Years ago when I picked up my grandmother’s blue mixing bowl and my mother’s favorite spoon, which had a hole in it, and made some rosemary focaccia to sell at a local market, I had no idea that eight years later a company called Buona Forchetta Hand Made Breads would be selling 60 products to over 200 accounts in the Los Angeles area. If you are thinking of selling your own product, no matter what it might be, perhaps these simple rules might spur you on.
Have a product you believe in. But don’t stop there. Try it out on everyone you know, even the media, and then listen to their criticism. You may still think your product is fine the way it is, but if nine out of 10 people are telling you something else, listen. We were lucky. People responded to us very positively all along the way, but we still listened to ideas from everyone.
Have demos of your product.
When the breads sold out, I rushed to make more, sending up a new volunteer to fake exuberant enthusiasm.
When I took some focaccia to the top of the hill in Beverly Glen where there was a small Italian-run market, I asked the owner if my product would sell. He took a chance and told me that anything left over that day would go back to me. I called on the lively daughters of a friend in the neighborhood to go to the store, buy a focaccia and rave in loud voices about the taste and quality to see if they could nab some buyers. They did, and when the breads sold out, I rushed to make more, sending up a new volunteer to fake exuberant enthusiasm. No guilt at all on my part, I just wanted to start a business and had no qualms about how to do it. I had no idea what to do but this was fun, and if fun worked, so be it. The store owner ordered more for the next day and voilá, a bread business was born.
So if you are thinking of plunging into the business world with food (or something else), do not hesitate to take serious actions to get it out there. Write up a short piece about what your product is,
and send it to the media and anyone who will talk about you to others. Get a website, and get links from your friends who have sites. Design a great logo, get business cards, and leave them everywhere. Your logo should be simple and have impact. Don’t do “frou-frou”… keep it simple and straight from the heart. Yours.
Always listen to your customers, especially the ones who have complaints. Hear them, be human in your acknowledgement of their problems, and then find a solution. There always is one. A woman once called our bakery and said there was glass in her bread. We asked her to get a glass of water and put some of the bread into it and we stayed on the phone while she watched the gross salt disappear from her focaccia… then we told her she was right to be skeptical and we would give her a couple of free breads if she came by the bakery. She came often after that and we made a friend for life.
Have a partner, if possible, someone with the same ethics about people and money managing, and the same love of the product or service you are creating. In my case, it was my husband, a very optimistic problem analyst who complements my sometimes crazed-weasel nature (you know how artists are) by staying calm and objective. Remember, only one of you is allowed to be crazy at any one time, while the other does the deep-breathing and oms.
Always listen to your customers, especially the ones who have complaints. Hear them, be human in your acknowledgement of their problems, and then find a solution.[/pullquote]Think unconventionally. My husband was a screen writer, and I was an illustrator, even though I had cooked and baked since the age of five and loved creating new and original products. Still, we were not business people, and I think this served us very well. It gave us myriad opportunities to make mistakes (and boy, did we, the best way to learn) or, possibly, find a unique solution that could not possibly have been found by following the book.
Treat your employees as you would treat your best friends. And try to treat yourself and your partner the same way. Be curious. Be so curious that you simply cannot imagine not taking the next step. Just to see where it leads. I read something once in a magazine called “O” that will stay with me always: Leap, and the net will appear.
And it did.
Follow your heart and intuitions, every day, one after the other. Keep the quality of your product ever present in your mind. And who knows, one day, after hard work and persistence and great experiences and sometimes terrible failures, but always adventures around every corner, a nice big company that likes your product and your business might make you an offer you can’t refuse. You may end up realizing your dream of living in Europe and thinking up new projects. It happened to us, and if it could happen to us, naive as we were, unskilled as we were, sometimes bumbling as we were, it can happen to anyone!
