fagan” when we moved to Freeport in 1980 and became first-time borrowers facing 22 percent interest rates) asked me a few times, “Why don’t you just cut your losses, close the business, and call it a day?” He was so sure that we would fail, but that is one piece of advice I am glad I never took.

So, if you think you have a good idea for a new business, or if you have already started your business or service, get as much advice and help as possible from wherever you can: family, friends, professionals in the field, your accountant, trade organizations, the SBA, regional economic development government agencies, the Internet (used properly and carefully—more on this in
chapter 15
, “You Can’t Taste a Cheesecake over the Internet”). I have gathered principles of sound business practices along the way (available in Recipes for Success), and I urge you to use these resources to help you come up with your own business plan. This includes what you hope to achieve in the first year, the second, the fifth, and beyond, as well as what you will need in the way of resources (for rent, equipment, marketing expenses, employees, and the like) in order to get there. My business plan outlined what we needed to do to generate revenue and profits, but it always remained flexible and fluid so that we could move with our markets.

Not every business needs to reach for the moon, and a successful business can be just one shop, one restaurant, one bakery, one regional
area as a local supplier, and so on. That said, Love and Quiches has grown and keeps growing. As we get bigger—as our customer base grows and our team of employees expands—the learning curve steep-ens. We realize that even now, forty years into the life of the business, we have plenty to learn, and we’ll take that knowledge from wherever we can get it.

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.
—Howard Schultz

N
o matter how good your product is, it cannot entirely speak for itself. As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you’re absolutely going to have to put effort into crafting a compelling identity for your company and telling people why your product is their best option. In the forty years I’ve run my business, I’ve learned some clear lessons about marketing and branding, and I’ve learned them in my usual manner: by trial and error.

Marketing is a huge job, and I recommend that you hire a PR or a marketing firm if your funds and the size of the company allow it. Doing it yourself works only if you are very, very talented. If your PR people are good, they will have great contacts and access to print press, radio interviews, and maybe even TV appearances, and they will also be able
to help tailor your social media campaign. They will constantly pitch your company to their (hopefully) huge arsenal of contacts. In addition, a
marketing
company—which can be hired on a project-by-project basis—may have design capabilities and other services way beyond your company’s expertise, especially when it comes to web design.

If you’re not ready for outside agencies, do the very best you can. That’s what
I
did until recent years, and as I look back over it all, I find that I haven’t done too badly. There are plenty of low-cost ways to market your business: social media, networking events, public speaking, homegrown news releases (you never know), blogging, cold calls, building a database, and the telephone. Of course, we now have talented marketing people on staff who direct our strategy for promoting Love and Quiches to the world.

No discussion of marketing and branding these days is complete without mention of the incredible power of the Internet and social media, where our message can be broadcast worldwide with the tap of a button. Love and Quiches makes use of
every
tool in the online arena, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email blasts, my blog, and all the other usual suspects. But I also have my reservations about these tools, as well as about what can happen when individuals and businesses rely too much on them. I’ve saved that discussion for the next chapter.

For now, it’s more important to talk about the fundamentals. You must have an understanding of how marketing and branding works, and here are some of the concepts I’ve found to be of most importance.

Every thriving company has a strong brand: an identity that tells its customers what they can expect when they do business with the company. Your brand is your reputation, and it’s the most powerful way to communicate your worth to consumers and partners. If you’re able to craft a brand that’s distinctive, that resonates with your customer base,
and that instantly communicates what you’re all about to everyone who sees it, you’re well positioned for success.