And then there's the whole question of positioning. Fresh from his own successful dieting, he'd pitched spaghetti squash during the initial market test as an ideal product for dieters. But recently, Kilmer says, all the independent studies show that serious dieting is on the way out. What to do? Simple, he says. "We have to reposition the product and educate the market about what spaghetti squash is." He's already asked his investors to put up new cash to spend on print, radio, and cable-TV advertising. To avoid diluting his equity, he had to put up new funds himself (which he got by remortgaging his house for the third time). He's feverishly trying to broaden the appeal of his product, called Nature's Pasta, by promoting spaghetti squash as "the vegetable with a hundred uses." (Number 28, spoon gravy on top; number 94, toss with duck sauce.) Kilmer, who now employs about 20 people, talks about reaching breakeven by mid-1995.
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When Jim Kilmer started his business, three years ago, he fantasized about the flexibility in his schedule: time to duck out for a dentist appointment or a haircut. But that's become a joke. "Things that can be delayed really drop on the priority list," he says. With the exception of Sunday, which is reserved for church, leading a Weight Watchers group, and family activities, Kilmer works 12 to 14 hours a day. He can't tell the difference between Thursday and Saturday. And those trips to the dentist? He sets them up for 6:30 a.m., before his 45-minute drive to the plant.
Kilmer travels for business as frugally as possible. No more Marriotts and nice meals on Heinz. Now if he has to go anywhere overnight, he stays at Comfort Inns. If a trip is less than a four- or five-hour drive, he takes the car. If he flies, he stays over Saturday night to save on airfare. He used to look forward to some weekends of skiing, but he hasn't been on skis since he launched the business. Partly, it's a matter of time. But it's mostly a new feeling of responsibility. "At Heinz," he says, "you could show up on crutches and it wouldn't be a huge problem. But what would a broken leg mean to my business?"
"I really can't remember what things used to be like," offers Vickie. Soon after the decision to start the business, Jim and Vickie sat down with their boys to tell them what to expect. Everything, they said, was on the line: the time and money for family vacations, the ability to help the children with college bills, even holding on to the house. The boys offered to do what they could. The younger one, Matt, sold candy to earn spending money. And Jimmy, now 17 and a year away from college, found an after-school job at a nursing home; that first Easter, he gave his parents a card with $60 tucked inside. Vickie still talks about how moving it was. ("I don't know if it was the high point or the low point," she says.)
Even today, she notes, the economic anxiety is relentless. She avoids talking about the business with her mother for fear that it will upset her. "It's not that I doubt Jim can do it," she says, "but there are so many things out of your control."
Kilmer himself doesn't pause often to reflect. "I tend to focus on the current problems and the next ones down the road," he says. Still, he muses about the day when he might be able to take an afternoon off and not feel incredibly guilty -- when there might be less of a sense of urgency and more of an organization to fall back on. One of the things he misses about big companies, he says, is having peers. "You could walk down the hall and plop yourself in a colleague's office, and they knew exactly what you were talking about," he recalls. When you own a business, he has discovered, it can be lonely.
But there are other aspects of owning a business that Kilmer says he wouldn't think of giving up. The business, he says, has quite unexpectedly helped his family grow closer. Last summer at least one of his boys got up with him at the crack of dawn each morning and went off with him to work at the plant. The goings-on at the business have become a common reference point at home. "When I was at Heinz, the boys saw it as my job," Kilmer says. "But now they call it 'our company." And notwithstanding the long hours and low pay -- he still earns less than half what he earned at Heinz -- he likes the ability to make quick decisions and act. "If there's an obstacle," he says, "I can go over it, around it, or through it. I don't have to worry about how it looks to my boss." Both physically and mentally, he says, he feels better than he's felt in years. He can't remember when he last took an antacid.
"Whenever I feel discouraged," Kilmer says, "I think about the great feedback we get. Just the other day, for instance, I was in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with buyers at two big chains. I drove up early in the morning and arrived at the meetings with a soup, a quiche, and a low-fat coconut custard pie -- all made with our spaghetti squash. Everyone said, 'This is really good.' They loved it!" But talk is cheap -- now he needs to get them to place orders.
In some ways, Kilmer says, owning a business is like a trip to Disney World. "It's tiring, the lines are long, everything is overpriced, and people bump into you with their ice-cream cones. But you don't regret it. For a lot of reasons, you're really glad you went."
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