Detailed stuff, and not much fun, but as Jackson says, "We didn't want to have surprises.'
Which is also why she and Beth Martin, a former Beatrice co-worker who became MOM's first employee in March 1987, spent four weeks laboriously plotting steps on a time chart.
Entrepreneurs typically deal with crises as they occur. It's a thrilling way to manage -- by the seat of one's pants as the adrenaline surges. Later, when the company is larger and the management chores seem oppressively mundane, founders reminisce about those glorious early days when crisis followed crisis and handling them was fun.
Jackson's strategy of crisis management consists of avoiding as many as possible through detailed planning. To that she adds contingency plans. Her main tool is an action plan. "That was the key to getting this whole thing organized with just a couple of people," she says.
Once she committed herself to My Own Meals in November 1986, she broke the start-up into its separate but often related processes. There were, she figured, about 20 of them: setting up an office, developing a product, creating a sales plan, finding a producer, and so on. Next, one by one, she listed the steps comprising each process and the time each would require. Then, beginning with the last step in each process -- the date by which she would, for instance, have to have printed boxes available at the product manufacturer's plant -- she and Martin worked backward to the first step. That told her when, in the case of packaging again, she had to begin interviewing designers. Finally, she and Martin plotted the time chart. The payoff? Every morning when they came into the office they knew exactly what had to happen, what had to get done, to keep each part of the start-up on track. They knew what was late and, if they needed to steal some time from somewhere, they knew what task could slip without seriously jeopardizing the process.
It ought not to surprise anyone that the first production run was made in March -- within budget. The five initial products: My Turkey Meatballs; My Kind of Chicken; My Meatballs & Shells; Chicken, Please; and My Favorite Pasta.
Jackson has financed her venture with two private stock offerings that she, personally, sold. The first, completed in May of last year, raised $365,000 from 22 investors that included former executives from Beatrice, Kraft, and Quaker Oats, plus a few doctors and others. The second, sold a little more than a year later, generated as much from the same sort of investors. This money is to cover early production, inventory, marketing, and distributions costs. The first, smaller round more than paid the costs of bringing My Own Meals all the way from concept to first production.
A major food company would have spent $2 million or more, by Jackson's estimate, and taken a year longer than she had. But more to the point, she argues, a major food company would never have created My Own Meals in the first place. An attempt to introduce a new niche product and an innovative plastic retort pouch container would have been seen, she says from her Beatrice experience, as too risky for any executive to stake his or her reputation on. Probably, she thinks, if someone at a major food company had proposed the children's meal idea, the product would have ended up frozen, giving it a much smaller market than she anticipates developing.
Issues of scale and growth rate often give inexperienced entrepreneurs nervous stomachs. How big could the new business actually be? Fantasy has it expanding everywhere, but visceral temerity often argues for something smaller. Jackson doesn't wrestle with these issues. From the outset she assumed the business would be at least national, and this assumption affected other decisions. She picked contractors, for instance, who could stay with her as she grew. It's an attitude that affects her image in the market. She wasn't interested, for instance, in working with a small food broker. She hired one of the largest. "When I walk into a store now and tell them who my broker is, suddenly I'm in a new category, I am somebody.'
By the same token, growth rate was a variable that she knew had to be strictly controlled. Jackson's rollout plans are, in their specifics, confidential. She's introducing the product in Chicago, beginning with a few local supermarkets and with the two largest chains in the area, Jewel Food Stores and Dominick's Finer Foods Inc. She'll work to establish the products broadly there, creating a strong brand identity, before moving to a second city, where she would hope to do the same before tackling a third. She doesn't expect to have national distribution in major markets for a couple of years. She expects sales to be around $1 million this calendar year and to climb to $10 million in 1989 and to $60 million in the fifth year.
Couldn't she be more aggressive, move into more markets sooner? She says she won't expand quickly, not until she's convinced that she can do it right. She also expects to develop new meals to match regional tastes. "If I scatter myself all over the place," she says, "I'll be out of business.'
Her business plan anticipates competition in her market by the end of 1989, although she doesn't expect rivals until the following year at the earliest. Here's what she thinks will happen: if the niche turns out to be good, large food companies will notice that she's taking some of their supermarket shelf space, and they'll want to find out who and what she is. "I can just hear some executive now," she says. "He'll say, 'Get so-and-so and put him on it.' " What they'll decide after six months of study and committee meetings, she believes, is that her prices are too high and that consumers don't care that much about quality. For a while longer, they'll continue to do nothing and wait for her to fail.
