Very few small companies were computerized back then, so the fact that we weren’t was normal. Nevertheless, I can’t fathom how our business operated in the early days of computerization in light of what we have at our disposal today. As I look back on the early to mid-eighties, I smile when I recall how our pricing was still done via a system of index cards and a calculator! We had a two-man team for this—a bright young employee, Molly, and me. It couldn’t possibly have been more rudimentary. Hopefully we mostly remembered to use the most current price paid for our ingredients. We used three percentages to determine the price of our labor, choosing which to use based on whether the work was “easy,” “medium,” or “hard”! Amazing, but the system worked for us until later in the decade. On top of this, we were still doing our price lists on the typewriter since we were still quite a few years away from spreadsheets.
Our first foray into computerization through the payroll company ADP had been off-site, dial-up, and painfully slow. Very little else was computerized, but we had one employee who basically functioned as a human computer. Billy had previously been one of our drivers and part of the Motley Crew back in Oceanside, and he had begun to stand out as being extremely bright. He quietly took control of our finished inventory, participated in production planning, and took the lead in managing our drivers and trucks, assigning routes and other related responsibilities. He was able to accurately track in his head the exact inventory we held for each and every quiche or cake, even after we had hundreds of products in our line, and this still held true even after we became computerized. Billy was our computer brain. We would send purchase orders back to him, and he would then send all the trucks out with handwritten bills of lading, after which he would come into the office to let us know exactly what did ship. We would then—after the fact!—print the invoices. Laura—who started working for us while still in her teens and who’s remained for more than twenty years—recalls that everybody in the office was afraid of Billy and had to remember three things: (1) Billy was always right; (2) Never say no to Billy; and (3) Billy took his coffee with cream and sugar!
We did know enough by now to upgrade our point-of-sale material, which we used on sales calls, at trade shows, and in mailings. We started using professionals to photograph our products and had our simple two-sided sell sheets typeset and professionally printed on glossy paper. But our product lines were constantly evolving, so we ended up with racks full of product brochures that were obsolete before the ink even dried.
With our first real bookkeeper, we had moved from our shoebox to a general ledger, which was maintained by our next two controllers even into the nineties. And our recipes, which we had yet to call “formulas,” were still handwritten on the ubiquitous index cards. Once we moved to Freeport, we “upgraded” to loose-leaf paper as we finally started adding method instructions to the recipes. It was in the mid-eighties that we “graduated” to the typewriter for recipes! A few years later we would finally migrate to entering all our formulas, complete with subassemblies, into the computer. But even at that point the formulas were in a word processing file, which had to then be reentered into our integrated software as we initiated batch control, raw and finished inventory control, formula management, accounts receivable and payable, and so on. Doing things the hard way was one of our specialties, but as the years passed, we got better. Very much better.
Through our ADP dial-up, we had been delivered from writing our invoices and statements by hand. Soon after, in 1982, we brought in our first general office manager, Dave, who had worked for our first airline distributor before joining Love and Quiches. He knew much more about computers than any of the rest of us did. At his prompting, we invested in our first in-house IBM server, which was truly monstrous and ended up being installed right in his office. But we were still keying in the purchase orders on two “dumb” terminals that could only communicate with the server and not each other. (This was before PCs became “smart” and could communicate with each other.) Still, it was much quicker, and it represented another step forward.
During his first years after coming on board, Dave purchased a software program, Cimpro, from a company called DataLogix, as well as another (smaller) server and two more “dumb” terminals from Unisys. Invoicing and accounts receivable was the first module of the software package to be put into use. Several years later, we brought in a new IBM-AIX server that was even smaller and a lot smarter than what we’d had up until then. We also started adding more terminals because we had more employees doing a lot more things.
All of our orders came in via the phone, so we did not yet have any real need for a fax machine. But on the rare occasion when we did, someone would have to go next door to send a fax! And most of our business was still local. Our customer service staff was armed with client information noted on—you guessed it—index cards! They would go through the cards—sorted Monday for Tuesday delivery, Tuesday for Wednesday delivery, and so on—to call each customer for their next day order. Theoretically, if an index card got lost, misplaced, or misfiled, we could lose the customer and not even know it!
We may have been a ramshackle operation in some respects in those days, but our key employees continued to produce top-drawer products. Jimmy’s reputation as a legend followed us into Freeport. In fact, on many occasions an ingredient or equipment supplier would spend the night at the plant helping to incorporate a new ingredient or machine seamlessly into production. They would always comment in the morning that they had never seen anything quite like the way Jimmy orchestrated the night’s production, moving his people around without a single wasted motion or moment. One supplier even likened it to a magnificent ballet performance!
Jimmy eventually had well over a hundred production workers under him. At the start of each evening, Jimmy always said he was “going up the hill” and toward the end he was “going down the hill.” One thing’s for sure, if we were out of an ingredient, he needed to be told in advance; otherwise, Irwin and I would likely get a call at two in the morning! Jimmy didn’t take kindly to any sudden changes in his Love and Quiches ballet.
As the years went by and our business became more computerized, we had to handle Jimmy very delicately, “making an appointment” in order to corner him in the conference room to wheedle all the details of a particular recipe out of him. Sometimes his description “about a handful and a half” was as close as we could get him to nail down a particular measurement, although his handfuls never varied; they were as reliable as a scale. He was extremely protective of what he thought of as his recipes and equally suspicious of them falling into the wrong hands. Occasionally he would leave an ingredient or two out; at these times we’d have to bypass him, getting the needed specs from his second-in-command, for inventory and pricing purposes. He finally did get it, and became more cooperative, but basically he was just Jimmy being Jimmy!
During this time, another member of our original Motley Crew began to stand out. One of our drivers, Tom, had also worked in inventory control and production alongside Billy. He was learning more and more about the operation of both the hardware and the software, and he asked for an opportunity to be our in-house IT technician. We sent him to school, and it turned out his computer skills were superb. Tom proved himself very quickly and would remain with us until 1998, when he landed a big job with the New York Jets. He remembers that our biggest challenge, among other big challenges, was keeping the inventory of ingredients. Billy would hand him the production list for the night, and Tom would enter it into the system. Each morning at six Tom would corner Jimmy the Baker to get a list of what had been made the night before. Then he’d sit with Bonnie, our buyer, trying to “back into” the materials that had been used so that she could reconcile materials required for future orders. Her “system” for keeping everything straight was to use sticky notes all over her desk—a step backward even from my pricing system of handwritten index cards.
As we put a few years in Freeport behind us, our general office
manager and Tom helped us take some big steps forward, technologically speaking. We added other modules within Cimpro (in addition to accounts payable, formula management, batch control, inventory control already added), such as cash flow management and sales analysis, which allowed our processes to become much more integrated. DataLogix was sold several times, and support for the program became more and more remote, so most of the enhancements over the years were accomplished either by our own IT people or other consultants. There was still plenty of handwriting and typewriting, though! And, as you might imagine, our old-fashioned controllers were very distrustful of computers at first, and they were reluctant to let go of their general ledgers. They worked with the “dual” systems, just in case, but as time passed, they—along with the rest of us—learned to trust our technology and slowly join the march with the rest of the world toward meaningful computer systemization.
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.
Trade Show Days
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 pho
to 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.
With Love and Quiches Page 10