Jack and his wife, Annette, and their five children now found themselves making salsa for 10 to 12 hours per day, and Garden Fresh Gourmet continued to grow. After a few years, it was finally picked up by a major Midwest chain, Meijer.
A local developer then convinced Jack to build a 25,000-square-foot plant, which he did. It opened just when I first met Jack in New York.
Which brings us to our lunch when we got back to Detroit from the conference.
“You know,” Jack said, “everyone told me I was crazy to go from 3,000 square feet to 25,000 square feet, that you don’t increase your size eight-fold, and I’m starting to think they’re right. Why don’t you move your business in with me, outsource your manufacturing to Garden Fresh. That will help pay my rent, and I’ll give you a free office – you can focus on sales and marketing, whatever you want.”
I did just that, and after a few months our talents seemed to complement each other, so Jack asked me to be a partner in Garden Fresh.
That first year together, 2002, Garden Fresh recorded $4.6 million in sales. I distinctly remember meeting with Jack and saying, “If we could ever get this to $10 million and pay attention to our margins, wouldn’t that be a great life?”
Well, that seemed to happen in about 15 minutes.
By the middle of the decade, we were up to $30 million in sales and recently crossed the $100-million revenue mark. Garden Fresh is now the number 1 brand of fresh salsa in the United States.
We eventually made our way up to become the third-largest hummus manufacturer in this country, the largest brand of tortilla chips merchandised in the deli, developed a top-ten line of dips, ship over a million units a week, and in the midst of all this, received offers from some of the largest food companies in the world.
All before being approached by the Fortune 500 company that would eventually purchase us.
Doing all this wasn’t easy. In fact, there were long stretches when there were more bad days than good. We were often stunned, and often heartbroken, over what was happening to us.
But it was an adventure. In fact, the adventure of a lifetime. Through it all we uncovered powerful secrets that directly led to our success.
In Irrational Persistence I describe both our adventures and our misadventures.
Adventures that illustrate that you’re not alone with respect to the challenges you might face.
Misadventures that will enable you to avoid our mistakes as you face those challenges. Secrets that can be applied directly to the challenges.
Secrets that can help not only the entrepreneur but that are valuable for the multinational company as well.
Secrets you can implement to accelerate growth and minimize risk.
Secrets that illustrate that, while I hope you never find yourself in the position we did, starting with less than nothing, even under those conditions building something great is still possible.
1
Summon the Courage to Enter the Dark Room
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
So how do you launch a business, even with less than nothing, and somehow get to the point at which some of the largest companies in the world want to buy you?
What’s the first step?
The first step is into the dark room.
The dark room is what confronts everyone who is not living the life they’ve imagined for themselves. Who is professionally unfulfilled. Who finds that condition unacceptable.
And who is determined to do something about it.
And also those who determine that doing something about it involves developing a product or service, then launching it, either within an existing company or doing so independently on their own.
It’s one thing to have an idea. Actually making it a reality is another entirely. Actually bringing it to life requires facing a moment of truth.
What’s that moment like?
Imagine you’re standing in front of a door that leads into a room. A dark room, a room completely devoid of light.
Dark rooms are frightening, potentially filled with peril. There is tremendous ambiguity involved.
It’s natural, and certainly rational, to walk away from a situation like that. To not enter the dark room. To stay where you are, where you can at least see what’s around you. Where you’re comfortable.
But it takes courage, which is often irrational, to enter that room. And to have the door close behind you.
You’re now alone. In utter blackness. Not sure where to go. Not sure what to do.
No one is comfortable in a situation like that. It’s unpleasant at best, and often terrifying.
So what do you do then?
You search for sources of light to illuminate the dark room. Sources of light that will allow you to navigate your way around the room. That will allow you to be successful in the room so that you’re not operating in the dark.
Those sources of light are not always obvious. They can, in fact, take years to locate.
Both Jack and I did enter dark rooms, and we both spent years in them, years in which we often found ourselves in absurd situations doing things we never thought we’d do.
What was it like? What were our darkest moments? Why did we stay in them for as long as we did? Why did we persist?
How did we find the lights to illuminate our dark rooms, so that we could see the paths we needed to be successful? To live the lives we had imagined for ourselves?
So my girlfriend just financed my new food company, American Connoisseur, by signing for a $2,500 credit card loan and I set up shop in a 300-square-foot former break room in a vacant office in a small industrial park in tiny Sylvan Lake, Michigan.
You don’t get much for that kind of money, even in the early 1990 s. Washable walls and ceiling, a couple sinks; fortunately, my landlord had just closed a TCBY yogurt shop he owned, so he let us borrow a stainless steel table. For equipment I ran to K-Mart and purchased two standard household blenders, some one-quart plastic pitchers, and four funnels.
I found a bottle supplier in downtown Detroit, along with a spice importer, and would make the 35-minute trek one way in my car for supplies. I could fit 35 cases of bottles in my trunk and would buy 20-pound bags of dehydrated garlic, onion, oregano, and basil, all of which would go in my back seat. I’d travel back to our plant with my windows open, even in the winter, to try to dilute the pungent odor from the garlic, but nevertheless the smell would permeate the fabric of the seat upholstery and would last for weeks. For just about everything else – salt, sugar, and canola oil – I’d go to Sam’s Club.
To make our marinades I’d measure the ingredients into the blenders, mix them, pour them into a plastic pitcher, put a funnel in the bottle, and fill them, then seal them and label them. All by hand.
The blenders invariably broke down every few weeks – I soon learned the hard way that canola oil seeping into the control panel is not a good thing – and I’d run back to K-Mart to buy $30 replacements.
We did have air conditioning but, ironically, we had no heat. I kept calling my landlord, who lived in the Bahamas for half the year for tax purposes, if that tells you anything, and he just kept telling me to keep flicking the switch on the thermostat and the heat would kick in. Apparently, the $300 per month in rent I was paying him under the table did not justify a significant capital expenditure budget.
We kept flicking that switch, but nothing ever happened. I wasn’t, though, going to let something like the lack of heat stop me. I was in