by Anne Beiler
Jonas and I left that meeting feeling completely overwhelmed. At least I was. To this day I am so thankful he brought it up with me, but at the time I immediately felt discouraged by the prospects of what lay ahead. Were we doing something illegal? Would I get into trouble? I just wanted to sell soft pretzels and help other people do the same thing—how expensive would it be to change from licensing to franchising? Could the business survive my mistake?
Jonas, as usual, encouraged me, saying we would do what we had to do to keep the company going. I also bought a book that talked about the more technical aspects of franchising, how it differed from licensing. The more I read, the more I felt that, yes, this is what we were doing! I knew we needed to make the change, which meant finding someone who knew what they were doing, someone who could help us through the process. I also felt that we couldn’t make such a fundamental change while still opening stores at that frenetic pace, averaging nearly a store a week. I met with my fledgling organization, which now consisted of my brother-in-law Aaron (full-time store builder and fine tuner), my sister Becky (helped with just about everything but seemed to be specializing in taking orders and overseeing the production of our mix), my brother Merrill (part-time deliveryman), my brother Carl (given the monumental task of organizing our headstrong, motley crew), and my husband, Jonas (busy building a nonprofit counseling organization as well as helping build a business). Together we tried to create a plan that would help us move forward.
Carl made an important connection with a company called Francorp, which helps franchisors get started. As he talked to them, we realized more and more that we were in fact franchising and needed to make some major changes to get on the right track. This was in the fall of 1990, and the responsibility felt heavier and heavier with each passing day.
Meanwhile, things at home continued to get more and more difficult. Sure, there was the “normal” chaos around the house that resulted from owning a growing business: our butter in the fridge was in one-pound blocks as opposed to sticks; retired market towels made their way into our kitchen for a few more weeks of use before being thrown away; money wrappers and coin rolls and bank bags cluttered more than one countertop; hard chunks of “washed” pretzel dough clogged the clothes dryer; generic plastic shopping bags with the words Thank You on the front doubled as small trash can liners.
Unfortunately, the chaos spread to our family’s emotional life as well. LaWonna still hung out with the same group of friends, and I worried more and more about her as the months passed. LaWonna and her boyfriend always spent time at his house with his parents, and never at our house with Jonas and me, causing me to feel rejected. One of the lowest points of those years with LaWonna came when a picture of her boyfriend showed up in the paper—he had been arrested. I felt humiliated and became furious with her for even associating with him.
Then there was LaVale. She, too, seemed to slip away from me. She was so young, so innocent—we had been such good pals! But she spent more and more time with LaWonna. At first I felt good about their times together because it made our family feel more cohesive, even though it didn’t necessarily involve me. But soon I started to see that her time with LaWonna only exposed her to things a fourteen-year-old shouldn’t be exposed to, shouldn’t see firsthand. My realization came too late, though, and soon I began to see LaVale following all the same paths LaWonna had taken. With complete despair I once again felt my family was falling apart, and no amount of success in the business world could make up for it.
At some point during those months, LaVale, Jonas, and I decided it might be a good idea for her to get some counseling, just meet with someone she felt comfortable speaking with, someone she could trust. She started meeting with the pastor at our church on a regular basis, trying to work through some things. In spite of my experience with pastoral counseling, I didn’t worry about her meeting with our pastor (he was a childhood friend), and I was happy she wanted to look for help. But a small part of me still felt disappointed that she couldn’t just talk to me about her problems.
A few weeks after LaVale began her counseling sessions, I approached our pastor just to see how things were going.
“Well,” he said, “I can tell you that LaVale is very troubled.”
Immediately I was concerned.
“What do you mean, troubled? I know she’s been struggling with depression recently, but is it something she can work through?”
“She’s very upset,” he cautioned me. “She feels like she’s living under a cloud. She feels that there’s a secret that everyone but her knows. She feels disconnected from the family.”
Up until that point I had not spoken with LaVale about the things that had happened with Pastor for those six long years. During the late eighties and early nineties, I still viewed what had happened between him and me as an affair for which I was totally to blame—it wasn’t until meeting with a counselor that I realized how he had abused his power as well as my vulnerability after losing Angie. Jonas and I often talked about when the right time would be to tell LaVale, but she always seemed too young or too angry. I thought that telling her would only shatter any remaining relationship I had with her, that she wouldn’t be able to understand, or that she would hate me for being unfaithful to her father.
Back in 1982, when I broke the silence and revealed my secret, I felt the need to tell LaWonna what had happened—she was eleven years old at the time and I didn’t know if I could explain the nature of what had happened to me, but I felt that she might hear it through the grapevine, and I wanted her to hear it from me first. Back then I knew very little about the effects a confession like that could have on a child. During the whole discussion LaWonna just sat there, listening very intently. I could tell she understood me very well.
Soon after our talk she handed me a letter:
Mom,
Thanks for telling me! Please don’t think I’m angry with you cause I’m not. I love you more than I ever did. Don’t even think I’ll hold it against you cause I won’t. If the Lord has the heart to forgive you, so do I.
Love ya bunches,
LaWonna Lynn
P.S. I would have told you this myself, but I know I would cry!
CASE CLOSED
Don’t ever bring the subject up again! Please. I love you.
“Do you think I should tell LaVale about Pastor?” I asked our new preacher.
He paused.
“I don’t know,” he concluded. “If you tell her, it could devastate her. If you don’t tell her, and she finds out from someone else, she could lose all trust in you. You are in a difficult spot, Anne. I can’t see either road being easy.”
But that’s what I wanted, an easy road!
After long talks and deliberations, Jonas and I decided to tell LaVale about the things in my past. I just felt that even though she seemed so young, she was bound to find out about it from someone in the community. After all, everyone else knew about it. So one sunny afternoon I got in the car with LaVale and LaWonna and set out for Angie’s grave. It was the only place on earth I thought I could reveal my secret.
Meanwhile, the business grew out of control. Totally out of control. Every single week that summer we raced to a store opening, including numerous shore-point locations. When word of Park City’s success began to spread, more shopping mall locations became available. Farmers’ markets continued opening as well. We were growing outside of Pennsylvania, trusting more and more store owners to uphold our high standards of cleanliness, customer service, and the creation of the best pretzel known to man. We moved into our first main office and built a training center with a warehouse in the back. And then there was the licensing versus franchising issue. By the end of 1990, we would have fifty locations open in nine different states, and we ended up selling over 800,000 pretzels.
Finally during one of our meetings, Carl made the bold statement “Maybe we should stop opening stores until the end of spring, next year.”
We all just kind of sat ar
ound and looked at each other. How in the world would we do that? It sounded like the right thing to do, but the phone rang off the hook every day with more and more people wanting to open an Auntie Anne’s location. And then there were the existing franchisees, most of whom experienced tremendously successful locations and wanted to open number two, number three, number four. It always amazed me to see how someone could go from being skeptical about the chances of success for a store that sold only pretzels to being desperate, nearly crazed, with the desire to open as many stores as we would allow them to open. The company snowballed into this gigantic force, and now someone proposed that we just stand in front of it with our hand up and say, “Stop”?
Amazingly enough, that is what we decided to do. Even though we needed cash, and every new opening represented that much-needed injection, even though the interest continued to grow, even though we had dear friends begging us to let them open a store, we decided to say stop. Carl was the driving force behind that decision—I never could have made that decision on my own. I was too interested in pleasing people, and I could only see all of the people who would be upset by such a strategy—I didn’t want to be the one to tell them. Carl, on the other hand, could see that if we continued building stores at that pace, the wheels would come off. We just couldn’t sustain that kind of growth. We needed to stop, catch our breath, get organized, and create some systems before moving ahead.
All that remained was telling the franchisees. We decided to make the announcement at the next gathering: the Christmas banquet.
LaWonna, LaVale, and I stepped out of the car at the small Mennonite church and walked the narrow paved path to Angie’s grave. I could feel the emotion welling up inside of me already and clutched tighter to a piece of paper in my hand. LaVale and LaWonna were both very serious, probably wondering what in the world I was doing.
“I brought you here,” I told LaVale, “because I wanted to tell you something. But it’s very hard for me to talk about. So I brought this for you to read. This should tell you pretty much everything you need to know.”
I handed LaVale an old bulletin from our church in Texas. On the back of it was a picture of Jonas and me. Under the picture someone had written a few paragraphs about our availability to serve as marriage counselors for couples struggling to keep their marriage together. The text also provided a very brief history, explaining what had happened with Pastor and how marriage counseling helped Jonas and me stay together.
All this time LaWonna sat off to the side, waiting. She knew my history and had known for years. I wanted to know what she thought about it, how she felt toward me, but I didn’t say anything. I just stared at LaVale and waited for the storm.
As LaVale’s fourteen-year-old eyes scanned down the page, I could see the color drain from her face. As she finished reading, I expected screaming, raging, crying. I expected her to scorn me and walk away. What I did not expect was for her to look at me with icy green eyes and ask one question.
“Is Daddy really my daddy?”
“Of course Daddy is your daddy,” I protested, the tears flowing. How I hated those tears and the emotional weakness they signified to me. I wanted to hold it all together. I wanted to stay strong. I didn’t want to be the one always breaking down. Yet there I was, sobbing when I felt I should be the one consoling my daughter.
That day was a turning point in many ways. For me it became the day I finally felt free of that horrible secret, although I wouldn’t feel the relief of that release for a long time because of the circumstances surrounding my confession. For LaVale, though, I think that afternoon was a slap in the face, the inevitable strike that comes when someone learns that everyone around them has been “in the know.” Up until that point I think she saw the trials our family experienced as relatively everyday sorts of trials: a little spat here, a disagreement there. But when I told her about my past, I think it put everything into question for her; the very nature of our family and our history was suddenly cast into doubt. Even her own identity seemed a mirage.
From that day on, the bond between LaVale and LaWonna became permanent. They spent summers at the beach together, ran off together for days at a time. They went to parties together and got into trouble together. I think the knowledge of my past mistakes served as a strong bond between them. They were in a common rebellion, and the upcoming years would prove to be almost more than I could bear.
I sat at one of the tables in a local restaurant with Jonas, Carl, Becky, and Aaron, along with some of my other main employees. We were surrounded by more than one hundred people, licensees and their families. It was Christmas of 1990, one of our first company-wide meetings, and there we sat, preparing to tell them the company they loved was going to stop growing for about six months.
Thankfully, Carl made the announcement.
He told them that we weren’t going to do any more new deals for a little while. If they were at the banquet and we had already agreed a deal with them, we would move forward with that, but outside of existing locations we were putting growth on hold. Completely.
A lot of people were very upset. It was during this time that a few franchisees attempted to tie up larger territories, something we shied away from, preferring to allocate each store one at a time, location by location. Franchisees from Baltimore, New York, and New Jersey pressed for the rights to develop those areas—they were concerned with competition coming in and taking the prime locations, one of my main concerns as well, but I just knew we could not continue to grow in that helterskelter way.
In the end most of our franchisees understood our decision and respected us for making it. And we probably did lose some locations during that time. Yet we needed the time to clarify our vision, organize our efforts, and restructure our system around franchising versus licensing. We often found that out of our greatest frustrations came our greatest advances. Our frustration with poorly performing units led to the assembly of better agreements up front as well as increased training and support. Our frustration with our licensing issue led to an exploration of the franchising community, where we learned many crucial lessons from companies that went before us.
But blinded by the frustration, I couldn’t see or appreciate the advances we were making. As the weeks passed and we entered that difficult period of remaking ourselves in early 1991, I continued down farther and farther. Every difficult business moment became a crisis in my head, until I didn’t feel I could go any farther.
Finally one day I entered our small office and sat down at my four-foot-by-five-foot cubicle (my desk barely fit into the space allotted). I prepared to visit a problem licensee in another state: the product there was very disappointing. I couldn’t believe how horribly some people could make my wonderful pretzel! I gathered my things together and tried to get psyched up before making the three-hour drive to visit with this difficult person. I just kept thinking, There is no way I can get through this day.
Carl came up to my cubicle and let me know he’d scheduled a meeting with an outside company to work on our training manuals. That was one of Carl’s main projects (of many) during those months, and he did a good job finding outside resources to help us expedite the process.
“Just wanted to let you know the meeting is in a few days,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, but just as he turned to go, I couldn’t hold the emotions in any longer. There were too many people to see, too many places to go, too many projects to think about, and I felt it physically impossible to stretch myself any further. All of my energy literally drained out of me, and I collapsed from my chair onto the floor, almost fainting in exhaustion.
Becky came running.
“What’s wrong, Anne? Are you okay?”
My brother Merrill was also in the office, and he joined Carl in racing over to my side. I couldn’t stop crying.
“What’s wrong?” they asked.
At first I couldn’t speak. Finally I gasped a few words.
“I don’t know. I don’t know wh
at’s wrong.”
“What can we do?” Becky asked.
“I just can’t go on,” I said. “There’s just too much.”
“But we’ll help you,” they said.
There they stood, my brothers and my sister without whom I could not have started the business. They were such a support to me. At first they suggested that they take me to the hospital to make sure I was okay, but I turned them down.
“I’m fine,” I said, sitting there on the floor of our offices. I wasn’t fine, but I had trouble admitting to myself that something was wrong. I felt I had to push on.
So a little while later I was on the road, driving to New Jersey. I cried the whole way, sure I was going to lose my mind. The business controlled every aspect of my life, and I felt certain that it would destroy me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Surviving Prosperity
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition
in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we
have little experience: the task of surviving prosperity.
—ALAN GREGG
During the early days of the company, from the opening of our second location through 1993 and 1994, my life, along with the lives of my girls, seemed completely out of control. My own anger and frustration, for one, filled me to the point where grace could not find a niche, not even the smallest little cranny. My inward struggles formed the core of my difficulties, whether it be my insecurity as a business leader or my feelings of inadequacy as a mother and wife. Eventually I could see that these internal battles led me into a time of personal growth like nothing I had ever experienced before. At these times I felt God testing me, pushing me, stretching me, and while at many points I could not deal emotionally with the stress that came from this intense molding, it had to happen. The adversity had to take place or I would not become the person I needed to be in order to fulfill my calling.