Most managers don't worry about proving their loyalty to company values to part-timers making between $5 and $6.50 an hour. But it wasn't so unusual for LeBlanc. Like virtually all of Harbor Sweets's managers, she had once been a part-time employee herself. And at 31, all her adult work experience -- 13 years -- had been at Harbor Sweets. She was used to thinking of part-time temporary workers as people with whom to share management dilemmas and financials.
Today, though, the employees seemed less concerned about the financials than about the topic of the earlier meeting: a new foiling machine LeBlanc had bought. Some of the workers were upset that the machine was failing to wrap all the Sweet Sloops properly and that so much candy was being wasted. As members of the group described their problems and suggested solutions, LeBlanc listened carefully. "We've had an awful lot of changes this year," she acknowledged. "And although we are trying to produce more candy and be more efficient, we don't want to ruin our best product!"
While LeBlanc clearly had plenty of employee goodwill to draw on, not everyone was so inclined. As she described some of her cost-saving decisions, a longtime employee had one comment. Under her breath, she hissed, "factory!" Without question, it was an accusation.
Ben Strohecker wasn't there to hear it. He had put LeBlanc in charge of Harbor Sweets in July 1988 when he began preparing for a year's sabbatical. The company was making money, Strohecker reasoned when he began making his plans early in 1988, and his managers could run it without him. Besides, the company no longer occupied such a central role in his life: he was happily remarried and now, at 62, wanted to fulfill a longtime dream of public service.
Strohecker's plan was straightforward enough. He would begin cutting back his hours in July, at the start of the 1988 season, and LeBlanc would take over. By January 1, 1989, he would be working full-time on his project: raising awareness of AIDS, particularly among small businesses. When he came back a year later, he'd find some new position for himself, probably in marketing.
In reality, the transition proved a good deal trickier. "It was very difficult to be in charge with him here," LeBlanc admits today. "We were kind of in limbo for six months." It showed. Fiscal year 1988-89 was a bad one at Harbor Sweets. An expected sales increase never occurred for a variety of reasons, including an exceptionally hot summer that slowed retail sales. The losses underscored Harbor Sweets's financial vulnerability. And they scared even Ben. Yet he wasn't scared enough to put off his sabbatical. He knew there had to be changes in the company and was glad to let LeBlanc make them. "Phyllis is conscious of a job that she has to do, that I have failed to do," he says. "And that is to make a decent profit." So he left LeBlanc with that unenviable task -- in an operation that has always cared far more about decency than decent profit.
Unfortunately, one of LeBlanc's early decisions to help the bottom line did just the opposite. The problem was the Sweet Sloop, the company's flagship product. Over the years, Harbor Sweets had added five other chocolates with nautical themes and shapes to its line, but it was the Sloop that accounted for almost half of the company's retail and catalog sales. The trouble was, the Sloop typified both the best and worst of Harbor Sweets. It was delicious and unique, yet an extraordinary pain in the neck to produce. While the other candies were made in molds, the Sweet Sloop alone had to be hand-cut in butter-crunch triangles and then dipped, not once but three times. While the other candies could be wrapped by a foiling machine, the Sweet Sloops came in sizes varied enough to defy automation.
LeBlanc's solution was to buy a butter-crunch machine that, the salesman had assured her, was up to the task of cooking and slicing the Sloops. She also invested in a new foiling machine, thinking the newly uniform Sloops could be wrapped automatically. The savings would be enormous: while one person can hand-wrap 6 Sloops a minute, the machine could do 30.
That was the plan. Eligio Velez Jr., 17, remembers that when the new butter-crunch depositor was installed, he was told he would no longer need to cook Sloops by hand. But no matter how much the machine was coaxed, "it shot the candy out like rabbit messes," he recalls. Today he continues to pour and slice the candy by hand, next to the now-dormant machine. It's a job that Velez, a three-year veteran of the company, likes so much he plans to stay on after he graduates from high school this year and begins attending nearby Salem State College. The one drawback? "They invest in things like this," he says, pointing to the machine, and then he misses out on his profit-sharing bonus.
LeBlanc is trying to ensure that there will be a bonus this year. To restore the company to profitability, she made some tough decisions in the beginning of 1989. There were no annual raises and all officers, including Strohecker, took a 10% pay cut. Then came the biggest change of all. In August Harbor Sweets hired an efficiency expert to look over its operations. One big aim was to set goals for each shift so managers could quickly know if production was on target.
That may sound innocuous enough, but in a company as loosely structured as Harbor Sweets, the culture shock was substantial. Strohecker had always told employees to work at their own pace; if the company got behind, everyone would put in extra effort. So for 16 years, Harbor Sweets had been telling its employees that they were not ordinary factory workers, that they were in effect trusted artisans who worked at their own convenience and who the company knew were doing their best. Now, all of a sudden, they were given production goals, changes that caused a good bit of grumbling. "Back then, it was total quality," says Joyce Brown of the Harbor Sweets where she began working part-time 11 years ago. Now, she laments, "it's becoming more of a factory."
