Without You I'm Nothing

That serendipitous strawberry assignment proved to be critical five years later. In 1991 prolonged city street construction hampered customers' access to King's store, and he also went through a life-threatening bout with peritonitis. Business at Jo's Candies was suffering to the point that King was advised by his accountant at the time to file for bankruptcy. "I was too proud or too vain to do it," he recalls. "I felt that the stigma would be horrible." At the time, King had a minuscule mail-order business for his chocolates. He decided he would try to expand it and add wholesale distribution.

His first call was to Selfridge, whom he began plying with samples of the graham crackers. "I'm a sucker for chocolate anyway, but Tom elevated this rather basic relic of my childhood to a new level," says Selfridge. (Unlike most versions of the sweet, King's is made up of three parts chocolate to one part graham cracker.)

Within a year and a half, King's cookies were carried in 77 Nordstrom espresso bars, and the candy entrepreneur started making the rounds at coffee trade shows. King, who feels his stout physique only lends credibility to the quality of his product--"Never buy chocolates from a skinny guy," he cautions--offered generous samples of his wares to all comers, maxing out 12 credit cards to their $10,000 limits to finance his marketing efforts.

While the Nordstrom seal of approval initially lent him visibility and credibility--coffee chain Gloria Jean's signed on after one of its buyers sampled King's product at a Nordstrom in Chicago, for example--King learned that he had to play that card carefully. He discovered that most companies he dealt with, large as well as small, wanted to avoid having a "me-too" product. "There's a strange subconscious impulse to always seek out the most unique thing," notes King. The candy maker learned never to volunteer his customer list unless a buyer specifically asked.

He also learned how to make customers feel unique, even though they were each buying essentially the same product. One company might want its grahams in a special-sized acrylic case; another might want the grahams completely unwrapped and unpackaged. That's fine by King, who goes to great lengths to accommodate requests. When retailer Borders Group Inc. wanted a custom-label three-pack of the grahams for its bookstores, and Williams-Sonoma and Starbucks wanted specially prepared products for their direct-response catalogs, King went along with their wishes. "I will compromise as much as possible," he says.

RULE #2
You Must Make It Easy for Them to Work with You
Another key part of King's strategy is giving each customer close, personal attention. "I always try to communicate with major customers once a week--by fax, phone, or E-mail--and try to meet with my largest accounts face-to-face every four to six weeks," King explains. In meetings, he always relies on a written agenda, which he edits down to be as short as possible (never more than two pages) and from which he rarely deviates. "You have only a finite amount of time before your customer gets distracted with other items," he cautions. "Get to the point." King describes himself as "very anal" about keeping track of the birthdays and anniversaries of his customers and distributors (he has 11 sales reps spread around the country) and hopping on a plane when something goes wrong to "make nice" and rectify the situation. That might involve sharing an anecdote to break up a tense negotiation or working out some sort of compromise when a customer wants an exclusive deal--agreeing to the exclusive for a three-month trial period, for example, before shopping his grahams to a competing chain. (In some cases he'll grant exclusives for longer periods but with volume guarantees attached. "Usually, they can't make the guarantee, so they back down," notes King.)

King frequently recommends price points for the grahams, for example, and he always guarantees each sale. If after three months a retailer is dissatisfied in any way, King will buy back the product--in six years, he's had to do it just once, from a retailer who left a case of the chocolate-covered crackers in the sun.

When very large customers are being particularly sticky or recalcitrant about contract specifics, King has gone so far as to casually mention to them that if they're not happy with his terms, they could always buy him out. "I use it like a chip," he says, while noting that to date, no customer has made such an offer. Of the possibility, he says, "if the numbers were right, I'd go work for one of them--running it like my own company but with their best interest at heart."

King's personal touch makes particular sense, given the discrepancy in size between Jo's Candies and its customers. "In business-to-business transactions, the size of the company does not matter as much if the process is honest, straightforward, and full of value," notes Kash Rangan, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He adds that "once a large company trusts that the small one is a good supplier, it will likely relent some of its power--by not browbeating on price," for example. "That trust and commitment play out over time to a more equitable relationship," Rangan notes.

Usually, anyway. But King has felt at least once the crushing strength of a big company bearing down on him. Looking back, he likens the incident to "seeing your spouse cheat on you through a two-way mirror."

RULE #3
You Can Never Forget: They Could Wipe You Out
In 1994, King began to hear alarming rumors that his precious Nordstrom account might be in jeopardy.

First one regional manager decided he could make his own chocolate-covered graham crackers more economically in Nordstrom's in-house commissary. Then others quickly followed suit. Before King knew it, he had lost all but six of his Nordstrom locations. John Clem, the general manager of Nordstrom's restaurant division, declined to comment about the lost Nordstrom accounts, citing the company's policy of rarely discussing its vendor relations. "To their credit, if Nordstrom sees a great product it can replicate, it will," says Selfridge, "but in this case I think they're being penny-wise and pound-foolish." (Selfridge left Nordstrom in 1993 to help launch Tully's, now a 70-unit specialty coffee chain--and a Jo's Candies customer--with headquarters in Seattle.)

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