The only personal role model I had was my beautiful friend Phyllis. She died much too young, but Phyllis always knew what she wanted and went after it. She decided against having children (she happily used mine instead) when that option was frowned upon, and she had been on track to become superintendent of schools in a large district on Long Island. We were very close friends who could discuss anything and everything without passing judgment, yet we always had fun together.
There was an entire genre of male chauvinist pop songs in the 1950s and 1960s. Phyllis’s and my favorite was “Wives and Lovers,” sung by Frank Sinatra, in which he advises the little woman to fix her makeup, comb her hair, and take nothing for granted just because she has a ring on her finger; that girls in the office will go after her man; no curlers or he’ll be gone; always run into his arms the moment he comes home; and other equally hilarious and sexist advice!
Every time we heard that song, we would howl with laughter while our husbands looked on, perplexed. I must have known even then that this would not be my role for too much longer. And I know Phyllis would have loved to learn about this book.
Although I started out not quite as a “lady who lunches,” I was nevertheless one who attended charity luncheons, wore wide-brimmed hats, and dressed to kill at these events. That was my milieu. For most women of my generation, marriage and then children was a given, automatic. In that era, female entrepreneurs were a fairly uncommon phenomenon. There was Estée Lauder, of course, but that was a very long shot.
But then I blindly plunged into this business, surprising even myself. I wasn’t the only woman who worked. Many women were real estate brokers, owned clothing shops, worked in the arts, or were teachers, nurses, and so forth. Manufacturing, however, was largely a man’s game. On my level, I was a pioneer, albeit an inadvertent one. On the rare occasion when I found a half hour to run out and meet a friend for a quick lunch, people used to stare and point at me, but I never cared. My community of acquaintances may have been a bit critical, maybe even a little jealous. But my close friends were always my cheerleading department, encouraging me to keep going in spite of the obstacles in my path.
At the start of this narrative, I admitted that my single credential was that I loved to cook and had a passion for anything and everything connected to food: not a very promising background for entering the highly competitive manufacturing arena. I had had no exposure to the corporate or business world. As the business grew and became more corporate, and our customer base became more corporate, I had to learn to navigate that world as if I was born into it.
I didn’t know any better—but once I got started, I did know that I had this tiger by the tail and wasn’t going to let go. I could do this! After that, everything I learned about business I learned by doing. Mine is a story about learning on the job, about developing a fierce determination to try my luck at something new—and get lucky in the process. I am still learning.
There is no such thing as a straight line to the top. I would not take no for an answer, yet I recognized that I was in for a long and often bumpy ride. My friend Jack, the equipment dealer who in the early days sold me my freezers and became one of my mentors, asked me more than once if I thought I could take it. Of course I would answer “yes!” to which he always replied, “But, can you really take it?” I painfully learned over and over again during the following decades what he had meant and was trying to tell me.
My path in business has been full of twists and turns. I liken it to my cooking style. When I cook, I just keep making adjustments: a little more wine or stock or olive oil … salt, pepper, herbs, and so on until the flavor is just right. I use my instincts here just as I have learned to do in business: what ingredients to add and how much vs. what to do next and when. It’s a skill learned from experience that has served me well. My advice is not to be afraid to veer a little to the left or to the right. Use my cooking as a metaphor for your career path; take the road to wherever it leads you. Dare to be a little bit different.
Through it all, I have never lost my passion. On some level, each phase of our development—both the good and the bad, as well as planning how to overcome the latter—has been filled with excitement.
Creating Balance
One would think my life has been all about food pretty much 24/7, but there has been some balance. Everyone needs some balance in his or her life. I played a lot of tennis—advanced singles tennis—and always loved it, except that I am now paying the price: my knees hurt, my shoulders hurt, and so do my wrists. When it became apparent that it was all over, I gave it up. I was sure that I would die if I had to give up my tennis, but I didn’t die. I’m still here, just like Love and Quiches. These days I walk a lot. I keep it moving all the time.
My next grand passion, almost up there with food, is reading. We own and have read so many books that we ran out of shelves to keep them on, especially since we now live in an apartment. I am grateful for my e-reader, although at first I was sure that I could never get used to not feeling the comforting heft of a real book in my hands. When traveling, we used to carry a separate bag with us containing thirty pounds of books. Now I can walk around with a hundred books downloaded onto my Kindle. I also make sure to read the New York Times cover to cover every day; however, I am constantly a day behind. I can never seem to catch up on that day, but I never miss a page. Theater and the movies come next in my list of passions; I drag Irwin to see at least one every weekend, and sometimes two. As a New Yorker, I have a lot of choices. And I never, ever tire of dining out. Turning off the pressure in these ways renews me.
As the decades flew by, I developed a new persona. I became unafraid of my own style; I never again followed trends. If I like something, I will wear it for twenty years. I never wear platform shoes, and I only wear one color, black, because it’s easier. Irwin says I dress like a widow. I don’t shop unless I absolutely have to, and I never shop in a department store (too complicated). But food is another story. I don’t mind shopping for hours to find the perfect melon or cheese. Food is still first on the list.
Climbing That Mountain
I have had a recurring dream for decades, and the theme is always the same: trying to get from one place to another. I can’t quite get there, or if I do, I arrive with the parts not quite in the right place. It may be as simple as forgetting my dress shoes when attending a wedding and not being able to go back for them because there isn’t enough time, or because there’s too much traffic because of a baseball game, or a concert, or the president being in town. Sometimes the raincoat is inevitably in the wrong place during a storm.
Most of the time, however, the obstacle in my dream is much more dramatic: mountains, floods, torrential rains, mudslides, a bridge that is out. No matter how hard I try, I cannot quite get from one side of the chasm to the other. Or perhaps I don’t have the correct address for the place I am trying to reach and there is no turning back to get it. I find myself hopelessly off course.
They’re not quite nightmares, but they’re unsettling nevertheless. And so it goes.
Building a business from scratch, from just an idea, is much the same. For me it has been a forty-year climb to get to a plateau high on the mountain, a place where I could stand without fear of falling. Along the way there have been hundreds of obstacles thrown in my path: recessions, competition, commodity spikes, blunders, flat tires, you name it. But I kept climbing because I had no other choice. It was too late to back down; there was too much baggage; I had bet the farm.
As I freely admitted in the prologue, my business didn’t come with an instruction manual. There was no “how to” book. If there was one, I had no idea how to get my hands on it. Many years later, I learned that the US Small Business Administration had several helpful booklets about starting a business that had always been readily available. By the time I learned about these, I didn’t need them anymore, but I’m sure they are still out there, no doubt online and updated to the present day. There are also myriad new busine
ss management books both online and in bookstores, and of course there are all the networking sources, local economic development organizations, crowdsourcing sites, and other help mentioned throughout this narrative. I suggest you look for and utilize any of them that can be of help; it would put you way ahead of me right out of the gate and save you a lot of grief.
As Love and Quiches’ reputation has grown, I have been invited many times to speak at industry conferences in order to share my experiences and knowledge on various subjects, including sales, marketing, building an organization, product development, and the like. During the question-and-answer period, I have always found that when all the hands shoot up, all anybody ever wants to know is how I got started! I hope I have demonstrated just that in this book.
It is difficult to know how it feels to walk in somebody else’s shoes, but I’d like to offer some of the advice that I only wish I could have had while starting out. I now know the food business very well, inside out and upside down, but these principles apply to almost any business endeavor. When the job market is difficult, starting your own business may seem an easier path, but it is a dangerous game, and being very careful as you take your first steps is of the utmost importance. To start a business it of course takes a good idea, but after that it takes guts, vision, a sense of humor, a tremendous capacity for work, and an ability to let go of doubts and the fear of failing.
Let me get this out of the way: There is no glass ceiling when you own your own business, and you can’t be fired, either. But when you fall, it is on a sword of your own making. Even during boom times, most new businesses fail. Plan B careers are extremely difficult. There are no guarantees, and undeniably there’s just as much or more stress as there is in corporate jobs. Don’t be afraid of Plan C: to go back to the corporate world or your old job (if you can get it back) if you have given it a shot and failed. Even today, less than 2 percent of woman-owned firms pass the $1 million mark (although, happily, that number is growing). So most small businesses are small. Given that, I guess I have done a pretty good job.
I accepted at the outset that there would be low pay—in my case, no pay—long hours, no benefits, and on and on. As you know, I had no expectations, and we were lucky to have just enough money to get by. I didn’t expect to have a career at all; but the thing is, I could and I did.
If you want to do the same, first gather your resources, and be careful not to risk more than you can afford to lose in case the enterprise fails. I took those kinds of risks more than once, and I am not ashamed to admit that it wasn’t any fun. So do what I say, not what I have sometimes done.
During every one of my speaking engagements, I have found that everybody is also hoping to hear, during the questioning, that building a business involves nice, neat, and orderly growth. It simply doesn’t happen that way. The pressures never end. Building a business is a 24/7 proposition, and it is very painful. People are also hoping to hear how glamorous it all is, but again, it simply doesn’t happen that way. I’m not saying that there is never any glory or that there are never any victories, because there are plenty of both in a successful business, even in the beginning when you take your first small steps and make your first sales.
What I am saying is that it hurts and you have to prepare for the pain. I once heard Richard Melman, founder of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group in Chicago, liken building a business to running a marathon: You cannot reach the end without experiencing pain. He called himself the “King of Pain,” and I think it’s fair to call myself the “Queen of Pain.”
Business life is not immutable. Things change with lightning speed, and my organization—both my people and me—had to learn to prepare to change with the tide or be left behind. I had to teach myself to stop wishing that nothing would ever go wrong, because things inevitably will. There will always be problems: problems between employees, problems with customers, with suppliers, with products, with ingredients, ad infinitum. There will be competition and money worries, and there will be downturns in the economy, and on and on.
As soon as I bought my original partner out in early 1975, I found that my real education was just beginning. I developed ambition overnight. I would see a plan through and nothing would stop me, but the resources and management skills needed to see me through the startup years were all in short supply.
I quickly became mindful that the food business is extremely competitive, highly capital intensive, and difficult. Ours is a perishable product with a shelf life that begins ticking the moment we produce it, as well as a thousand other obstacles that I could list and that I’ve talked about throughout this book.
I needed good instincts and good “antennae” to anticipate the challenges and battles ahead of me. I had to learn to overcome the fear of failure and keep moving on, and I had to accept inevitable truths. I had to will myself to develop certain invaluable skills, all learned on the job, that I have used throughout my decades-long career.
Some things are in the hands of the economy. Things will always shift beneath you, and you need to develop the skills to adapt and the fortitude to persevere.
I have learned to:
Recognize an opportunity and go with it
Take measured risks
Learn from my many mistakes
Innovate, try something different
Remain motivated and motivate others
Develop a sixth sense for things that may need correcting
Never take anything for granted, no matter how good we get
Learn early the strategic use of the word “no”
Choose courage over fear, and play outside my comfort zone
Keep calm and deal with the chaos; things happen and we must be ready
Concentrate on the good, not on the bad stuff; build on what is right
Not ignore my weaknesses, but tap into and build on my strengths
Prepare for the inevitable setbacks, many simply beyond my control
Make a decision, and once made, never look back; the best leadership skill of all
For me, these were all newly learned skills, honed the hard way: one by one. I have learned to cope, not to show my pain, to encourage people to move forward, to keep focused on the end game, and to celebrate the victories. It’s kept me busy for forty years, and I have never been bored.
Being a Woman Is a Good Thing
I have never really allowed gender to affect how I have conducted myself during my career as a business owner, but in many ways I suppose my gender has helped the growth of my business. I have won quite a few awards that I may not have won otherwise, all of which has brought attention to Love and Quiches. So that has always been a good thing.
I have been honored by Long Island Business News as one of the Top 50 Most Influential Women in Business on Long Island so many times that I was finally inducted into their Hall of Fame, along with some other woman business owners in the region, in 2009. There have been many other awards throughout the years, many of these because of my gender.
Year after year, in conjunction with Women’s History Month each March, I am kept busy with all sorts of events, and I am happy to tell my story in the hope of encouraging others to take the leap.
One of my best stories came rather early in the game, in the early eighties. I was invited to Chicago to conduct an all-day seminar preceding the monthly meeting of the Purchasing Managers Association, as well as to be the speaker at the meeting itself. It still remains a powerful association, and I was probably invited because of our excellent relationship with one of our major distributors—and also because I was a woman who started a business from scratch against the odds. Throughout the years, my motivation for seeking this kind of recognition has always been to promote my company, not my ego. I have always been much too busy for ego.
One more important advantage that has served us well is our certification as a Minority Woman Business Enterprise. Because larger corporations and public companies, airlines, chain restaurants, buying groups, th
e military, and so on are required to do a certain percentage of their business with minority companies, our status is a tremendous boon.
As I’ve said, in spite of all this, we operate in a rather color- and gender-blind way, and I am hopeful that my employees respect me for my ideas and leadership rather than for unimportant distinctions.
Only once was I subjected to truly blatant discrimination. Early on there was a powerful buying group called North American. For those unfamiliar, “buying groups” are organizations of otherwise unaffiliated companies that pool their buying power to gain an advantage in terms of price and marketing dollars. The vendors favored by these buying groups then have a “hunting” license and an advantage over their competitors with similar products.
Eventually, a distributor invited Love and Quiches to present our line, and we were able to secure a showing. We flew out to Chicago at the crack of dawn because we were told that we had a 9 a.m. slot. In practice, we sat there all day, and we were not invited in until 5 p.m. We could not get anybody to taste even one thing, nor were we asked any questions. We were invisible.
We left quite dejected, but the next day dejection turned to outrage when the distributor who had invited us to present our line contacted us. He told us that the minute we had left the room he had been asked by everybody present if I was his girlfriend. He was angrier than I was.
With Love and Quiches Page 20