Because she had her plan, Jackson hit the outplacement center with her enthusiasm and self-respect very much intact. Any one of three strategies -- getting a job, buying a company, or starting one -- would conceivably get her where she wanted to be: running an organization. That meant that when she eventually did decide to start her own company, it wasn't for the reasons that entrepreneurs typically cite.
It wasn't, for instance, because she was unhappy or didn't function effectively within the organizational complexities of a large company. She had loved working at Beatrice and had done well there. She didn't crave independence or chafe under corporate controls.
Nor did she have a product of her own ready to exploit. At the time she elected to go solo, she hadn't progressed further than developing a product concept.
She was not escaping the urban rat race or looking for something she could do part-time while raising kids. Neither was this semiretirement, something to dabble in when golf or gardening got old. The short-term pursuit of wealth wasn't her objective, either.
Running an organization, whether her own or someone else's, was nothing more than Jackson's next professional objective. And so the decision to start her own company didn't carry a huge emotional charge. The prospect was exciting, but not spontaneous or unstudied. This was no declaration of independence, no announcement to the world that Mary Anne Jackson was through doing other people's work. It was a professional commitment, less personal, and therefore cooler than those decisions tend to be. And the start-up itself, not surprisingly, was more deliberate than most.
In the summer of '86, at the same time that she was prospecting for job offers and companies to buy, Jackson was also thinking of creating a business to run. While most new companies are the result of either a flash of insight or serendipity, either one of which can hand the entrepreneur an idea for a new product or service, Jackson had no product and no market. She didn't even have an idea.
Silicon Valley and Route 128 are populated by companies created by men and women with new technology or marketing wrinkles they thought they could exploit. Fred Smith imagined an entirely new service -- overnight air delivery -- and started Federal Express Corp. David Liederman stumbled into a cookie store and saw the potential for a national franchise, David's Cookies. The point is that when they started, these people had something, if only in their heads, to which they were fully committed. All Jackson had was detachment and corporate management experience. She knew how to approach a problem systematically, and her problem in the summer of '86 was to come up with an idea around which she could build a business.
Her thinking process was straightforward. Beatrice had owned every kind of food company. So the business should be food related. And it had to be a product, because Jackson wasn't interested in consulting, which was too much like the work she'd been doing.
But what sort of food product? She did a mental tour of the supermarket aisles looking for . . . for . . . a section where not much was happening. Frozen foods: nothing much was happening there, except that too many products already competed for expensive freezer space and grocers were trying to cut back. Canned food: not much happening there, either. Hmm. What part of canned food? Baby food? Maybe. People were having more babies. But Beech-Nut and Gerber Products already owned the market. Something for teenagers? They're too faddish. But kids. They eat what their parents give them. They're a growing market. They stay kids for a long time. And aside from junk food, nobody's doing much for them. No one, for instance, is making meals for kids. Jackson remembered returning to work after Kathleen, her first, was born. "Other working mothers," she says, "kept asking, 'What do you feed your kid?' " It was supposed to be something that the kid would eat, that was good for her and quick. Quick? Microwavable? You can't zap a can. Jackson had done a lot of packaging research at Beatrice. A pouch? A plastic retort pouch. Meals packaged in retort pouches -- just think of them as flexible plastic cans -- don't need the additives that frozen foods require. They keep without refrigeration for up to a year, and they're ready to eat after just 90 seconds in the microwave or four minutes of boiling (in the pouch).
So what she had was a concept: quick-to-fix children's meals. Now, she needed a product; an organization to develop, produce, distribute, and market it; and capital to finance all of this. "I have big-company experience," she says, "so I did it the way a big company would." That means she set about the process with a measure of deliberation, dispassion, and skepticism infrequently found in entrepreneurial ventures.
The big-company way of doing something is to proceed one step at a time, testing the results of each action before proceeding to the next. So that's the way Jackson moved, one step at a time. The principal differences between her and the corporate world she stepped out of? There are two.
With no money to speak of and no staff to call on, Jackson had to rely more on ingenuity and improvisation. For her, gregarious and without a shy bone in her body, the absence of staff to do her bidding wasn't a problem. She simply asked people around her for help -- and got it. Another outplaced executive with a different personality might feel the loss differently.
Second, the time Jackson spent moving her product from concept to market was shorter than a large company would have taken, not because she skipped any steps but because the go/no-go deliberations between steps involved just her, not multiple levels of committees, managers, and executives. Decision making, in other words, was quicker.
But this was no entrepreneurial solo. There were dozens of people involved. As Jackson says, "I had more helpers than Santa Claus.'
Big-company managers, typically, aren't experts themselves in every stage of new-product creation, and Jackson certainly wasn't. She made sure that her role in the start-up was precisely what it would have been as a project head at Beatrice -- planner, conceptualizer, expediter, critic, cheerleader, and decision maker.
