Chapter 15
You Can’t Taste a Cheesecake over the Internet
You are what you share.
—Charles Leadbeater
The web and social media have brought us some great things, but in many cases they have also caused the death of relationship selling. Communication becomes clipped, quick, and less personal; relationships become shallower; the experience of the product becomes less tangible. But this is not the case in the food business, which is still a taste-before-you-buy kind of business. Our sales team members are all road warriors. They meet people in person and have them try real samples of our products. No matter how crisp the image or enticing the description, the experience of tasting—savoring—one of our scrumptious cakes or pies could never be re-created on a screen. Just about everything else is done digitally—from the PowerPoint presentations to the pricing spreadsheets to the final contract—but it is the taste that seals the deal. And that is our advantage.
I draw a distinction between the computer age, which began in the 1980s, and the digital age represented by social media. The first is a triumph. The second concerns me more than a little. What hath the digital age wrought? I am not exactly a Luddite. I love my laptop, my e-reader, my iPhone, my iPad. I can find things on the Internet with just a few touches on the keyboard. I can stream movies, record my favorite programs, download music onto my iPod (on which I now have more than three thousand songs, or nine days’ worth!).
What I am worried about is this: I fear society is unraveling on the Internet; that so many people so depend on all the devices we have, that we are becoming more isolated than connected as entrepreneurs, as business owners, and simply as people. The closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further away it moves from our real selves. I use all these connections as tools, but I am not consumed by them as so many of my fellow human beings are, especially the younger ones. Of course, from my vantage point, almost everybody qualifies as a younger one.
As I walk down the street, I notice that everybody is looking down and texting as they walk, or they are listening to something through a pair of ubiquitous earbuds, oblivious to the world around them. On the Long Island Railroad (the train on which I commute to the office), everybody is reading email, playing games, or doing something on a device. On the subway platform where there is no connectivity (although that is rapidly changing), everybody is still staring down at their devices. It seems as though people—too many of them—are uncomfortable just thinking or being alone within themselves, as if they’re afraid they will miss something if they turn off the electronic gadgets.
People share everything! Even couples do, which is trickier unless the pair sets up some rules, a kind of social media prenup, if you will. Does the world really need to know what we ate for breakfast? Facebook has been storing everything its eight-hundred million users have been sharing about themselves for years. Is this what social media was originally intended to do? Maybe so, or maybe it just evolved that way because we have been willing to let it happen. I think we surely need more self-censorship.
What has happened to privacy? Public feuding on Twitter is a new blood sport. Politicians, too, use it as a platform upon which to bicker or as a weapon with which to humiliate opponents rather than as a platform from which to express ideas. I once read an article—can’t remember where—in which the writer, a psychiatrist, was quoted as saying social media was intended “not really to communicate some bone of contention; it’s to humiliate the person in front of the whole world. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, is the coward’s way of expressing yourself.” Has everybody forgotten that phones are available for us to use if we need to fight privately, or that we can fight in person?
I am by no means an expert, but I am intensely interested in the subject of social media, and I have noticed more and more articles being written about it all, some of them quite alarming. The writers of these articles are not just addressing social media, but technology in general. The title of an article in the magazine section of the New York Times one recent Sunday says it all: “Just One More Game … How time-wasting video games escaped the arcade, jumped into our pockets, and took over our lives.” Another Times article I clipped was titled “The Flight from Conversation.” In it the author contended that “the little devices that we carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but who we are.” It went on to say that “we expect more from technology and less from one another”; that “technologies provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship”; and that “when people are alone even for a few minutes, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure.” In the same article, a sixteen-year-old is quoted as saying, “Someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”
It all moves into the workplace. People are isolated even in an office without walls. Coworkers sitting at adjacent desks or cubicles email one another. I think that as more and more devices, software programs, and apps are added to workers’ arsenals, efficiency will eventually suffer and technology will overwhelm us. Don’t forget that we are all mere humans, and we will need new rules of the road and best practices for using all this wonderful technology to help rather than hinder us.
I admit there is a great deal I don’t understand, but my instincts tell me that this brave new world with all of its advantages is no cakewalk. When the technology becomes the most important thing in our lives, it is time to rethink the human connection. We need to put in some balance.
Nevertheless, I have been forced onto the bandwagon. Now I have both a Facebook and a LinkedIn account; my marketing team insisted, and I am, as ever, nothing if not a team player. I was also bullied into starting my blog, where I have chronicled the history of Love and Quiches and where I comment on “of the moment” subjects. The marketing team’s reasoning was that my blogging would help add to the visibility of our company, and I hope it has done just that. I admit that I have come to enjoy doing it. Then, by natural progression, came my book. (And of course I wrote this book on the computer using the two-finger method because I never learned to type. I couldn’t have done it without the computer, since I rewrote it over and over and then over yet again.)
So here I am, a reluctant participant, with hundreds—approaching thousands—of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections, and with invitations to connect coming faster than I can field them. These invitations keep coming, so I suppose that people must know me after forty years in the industry—or more likely, all the sharp and social media–savvy people that work at Love and Quiches have helped raise my profile. I have accepted that personal anonymity, which would be my choice if I had a choice, isn’t a good thing for building a business. So I vigorously continue this process of gathering “friends” and “connections” even though I am not a believer.
Our public relations team is tutoring me on how to “engage.” They also gave me marching orders to post comments at least twice a week, which is not too hard to do because I always have a lot to say. What is a problem is that the best time to comment (or so I am told) is on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, the later the better, just when I would rather be watching Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, or The Good Wife, or The Mentalist, or Shameless, or Mad Men, or reruns of The Sopranos. I guess the whole world is online late at night instead of relaxing, winding down, reading a good book, or going to sleep.
I do not yet use Twitter, and this may be where I draw the line if my team presses me to tweet. I read an article recently titled “Where Have All the Neurotics Gone: They’re everywhere. But now we call it Tweeting.” You can actually buy followers on Twitter or buy positive book reviews for a fee—not my idea of fair play. Then there is Yelp, where a thoroughly unqualified reviewer can kill a restaurant if he or she did not like the meal, and the terrible review is there for the whole world to see. I am trying to come to terms with all of this because this is the way it will remain, with much more to come.
Please do not misunderstand—I would never want to go back. All of the tools available today are vital to any business, from a start-up to the middle market and to the giants of industry and business. They are vital to government, education, writers, professionals, and all the rest of us. We use them both to keep our company front and center and to keep ourselves instantly informed about vital developments within our industry. As I discussed in more detail earlier in this book, Love and Quiches’ software systems are vital to our day-to-day operations, information streams, and forecasting, and our website helps us broadcast our products and capabilities all over the world.
Businesses, especially new ones, need to use the tools available to help them advance. Crowdsourcing can help new businesses raise seed money and seek advice; e-commerce systems can help both young and established businesses sell some of their products online. Plenty of websites exist—particularly Smart Brief (www.smartbrief.com), which offers an excellent best practices series—where entrepreneurs can seek sound business and leadership advice. These sources provide helpful advice on such topics as preserving sanity, time management, procrastination, burnout, leadership skills, business planning, and the effects of answering email at 2:30 a.m. Some of the articles may seem silly—like “Leadership Lessons from Outer Space”—but the majority will be right on. Still other places offer up-to-the-minute industry news and vital information. Just be careful not to visit so many of these free informational sites and request so many of their newsletters that your inbox becomes unmanageable.
No matter how useful the Internet and social media can be to advance your business plan and to market your product, from my experience the successful entrepreneur should never let these tools supplant personal connections, relationship selling, and living in the real world. No business can survive without strong customer relationships, without engaging face to face somewhere down the line, and without meaningful interaction; this is especially true in the food business. People buy from people.
Social media and the digital world have value and are here to stay—get used to it. Whether you love them or hate them, you cannot ignore them. But they will never become my primary means of communication. The human connection is much too important and precious to me to let that happen. I still believe in the art of conversation. I guess I was born too soon.
The advantages that today’s technological advances afford us are endless, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. But we need to find a way to effectively use the one without losing sight of the so very vital other.
Me vs. a Futurist: A Short Digression
I occasionally attend the Women’s Foodservice Forum’s yearly conference to catch up with friends in the industry, and I always really enjoy myself when I do because it is wonderful to see so many (as many as 2,600) young—and not so young—women gathered for a few days to network and help each other advance their careers.
Because of my position as chairwoman and founder of Love and Quiches, I was invited to some of the smaller, more private events at the 2013 conference. During a luncheon for some of the higher-level participants, the speaker was a well-known author and consultant whom I consider a futurist. His vision of the world we will be living in, in the not-too-distant future, was really scary. He began by telling us that medical advances will be so vast that humans will live 140 years or more and will all have our own personal robots to help us cope. We will not need human interaction; our robots will take care of us and keep us company, which will allow us to remain in our homes.
He then said that each of us, both young and old, will have his or her own genie, maybe sitting on our shoulders or imbedded under our skin, to serve as our taskmaster and conscience. The genie will store our statistics, recite our up-to-the-minute blood pressure and cholesterol counts, and slap our hands when we reach for the french fries.
The vision went on (and here he was prescient): We will all wear glasses that will give us our calendar reminders, the weather report, our email messages, the ability to make purchases from anywhere in the world, and so on. This technology, though just getting off the ground, is already available to consumers and is picking up steam. Our connections will become more and more virtual as people become more and more dependent on their countless devices. And this by choice.
He also said that higher education will all be virtual. There will no longer be a Harvard or a Princeton or any other university as we now know it. Online education is growing by leaps and bounds, but for higher education to cease to exist altogether as we know it today—no more sitting in a classroom, every single college campus disappearing altogether—is more than I care to contemplate.
This speaker was so definitive and persuasive in his arguments that you could hear a pin drop. But I was not convinced. I’m not sure where I got the courage, but I raised my hand in the Q&A that followed his talk. I asked him, “What about the human connection?”
In not so many words, he said we won’t need any, that the technological advances will be so vast that they alone would be enough for us to live fruitful lives.
I hope we have all bargained for a lot more than this. This brave new world doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Whatever the future brings, I’m confident in one thing: human connection will always remain important. I encourage you to embrace the Internet and social media; both are powerful tools for telling the world about your business and connecting with customers, partners, and mentors. You will need a media presence to build any business; get started on establishing it.
But at the same time, don’t discount the lasting power of having deeper conversations, of meeting face to face, of letting people experience your product or service in the real world. With so many of your competitors increasingly putting a digital buffer between themselves and everyone else, give yourself an edge by welcoming in-person communication and human warmth.
Chapter 16
A Global Perspective
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
—Henry Miller
My very favorite thing to do is eat in restaurants all over the world. Over the years, seeing, tasting, and touching the food of the far corners of the globe became an obsession for me and a significant part of what we at Love and Quiches are all about. This was especially so as our export business took on a major role in our growth and future planning. For me, travel is a way of broadening my horizons, and I recommend that any entrepreneur or business owner who is able to, to travel the globe. It’s amazing how new sights, sounds, tastes, and smells stimulate your mind and show you new possibilities.
Even my childhood memories of travel seem to be linked to the food I ate, saw, or learned about. One of the first such events occurred when I was thirteen years old: while on a cross-country teen tour, we were treated to an elegant lunch at Chateau Lake Louise in Banff, Canada, and we were served a delicate and cool fruit soup as a starter. Soup made from fruit? Soup that wasn’t hot? I found it incredible! Later, as young marrieds before Bonne Femme began, Irwin and I went on a whirlwind tour of Europe—five countries in ten days!—that included many wonderful food-related memories. In Paris I broke some kosher taboos, eating simple ham sandwiches on well-buttered bread (positively divine) and lobster at the legendary Maxim’s de Paris for a gazillion dollars! In Rome we learned that all Italian food was not always red. In Lisbon we were served a small portion of scrambled eggs topped with fresh tomato sauce as a starter for every meal, accompanied by beautiful and haunting Fado music and, often, dancing. And in Madrid I exercised my newly acquired taste for pork, dining on whole roasted suckling pig at the storied Casa Botin, founded in 1725. On another pre–Love and Quiches trip, a Caribbean cruise on the France, I learned to eat Beluga caviar by the carload—no accompaniments, just the caviar neat! I was obsessed with the stuff.
After we had been in business for ten years, I found that I could get away for a week or two without everything collapsing around me. So began Irwin’s and my more serious and purp
oseful travel around the world. In any place we found ourselves, we always hit the streets and visited as many bakeries, gourmet shops, open markets, covered markets, small local grocery shops, food bazaars, and supermarkets as we could. We looked for anything baked, everything sweet. We were amazed to learn that in every corner of the globe, the very same size racks and bun pans serve as a universal baking “language.” Our best finds were often far off the beaten path, and everything we learned about local tastes and customs helped Love and Quiches as the company transitioned to more sales worldwide. Each experience contributed a part to what I brought home to my business—perhaps a color, a flavor, an unfamiliar fruit, or a unique presentation—things that helped us in subtle ways to become what we are today.
Sometimes, on our way to South America or China or Europe or Russia, we have been served our own desserts on the flight, which has always made me feel very good. On a Delta flight, I once asked the stewardess what we were being served, and she replied, “It’s an apple something or other.” It was actually our lovely Swiss Apple Custard Tart, and I was disappointed with her description but I didn’t correct her. Other times we’ve noticed little hoards of our brownie, blondie, or oatmeal chewie snacks put aside for the pilot and crew, even when they were not being served on the flight.
Taste Sensations
We have taken a major trip once a year since our serious travel began. Admittedly, our first few trips were a little less adventurous, and we confined ourselves to Europe. But the food was another story. We once flew into Paris during Christmastime, rented a car, and immediately headed north to the Champagne region and Reims, our destination the lovely Château de Fère in Fère-en-Tardenois. The inn is located on the grounds of a thirteenth-century ruin. Our dinner was exquisite, but the table settings were quite intimidating: a dozen or more forks, spoons, and knives in shapes we had never seen before. We ended that meal quite a bit more educated than we were when we had gone in.
With Love and Quiches Page 18