Now, as seasoned travelers, we can adjust our inner time clocks with ease, but on that early trip, by the next morning, we had no idea where we were or whether it was day or night! At noon the proprietress entered our room and shook us awake, knowing we wanted to be on our way. We drove down the Rhône River, stopping in many little villages along the way and always asking the innkeeper for suggestions on where to eat, going from three-star restaurant to three-star restaurant, some that are now gone—like Alain Chapel, a culinary landmark in Mionnay, whose chef-owner was credited as being one of the originators of nouvelle cuisine—and others that are still there, like Oustau de Baumanière in Les Baux-de-Provence. More fun were the simple unknown places we happened upon for a meal at random—genuine French comfort food. On that trip, we ended up on the Riviera for New Year’s Eve, where we celebrated at Le Relais de Mougins. The owner, André Surmain, was the founder of Lutèce, one of the original haute cuisine restaurants in New York, and he was so happy to see New Yorkers at that time of year that he spent the whole evening at our table.
At first, Irwin and I never intended to visit all of the earth’s seven continents, but we’ve nearly done just that. (We still need to visit Australia to eat fresh-picked kiwis and to sample Foster’s beer from down under.) We would study an illustrated world atlas and collect brochures from travel agencies as we planned our various tours to South America, Africa, Asia (Central, Southeast, and the Far East), Europe, and North America. No distance was too daunting, and as we all know, the language of foodies is universal, so being English-speaking tourists was no barrier. Each country—whether it was behind the Iron Curtain, as during our visits to Poland and Hungary, or embroiled in political disputes, as in Egypt—offered so much richness in its culture, history, architecture, and of course, cuisine! If you’d like to read some humorous episodes from our many trips abroad, I’ve collected them at the end of the book in Recipes for the Soul.
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Why have I told you these stories about our trips? To bring home the fact that in order to broaden your reach in whatever business you’re in, you need to broaden your horizons and learn what’s happening in other parts of the world that you may not have thought possible. For me it was travel both in this country and abroad. Not only did we broaden our culinary horizons, but further honed leadership and organizational skills as we met and traded ideas and secrets with chefs and food manufacturers from all over the globe. And as a New Yorker through and through, I have always immersed myself in everything culinary that this phenomenal international city has to offer. I’ve seen every market, every bakery, and every food hall (a growing phenomenon here), and I’ve tasted every cuisine.
In my case, I needed to broaden my taste buds so that we could build a better chocolate cake—and that I think we have done. Ironically, I have found the world over that people love American desserts. Even in places where they hate us, they love our chocolate cakes, our cheesecakes, our brownies. They can’t get enough of them, and that has been a good thing for Love & Quiches Gourmet.
Chapter 17
Family Matters
It’s not personal, it’s business.
—from The Godfather
I started my journey at Love and Quiches with one partner, Jill, and am ending it with another, my family, who joined me, one by one, as the business grew. We have segued into a family business slowly: my husband joined the organization in 1980, my son in 1992, and my daughter in 1996. It has been quite a story from the time I started delivering quiches out of the trunk of my car. Andrew and Joan have gone from being children who helped their mother crack eggs in the kitchen to becoming major players in our ever-growing company. Love and Quiches has already celebrated its fortieth year in business, and we plan on celebrating our fiftieth and then our sixtieth as well. There is just so far into the future we need to look. I like to deal with the somewhat more immediate future; nobody has a crystal ball.
Jill’s and my original partnership lasted just a bit longer than one year, but our friendship is strong even today. Yet I started with a decent support system; Jill did not. Jill’s family didn’t think she should put in the time, whereas my husband always supported me and cheered me on whenever I needed cheering. Irwin has been my rock, my advisor, and the behind-the-scenes pillar of wisdom at Love and Quiches. And he’s funny—he has kept me laughing since the day I met him. I need the laughter; this is a rough business. He is also one of the smartest people I have ever known, and he has proved it over and over during the almost sixty years we’ve known each other (we’ve been married for more than fifty of them). He has always had the numbers cold while everybody else, to this day, is madly calculating on their devices or counting on their fingers.
The Home Front
When I started my business, my parents, at first, couldn’t understand what I was thinking; it didn’t fit the pattern. I was just a girl. Even when I was a child, they never taught me to ride a bike and they neglected to get me braces for my teeth. I taught myself to ride at the embarrassing age of twelve, and I decided to fix my teeth at forty! By then my father practically begged me to let him pay my orthodontics bill because he felt so guilty, but I wouldn’t let him. By then I had a stubborn streak that hadn’t been there during my formative years but that I surely needed as the business grew. As I mentioned earlier, my father finally became so enthusiastic about Love and Quiches that for a while he showed up almost every day.
My in-laws, the world’s most neglectful parents (Irwin grew up wild and undisciplined and often on his own), morphed into the world’s most incredible grandparents, and I really needed that support. They were of immense help: always there for anything I needed, no questions asked, and I surely needed them for all the car pools I would otherwise have missed. If not for them I would never have been able to pursue my business and to work the hours needed to make it all happen. They took my children everywhere for me—to the dentist, to their lessons. Irwin’s parents did anything else I needed, too, including waiting at my house all day for a repairman if something was broken.
Andrew and Joan were extremely close to both sets of grandparents.
It is obvious that no one can be in two places at once, so for any entrepreneur with small children, it is crucial to have a support network of spouse, family members, friends, or (if you can afford it) good child care as you pursue your dream.
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Long before I started my business, Irwin and I always exposed our children—even as toddlers—to fine foods both at home and in restaurants. So, much as it was during my own childhood, it has always been all about the food for our children also. When they were still very young and I was just developing my own passion for fine foods and cooking, Irwin and I spent a lot of time with Andrew and Joan. We loved to take them out to dine in fine restaurants on occasion. Even at three, Joan would look up after we read her the menu and order such dishes as Lobster Newburg. Then she would eat the whole serving with relish. Andrew at that young age was not quite as adventurous, but he got the exposure nevertheless. Eating well as they became teenagers and beyond has always been in our blood as a family, part of our DNA.
After I bought Jill out, I was working nonstop, but Irwin and I still saw to it that homework got done, dinner was ready (thanks to Bridget), and we always ate together. We made sure that both Andrew and Joan participated in at least some activities besides school: dancing lessons, piano lessons, and the like. (This was still the era before most parents started to obsessively overschedule and push their children in so many directions.) Another family thing we never gave up were occasional trips into the city to visit museums and attend the theater.
Andrew and Joan are close in age, and they were always good friends as young children and teenagers. They remain so now as adults and business partners. They managed to survive their childhoods even though, since I was so busy working, I wasn’t always there for them. I admit that I left them, in some ways, to semi-drag themselves up. Although they never caused me too
much grief, inevitably a bit of rebellion set in, like the time Andrew walked in with an earring in his ear, not at all common in those days, and it turned out that Joan had done the piercing! And they tell me now about all the wild house parties they had while we weren’t home. We had no clue!
Bringing Skills to the Table
Andrew’s and Joan’s eventually joining the business had been a natural progression, a given. They both had always known they would, and they both brought considerable skills to the table. With the second generation on board by the end of the 1990s, Love and Quiches was officially a family affair with a succession plan in place. So far so good.
Andrew was a bit like his father growing up; he ran wild. We became quite used to his phone calls that started with “You won’t believe this, but …” He would tell us, for example, that he’d just mowed down a row of rare Japanese maples while teaching his friend Michael how to drive and ended up with the car in the duck pond. Of course his friend was only sixteen at the time and didn’t yet have even a learner’s permit. He was also constantly in trouble in school until he was a senior in high school, at which point he was invited into a special alternative program where the students designed their own curriculum. I am grateful his advisors recognized his abilities, and this started his transformation. As he put it, “I have too much respect for my brain to continue screwing up,” and from then on we knew he was going to be fine.
Andrew attended Michigan State University and graduated with a business degree in hotel and restaurant administration. During college, he did a summer at the École Hôtelière in Lausanne, Switzerland, a world-renowned hospitality and culinary school, where he caught the cooking bug at a much earlier age than I did. Then he changed course and attended law school. After practicing primarily labor and real estate law for eight years, he brought his negotiating skills with him and joined Love and Quiches. The experience he garnered during those years of practicing law has meant he’s brought a great deal to the table here. Andrew is heavily involved in managing operations and financial planning, while still spending time selling and promoting the company.
Andrew is the visionary who sees Love and Quiches becoming potentially much bigger than it is now. But he has learned—as I have a thousand times over—that it doesn’t just happen. So he tempers his enthusiasm with practicality: how we can best get from here to there, and what we need to do this.
Joan, as a child, was Miss Personality. These skills stayed with her and are intrinsic to her present role in the organization. Before she came to work for us full time, she did some local sales, on and off, while we were still doing store-door deliveries. After graduating from Boston University with a degree in marketing, she worked for MGM for a while; then came marriage and children. Her first husband, Frank, worked for us in sales. There was a divorce, and, democratic organization that we are, he stayed and Joan left. It was several more years before it was time for Frank to move on, and she rejoined the company, this time for good.
In the intervening years, Joan took me as a role model in order to figure out how to be entrepreneurial while staying home to raise a one- and a three-year-old. She got her yoga certification and became a personal trainer. Meanwhile, her children were getting a bit older, and eventually she returned to Love and Quiches to make use of her marketing degree to help promote our twenty-fifth anniversary. Joan continued in sales, and now she manages our entire sales department while performing many marketing functions. She can really sell, and she runs her department with an iron hand. She has completely revamped our sales reporting and all its complex parts. She even got our export reps on board with reporting—if no New Business Data Form, no samples. Joan is the communicator, and she has taken my place—which I gratefully relinquished—from a networking and mentoring perspective.
Today, we all hold equal positions on the executive committee at the top with a few of our other key employees. Even so, on rare occasions I still allow myself to throw my weight around and get two votes. But I have learned that I can be outvoted, and I am okay with that. We have managed, for the most part, to work it all out. We are fortunate in that we not only love each other, more importantly, we actually like each other, which is very helpful when we are fiercely going head to head, which happens very often in a business as complex as ours. We have to try very hard to coexist effectively in the office.
All in the Family … Business, That Is!
No business is easy. We’ve had our share of battles, and some of them have been rather explosive. But we find a way past them. I might add that it is always a good idea to have a third neutral party in the room as a referee of the combatants. This is very good advice.
The people you spend your life with greatly influence your path. We are a close-knit family who find ourselves in business together, a difficult proposition in any circumstance, and we have had to find a way to live with it. Family businesses come with their own unique set of challenges. We will ourselves to keep the personal out of it, to focus on the end game. It was a process and took quite a while; we are still at it.
The sacrifices I have made have allowed my children to follow their own destiny, to put their stamp on Love & Quiches Gourmet and the direction the company will take going forward. So my husband and I have learned to step back, to let go, to allow the organization and its high-performance teams to do their jobs without being micromanaged.
In any organization—whether private or not, whether operating during periods of a difficult economy or vibrant growth—there will be disagreements, both among the family members and among others in the organization at all levels. Clearly defined areas of responsibility and job functions help keep this to a minimum, especially when it comes to family members. Communication, mutual respect, and coordination are key. And not just for the four of us.
As we all know, change is inevitable as the needs of our target markets evolve, and we realize that as a family-run private business we have the advantage of flexibility, with fewer layers at the top for important decisions. This is yet another example of setting aside the personal and moving quickly to seize an opportunity. Our employees appreciate this distinction. Our longevity depends upon keeping both our customers and our employees happy.
Sometimes, as our personnel numbers expanded, the togetherness grew a little too literal as the office space correspondingly got smaller and smaller. I still have the corner office, but now Irwin and I share it, sitting opposite one another across a partners desk. And it is not only us; sometimes, I am embarrassed to admit, if visitors need some private office time, we must seat them in a chair opposite the bathrooms with their laptops in their laps! More office space is on the agenda.
The statistics are disheartening for family-owned businesses; only about a third survive beyond the founding generation, and only 12 percent make it into the third. This family business will try to beat those odds. We have a willingness to change and remain relevant that has been demonstrated throughout this book. Family members have to earn their positions both now and for future generations, and we are open to seek outside help when needed.
Forming our formal board of advisors, discussed earlier, was an important move for us. Because family businesses tend to make emotional decisions, we knew that the time had come to seek crucial input from outsiders, each of whom brings their business experience and unemotional advice to the table.
We have always done a lot together as a family, and we still do. We can’t seem to get away from each other. And even though we work together—often more than enough for family members—we also spend a fair amount of time out of the office during holidays, at the beach, while out for a meal, and so on. Away from the office, we try to refrain from discussing business as much as possible. Realistically, especially during this digital age, this isn’t always possible; sometimes issues or decisions cannot wait, especially in a business of our size. We understand that and accept it, but if it can wait until Monday, we certainly let it do so.
Whatever the hardship
s of working with family might be, I’ve found those hardships outweighed by the gratification of being close to my husband, my children, and now my six grandchildren.
I think a fit end to this chapter is a poem my granddaughter Sari—now fourteen and always creative—wrote when she was eleven:
Sugar dust and flour spots,
Rest upon our big, gray pots,
A hair net to keep our tresses attached,
And white chef gear just to match,
The smell of brownies in the air,
And chocolate cake with devotion and care,
Blondie crumbs on our glove,
And our pretty quiche,
That’s made with love,
Love and Quiches is the place that’s best,
Because we’re better than the rest,
So eat our brownies,
Treats and more,
Then like us you’ll be sweet,
Just down to the core.
—Sari Axelrod, age 11
Chapter 18
A Look in the Mirror
Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.
—Mary Kay Ash
There was absolutely nothing in my upbringing to prepare me for the fact that I would eventually find myself in a leadership position and that people would wait and want to hear what I had to say or what I thought. As you all now know, building my business from just one quiche to where we are today was not what was supposed to happen, given where I came from and the playlist that was set out for me. Nevertheless, here I find myself; I have met and exceeded goals that I never knew would be mine. It is ironic that I ended up in the dessert business, considering that my real passion for cooking and food hadn’t initially been for baking at all. It shows how random these things can be. An opportunity presents itself, and you either go with it or you don’t. I chose to go with it.
With Love and Quiches Page 19