Do you have a craving to be your own boss?

I left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day. And I never lost one minute of sleeping worrying bout the way things might have been.

Tina Turner

Oh Fudge!

You’ve had a good run in your career and now you’re ready for something new. Maybe you can’t quite afford to ride off into the sunset. Or maybe you have a recessive entrepreneurial gene that’s demanding to assert its dominance in this stage of your life. Could be you’ve always dreamed of owning your own business. Thirty percent of the people we interviewed while researching Changing Lanes picked this route. These change artists are in good company. We learned that 3.6 million new businesses are formed each year, even though 34% of new businesses fail in the first two years.

Despite the odds, you may find the prospect of engraving the title “president” following your name on a business card very seductive. Being your own boss brings with it a sense of being in control along with a certain degree of flexibility in your life. The government essentially subsidizes new business formation by providing SBA loans and allowing you to take deductions for allowable business expenses.

Owning your own business is the primary means of developing personal wealth in our country. Sounded good to us too, so we talked to several lane changers who could chart this route for us and allow us to pass their experience on to you.

Take Lucie Bava as an example. 

Lucie Bava has been a supplier to a specialty food and kitchen products company for 24 years, their longest tenured food product vendor. If you haven’t had the exquisite pleasure of tasting her award winning Hot Fudge Sauce, you are missing a heavenly experience. Or her Caramel Sauce and tart fillings. All these sinful concoctions were developed and produced by Lucie under a private label arrangement with this premier retailer. 

Modest to a fault, Lucie surprises you with her many accomplishments. For years, this great cook, dedicated mother, and part-time political analyst lived in the shadow of her attorney husband, who was managing partner of a major law firm. She was awed by the brilliance of the professional men and women she often entertained in her home, treating them to evenings of great food, heavily laced with politics and humor.

Now it is Lucie who is a star in her own right, having transformed her hobby making gift baskets—filled with baked miniatures and her signature fudge sauce produced in her own kitchen—into a profitable business, developing and producing specialty food products.

Beaming, Lucie says that, “Getting a product into this company is akin to being a finalist on American Idol.” No false modesty here. She recognizes and takes pride in her accomplishment. But to what does she credit her success? “Fear of failure,” she admits without hesitation. Instead of being paralyzed by fear, she uses it as a motivator. “I’m no good at failing so I give it my damnedest.”

Her family also gets credit for her diverse strengths. Her father was a newsman for UPI in New York, moving on to radio and TV as a commentator. Lucie clearly got her love of politics from him. And her gift of gab. Her mother gave Lucie a strong sense of pride as a woman but was no help training her daughter in the kitchen. So she had to develop her talent for the culinary arts on her own after she got married.

For seven years after college, she worked as a public school teacher in the inner city. With the birth of her two daughters, she became a full-time mother. Calling this “the hardest job there is,” Lucie still had enough residual energy to work as the Director of Women For:, the oldest women’s political action group in the city. This role satisfied her cerebral side which she balanced with the creativity she poured into her gift-basket hobby.

Enjoying a tennis game one day almost 20 years ago, a friend suggested that she make the fudge sauce into a commercial product. Lucie had never made more than two cups at a time before this, and she needed about thirty cases to get started. Realizing how her feet hurt already from standing over the stove while minding her two small daughters, she set out to find a food processing company that would be willing to take on the project with her.

She knew a food manufacturer who was the father of one of her daughter’s school friends. Even though Lucie had no clients and little money for the start-up, she was able to convince him invest his time and resources, nonetheless.  She did almost all the work herself. For $2500 she hired a graphic artist to design product labels and screwed up her courage to go on her first sales call, ever. She put to good use a tip she had picked up from an unemployed actor in her Sales class at the local High School Extension program: “Every No is just another step closer to a Yes.”

A specialty food emporium in town took notice of the elegantly wrapped jar of fudge sauce and saw it as the perfect hostess gift. They began ordering 10 to 20 cases at a time. Lucie would sometimes support her product sales by manning a table in the supermarket, handing out free tasting spoons to the food shoppers.

She then took the bold step and sent a sample to the premier retailer in the industry. They tested her fudge sauce against eight competitors and promptly ordered 300 cases. She was elated until reality hit her hard—the order was due in three weeks. Another huge order followed quickly on the heels of the first. Her veritable single person assembly line was sorely tested, but she pulled it off and was rewarded with a private label contract, supplying their 260 stores with her incomparable fudge sauce.

Still, she considered her small business an avocation. Her goal was to lead an active and balanced life, satisfying both her cerebral and her creative/hobby side. The fudge business perfectly complemented her “day job” as the Director of Women For: But soon, the balance began to tip.

While watching the 2003 State of the Union Address, Lucie, already in an agitated state, took a call from the retailer demanding changes to their caramel sauce, her new private label product. As usual, they wanted the changes yesterday and Lucie found herself in a predicament—having to develop 25 batches on her own nickel. “That’s the risk you have to assume as a food product developer,” she explains.

Her challenges began to pile on. First, she had to transfer her recipe to big commercial batches, with only two months to deliver the finished product. If the ingredients were to separate, she would need to change the recipe and that would necessitate  corresponding changes to the labels—which of course had to be to the printer well in advance of shipment date. Lucie swore, “I will never do this again—week after week, its torture!”

It was around this time Lucie recognized her small business was no longer a hobby. Still propelled by the fear of failure, she couldn’t get herself to say no to her prestigious customer. So, when she got the order to develop tart fillings in three flavors—multiplying the process complexity threefold, she accepted even though their demands were taking on surreal dimensions.

Take the lemon tart filling as an example. Picture a diminutive woman dressed in white lab coat, head covered in a shower cap, standing with watchful eye over an enormous vat of desert tart filling that must be shipped to the warehouse in five days. The commercial recipe she adapted from her stove top concoction called for 500 pounds of butter at room temperature. Now imagine the look on her face as the food processing staff burn 72 gallons of product. It was like watching her own money go up in smoke.

Still worse, at the last minute, the store changed the order to Meyers lemon, for which there is only one grower in the country. Lucie’s costs skyrocketed and she had to do battle with a very disgruntled food buyer. While they wrangled, the “best used by” dates on the labels were about to expire. As always, she pulled it off just in the nick of time.  

It became obvious that her growing food business meant she had to give up her job at Women For:, but Lucie could never be satisfied focusing on only one activity. Now, she balances her demanding business life with new creative pursuits. She has become a prolific painter, using her dining room as her art studio. After all, it’s not getting much use these days. Cooking is no longer fun; it’s work.

She continues to get exercised about politics and has found a new outlet-- writing impassioned Letters to the Editor. It is not unusual to pick up the paper and read a Lucie Bava diatribe on an issue of local or national concern.  

She delights in the uniqueness of her work and laughs about the kick she gets playing What’s My Line? at cocktail parties. The legal eagles, who once filled her with awe, now sit at her feet to hear about her latest escapade in the food lab, imagining her praying over a cauldron of chocolate, her hair in a shower cap, channeling her namesake in sitcom heaven.

Yet this fearless dynamo is also a chronic worrier. Her constant dread of imminent failure challenges her to accomplish things she never imagined she could do.  She marvels at her success, given that she is not a food chemist, nor did she engage the help of a food broker or other consultants. Lucie did it the hard way, relying on her own energy and problem solving skills.

Ever the teacher, Lucie mentors those who think they have a killer idea and want to follow in her path. The map she has charted is clear: first you must have the best product in the world, because without that, no amount of consulting or investment will help you get there. And by the way, do as she says, not as she does. Despite all her protestations that “I’m never going to do this again, and I mean it this time,” she couldn’t resist the challenge of developing two new products to tempt the soul. Look for Lucie’s chocolate syrup and chocolate drizzles as you shop around.

Most of the entrepreneurial change artists we talked to started out making only a modest investment, often in the $5000 range. But others took much bigger risks. John Lappington created a small electronics product-consulting firm and quickly won a contract that would cover their salaries of his engineers for a year. But to buy the necessary equipment for the business, he and his wife signed personal notes secured by their home. It was a big risk, but one they were willing to take to allow John to achieve his goal.

Will Bashan figured out how he and his wife could buy a small retail business in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Familiar with both the store and the town, they were confident they could grow the business. Still, they knew they had no choice but to make a living from the store. It could not be a toy. The key to the deal was buying the building to provide rental income should the company fail.

These change artists have proved that you can mitigate the risks that cause so many small businesses to fail. If you are thoughtful, fully committed, and energetic, you too can successfully change lanes and enjoy the benefits of being your own boss.

Comments

*Name	*Email
*Comment
*For security, enter the word you see below