Growing my business

 After years of working in large companies, my wife, daughter and I decided to start our own business. Looking from the outside in, it did not seem like to big of a deal. The need for the business was easy, there were many Southern foods I remembered from my childhood that I could not find. Hence we started an online retail store since we all had a passion and interest in these foods. Things went well and we soon desired to have a small store front and moved the business to a strip mall location. Might not have been a bad move other than the fact that ir was at the start of the great resession. We learned a lot from meeting and talking with many of our suppliers and decided to introduce our own food mixes under our Julia's Pantry brand. That decision proved to be very wise since our orginal retal food business began to quickly fail with the economy.  Like many small companies we had to regroup and move the business back inro our home and essentailly start over again. Obviously we received a lot of advice much of it critical. My two grown sons thought I was crazy and I might add still do. I quickly learned that you had to really believe in yourselt to become an entrapenur.  We slowly developed more products, continued to meet folks in the business and worked our way back to a point where we have total confidence we will surviive as a business. Key point in this turn around are noted in  our Advice for Others.

Advice for others

 1. Control - Control as much as you can in your business. We decided the only way we could succeed was to mix our own product, do our own packaging and maintain a small and fresh inventory of ingredients. Our experience has shown the packaging to be about 95% of the product cost. Had we involved a co-packer, we would have lost control of the packaging. We inform our customers that we do not maintain a large finished goods inventory and we have a 1 week cycle on orders. This helps us and our customers in that all products are mixed to the most current recipes and will have the maximum shelf life.

2. Greed - allow your distributors and retailers to make a good margin. If you overprice your products for the market they will not sell. You have to continually improves your process to gain more margin and not take the path of reducing the profit opportunity for your retailers. You are in business for the long haul and understand that it will take time to build the business and the profits.

3. Focus - Make no mistake, you will recieve a lot of input about your business. Including but not limited to suggestions for new products, changing your packaging, shows to attend and where to sell your product. Trust yourselves, and carefully make decisions based on your focus of what you want to accomplish. Wefrequently discuss what the focus of our business is and we have Focus signs posted on every wall. Our business is much too contrained to go down too many paths at one time.