Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Lucky Breaks: The breadman, the auditor & me.

Evening everyone,

There is no doubt about it but every business needs a lucky break.

The biggest break we ever had came in 2006, when a bread supplier came in to pitch business to us, his bread was great, but didn't come in commercial sizes, so wasn't right for us. As he left he picked up a brochure we had produced. His next call was to a small Gallery/Cafe whose sandwich supplier had ceased trading,He passed on my brochure and two days later The Delicious Food Co were the new sandwich supplier. Enquiring as to who the previous supplier had supplied I found amongst others two gems.

 Ernst & Young and Avoca Suffolk St.

I made contact & set up meetings with both clients. After pitching to AVOCA, they were so impressed they had placed   their very first order with us before I'd even  got back to the car. It was the start of a great relationship &  we continued  to make sandwiches under the AVOCA label for a number of years.

The next client, Ernst & Young as it was known then, was a bit more tricky as the catering facility was run by a contract catering company.Getting on the approved supplier list was as difficult as getting a mortgage in 2013.
 However the EY client loved us & ultimately he called the shots.

This required an audit of our food business...to be honest we hadn't a clue. Sure we had a HACCP system, but it was basic. Our (commercial) kitchen was full of cookery books, pretty ceramic platters, a kind of Kath Kidson meets Martha Stewart, mixed with a little bit of Nigella (to keep Mr Delicious smiling). The scope of the audit was 32 pages long & covered things I thought petty ...specification sheets for packaging materials....water certificates...a corporate responsibility statement...OMG..

But the auditor (who had flown in from the UK to do the audit), saw something in us, a small business making seriously good food, albeit in a slightly disorganised way. The audit took 12 hours as both he & I looked for a way to get us over the line: the line from Martha kitchen to a proper professional food business..and we got there (achieving A grades, no less,  in our past two audits for that same client)

Ultimately that one act of passing on our brochure, transformed our business & led to clients that included not only AVOCA, EY, but Citibank, PWC, RTE, Google, Yahoo, Deloitte, Bank of New York..and many many more...

Now wasn't that one hell of a  lucky break !

Shirley


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