With Jill gone and a few rudimentary business lessons under my belt, I knew I needed to turn things around. This is the point at which I launched the real business. I stopped dead in my tracks and made a fresh beginning. The very first step I took was to create an informal business plan. I outlined the scope of my operation: what I hoped to achieve, and what I needed to do. A more formal plan followed, detailing both the big picture and the smaller ones. This more formal plan detailed my rudimentary strategy and tentative marketing plans. I realized that even without Jill I could rely on a strong network for help: I had my accountant, my family, my friends, my mentor Marvin Paige, and anybody else I could get my hands on to answer my questions. I was learning fast and furiously.
The one constant of my endeavor was my own ability to sell. I had to develop an organization that could meet the demands created by my sales out front. This was true even in that first small shop on Franklin Avenue where we were operating. I was virtually starting again. I had so very much to accomplish in a dozen areas, and I had to do it right away or I would lose the momentum we had most definitely created but could not control.
I knew I had to gather the cash to get me through the next year or two, until I could develop a positive cash flow. (Yes, I finally knew what the term “cash flow” meant!) And I simply knew, with innocent clarity, that I wasn’t going to allow myself to fail. I broke a lot of my own rules along the way, but I did what I had to do. I’m still here.
I was also mindful not to invest more than I could afford to lose, however little that was, just in case I was wrong and couldn’t pull it off. And unlike Jill’s and my initial mindless ideas, I would be doing it for the money, not the glory, which could carry me just so far.
Even though I was still using handwritten index cards, I now knew my formulas and all my costs. I borrowed $15,000 from my father (the only time he directly helped me financially) to give me some breathing room, and little by little, I righted the ship. My capital limited my participation in the marketplace. I developed the ability to know those limits and to rely on my budget. And then my business did begin to grow, and then to grow again.
I was working twelve- to fourteen-hour days, but I was thinking and planning all 24/7. I had my one or two employees and Don, my driver, who would pitch in with production when he wasn’t on the road. Soon after Jill left, Bridget started coming with me to work in the shop almost every day, just as she had done when we ran Bonne Femme in the garage. But now she wanted to know when “we” were going to get someone in to clean the house!
In spite of all this, there was a home front, and I needed to keep at least a semblance of order while all this was going on. I will discuss how we kept it all together later in my narrative, in chapter 17, “Family Matters.”
At this point I was still the baker, salesman, and chief bottle washer; yet the business by mid-1975 had grown to well over $100,000 per year in volume. Our reputation came through the turmoil of my partnership breakup intact; our products were still delicious; and, more importantly, they were always consistent. I was now able to breathe a little easier and have some fun, too.
Then someone new walked into my life, and everything changed again.
Jimmy the Baker
Shortly after Jill left the business, an acquaintance of mine called me to ask if I would be interested in meeting the husband of her housekeeper, who was a trained baker. The husband, James Gilliam, was out of work due to an injury, but he was looking for something he could do for a few hours a week. It was this chance introduction that brought the man who was to become Love and Quiches’ head baker into the fold.
Jimmy the Baker, as he will be called from here on in the book, was a black man who got his professional training in the navy. At the time, a man of color, at least in civilian life, was not often given the chance to be considered a head baker. We were still in the mid-seventies, and this was the reality, even if it was the North. Instead, bakeries had employed Jimmy merely as a benchman. Yet I was told by many of my suppliers during those early years that Jimmy always ran the local bakeries in which he worked. He was a legend in the regional bakery industry.
Jimmy came to work for me in 1975, and I found out very quickly that old-fashioned bakers are strictly nocturnal beings. He worked only at night, dressed in his crisp whites, no matter how hard I tried to convince him otherwise. I soon got used to arriving in the morning to find all the day’s production completed and perfect. Gone were the days of tissue-thin cheesecakes! We still were making the quiches during the day, but Jimmy took on all the desserts. Now I was able to introduce a variety of layer cakes from Jimmy’s recipes, chocolate and carrot to start, then a few others, in this tiny shop.
Jimmy was also a superb bread baker. And although we have never sold any yeast products commercially, just to keep in practice he often baked a few racks of the most wonderful French breads—including, sometimes, brioche—for the staff. We devoured it all, slathered in butter, within minutes of starting our day. I was always reminded of Evelina and her bread when Jimmy treated us to his bread.
Jimmy was stubborn and had a quick temper, but everybody loved him. He was all business, but he had a soft side if you sought it out. He lived a few towns over, and his house was by far the most well kept on the block, with not a twig out of place. This is the same way he handled everything in our little shop. When I arrived in the morning, everything was sparkling, and, if he had not already left for the day, I was always amazed to see that he had not a drop of chocolate on his crisp whites.
Onward and Upward
By mid-1976 I knew a lot more about running a business, and with Jimmy’s help, experience, and knowledge, we were really moving ahead. Love and Quiches was doing several hundreds of thousands of dollars in volume and generating a profit for the first time in its short history!
We were gaining ground every week in our little storefront. Jimmy the Baker was turning out gorgeous desserts every night, our sizes and varieties of quiche were growing a little, and Don was maturing by the minute, taking on some management responsibilities inside the shop in addition to making deliveries a bit farther afield, from Staten Island to Brooklyn to Long Island and every place in between. Also by mid-1976, we had about seven or eight full-time employees (one or two of whom would stay with us for decades).
Our roster of customers continued to grow, though we were still a local supplier doing “store door” deliveries in our own trucks. We had no distributors yet; I’m not sure I even knew then what a distributor could actually do for me. We still had most of our original customers—including our first, the Windmill—but we now had many more in the city, where I had concentrated my sales efforts. One of our newer customers right in Manhattan was a café opened by “society” restaurateur George Lang in the new Citicorp building. George was also the proprietor of the venerable Café Des Artistes (which has only recently closed), and his lavish apartment was famous for its spectacular green jade bathtub. George moved in rarified circles, but it didn’t stop him from beating me out of $1,700 in receivables when they folded the Citicorp Café. I was outraged, but when I protested, my only answer from his management was, “Grow up, girlie!” This turned out to be a fairly cheap education, because since then we have kept a very tight rein on our receivables.
We were also polishing up our image with sturdier packaging and more professional labeling. The resultant improved handling provided savings in labor and also eliminated waste. We moved to printed ingredient labels, eliminating our rather childish practice of filling out our labels by hand, running them off on a copier at a local stationery shop with ink that smudged and ran, and then cutting them out one by one. How ridiculous was that? Turned out that our hand-cut labels cost us more than our new printed ones once you counted in the labor, which we were finally beginning to do.
We retired the Silver Bullet and bought our first real freezer truck. It was hot pink this time, and printed on its side in professionally drawn white letters were our address, our te
lephone numbers, and our newly stylized logo. We had appropriated the lady with the rolling pin (part of our logo until recently) from an image my college roommate found for me in a children’s coloring book. Trucks are great “vehicles” for advertising! Losing my homespun style and image gave me further entrée into some larger foodservice organizations.
An Accidental Favor from Jill
Once again, something accidental that proved pivotal precipitated our move to our first industrial space. On January 17, 1976, Jill was written up in a human interest story by the New York Times. It was an article about a woman who had started a business from scratch but decided to leave it, returning home to find a much smaller enterprise in which she could control her time, rather than the other way around.
From that Times article I received a phone call from the foodser-vice director at Columbia University. Columbia did a tremendous amount of catering and became a very large customer of ours. As was often the case with my customers, the director and I also became good friends for many years, until he moved out of the state after accepting another position.
The article also attracted the attention of the buyer who ran the restaurants in Bamberger’s department stores, later bought and absorbed into Macy’s. This was my first large multiunit account; the company had fourteen stores from the New York metro area all the way down to Maryland. For the first few months, my patient and supportive husband made the delivery run (fourteen hours!) in our shiny new truck once every other week, until the buyer put us together with his meat and produce supplier. This supplier became our very first distributor and “delivered” Irwin from his grueling ordeal!
Just as Bonne Femme had in my garage, Love and Quiches was straining at the seams. Stuff was piled up everywhere, there was no room for much-needed new equipment, and we had no real bakery ovens. Far worse, there wasn’t nearly as much freezer storage as we now needed in the wake of the article—and we were, after all, a frozen foods business! Although this little storefront in Hewlett had served us well, I knew I wouldn’t miss the cluttered place for a second. We were at the end of our rope, and I knew we had to get out of there—and fast!
Chapter 5
The Mini-Factory (1976–1980)
Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.
—Indira Gandhi
I didn’t want to move far, no more than five or ten minutes from home. Irwin, always ready to help me, was my sidekick in my search for new space. We started by driving in small concentric circles around the Hewlett location in our Chevy, zeroing in on commercial areas in nearby towns. One day we were cruising around Oceanside, two towns over and about ten minutes from our shop, when we noticed a For Rent sign that looked promising. It stood in front of a neat-looking one-story building with a brick façade. Though the building had no loading dock, it did have a wide garage door that would allow our truck to back up close to load up in the mornings. The building was on a wide boulevard, a main route to all the beaches—including Jones Beach—and we realized that this spot, if it worked out, would help us pick up a lot more retail walk-ins even as we kept our current customers, since it was so close to the old space. It was perfect!
Irwin and I knocked on the door of the building and met my soon-to-be new landlord. He invited us in, and I was immediately struck by the vastness of the space before me. This building was five thousand square feet, but coming from our tiny shop, it might as well have been a hundred thousand. The rent that went along with the giant building—$1,200 a month—seemed a princely sum for us in 1976, but we felt we could swing it. By this point we were doing over $300,000 a year in volume, and expansion to a bigger facility was mandatory. But could we afford to outfit such a cavernous space?
Within a week we’d decided to go for it, and we signed the lease for the Oceanside facility for five years with the right of renewal. For this move, I needed some working capital, and I managed to secure a $200,000 loan from a bank that my father, albeit grudgingly, introduced me to. Love and Quiches wasn’t yet considered bankable. My father also grudgingly put up securities as collateral, which was the only way I could secure the loan. He wasn’t very happy about that, and neither was I.
We were, at this juncture, still a do-it-yourself organization with extremely limited resources, so we designed the shop floor ourselves with some advice from our equipment suppliers. My father-in-law, a retired plumbing contractor, did the plumbing work, and we used local electricians, carpenters, handymen, and other assorted characters to do the other necessary remodeling. We had a few mini-disasters, including one that involved a handyman named Willie and bright, raspberry-colored paint all over our sidewalks and window glass. (“I told you, I cain’t paint!” was Willie’s defense.) Finally, up went our great big Love and Quiches sign, and we were almost ready to move in.
In Oceanside, we could handle real equipment. The secondhand bakery equipment supplier whom we had met when we bought our first pie press for the garage sold us a Middleby Marshall rotary oven. It was a reconditioned twenty-four-pan gas oven with six shelves that rotated like a Ferris wheel so that the product was constantly moving through the heat. (Later, we added a second rotary oven with an eighteen-pan capacity.) The installation of our first Middleby Marshall was a major case of taking my company to the next level for me, but it was business as usual for Jimmy the Baker; he was used to real machinery.
My mentor Marvin Paige introduced me to another equipment supplier—a guy named Jack Harris, who became a mentor to me himself—who sold me a very large storage freezer for the baking side of our new workspace. Shortly after, he sold me another freezer—this one for the packing side—that made the previous one look tiny. It was about eighteen feet by twenty-four feet, almost the size of our first shop! This holding freezer enabled the staff to operate more efficiently by providing them with a place to store longer runs and to stage orders for shipping each morning. We were still delivering directly to our restaurant accounts, which meant we had a lot of very tiny orders to pack daily—two of this, one of that, and one of the other thing. (Yes, we were still selling eaches, not cases. The thought of cases hadn’t yet occurred to me. Still clueless!)
We bought plenty more racks, more mixers—some holding 180 quarts!—and more pans. Finally, we were ready for a real education in the industry. I had a feeling that this facility would be my proving ground, and I was right.
Love and Quiches Begins to Grow Up
Our years in Oceanside gave us time to grow both as a company and as an organization. We were rounding out the company with a growing number of support staff as the company began to take on more shape. With Jimmy the Baker to help, our product line was still growing. He was training our young recruits in mixing, baking, and cake decoration (or “deco” in bakery manufacturing parlance).
At first the front office was run by my friend who had moved with us from the first small shop across from the firehouse. After she announced that she had not intended to be working so hard and was leaving, she was followed by a more experienced head bookkeeper, Mildred, who stayed with us for the rest of our time in Oceanside. She was an old-fashioned bookkeeper who was ardently committed to her manual ledger and had no use for the encroaching wave of computerization. We also hired a customer service rep who called our customers weekly, sometimes daily, for their orders. All of our invoicing was still done by hand, but at least we wrote them out on printed triplicate forms. This was an important baby step for us, one among many others that had begun to add up. We also started to do a bit of almost embarrassingly rudimentary advertising in local newspapers to attract more walk-in retail customers, and we set up a tiny area in the front office as a retail counter.
Purchasing responsibilities were shared by whoever was around and had some free time in the front office, since this function did not warrant a full-time position as of yet. We were still a fairly small business, but even so, we used quite a few suppliers. Under Jimmy’s tutelage, we always compared prices to keep them competi
tive. Jimmy the Baker was familiar with all the local distributors, so he compiled the list of needed supplies, and the rest of us pitched in to make sure he got what he wanted.
We bought another truck; this one was white with raspberry lettering instead of the other way around, because the hot pink on the first truck had faded pretty quickly into a really dull color. Naturally another truck meant another driver—actually two because Don finally moved inside full time as the day manager, while Jimmy the Baker ran the night crew.
We had an endless supply of young people who wanted jobs, all of whom were friends and had grown up together in the neighborhood. They became our drivers, and soon we bought another and yet another truck. The new employees also became production workers, cake decorators, packers, cleaning crew, and all the other roles that evolved as we grew. We used to call them the “Motley Crew,” and I loved them all dearly. Many of them stayed with us for many years, growing up and into management positions before moving on.
You’ll recall my earlier comment that we tried our best to keep our sense of humor, but running our own trucks was, admittedly, a headache. Today we have strict inventory control and can account for every brownie, but back then, we had a few entrepreneurial drivers who would, on occasion, help themselves to a few cakes with the hope of selling them on their own. Luckily we had loyal customers who would call to let us know about this. One driver, still just a kid with a license, approached Marvin Paige, of all people, offering him our quiches at a great discount. Big mistake—end of job. Another time, two of our drivers had an accident—with each other! On the highway! When one of them called to inform us, we asked, thinking they were doing a route together, “Who was driving?” The sheepish response: “Both of us.”
With Love and Quiches Page 6