The people who run fast-growing companies are driven by optimism and a passion for what they do. And the people married to them? The author remembers worrying about money and trying to keep her doubts to herself as her husband, Gary, built Stonyfield Farm into a $330 million company.
My husband, Gary, and I met about 25 years ago at an organic farming conference. He and his business partner, Samuel Kaymen, a pioneer in organic agriculture, had just started churning out delicious cream-topped yogurt at their New Hampshire hilltop farm. Stonyfield Farm was more a place than a brand then, featuring "seven cows and a dream," as company literature would later romanticize that era.
Gary delivered the keynote about turning the organic movement into an industry. I was in the audience, thinking he was cute. The stars were bright that night, the bonfire lit, and a romance was kindled. Years later, Gary confessed that by the next morning he had forgotten my name and had conducted a surreptitious early-dawn search among my scattered clothes for my conference name-tag. We began a commuting relationship on the now defunct People Express airline, Newark to Boston, $29 each way. Some weekends, he headed to Logan airport from Stonyfield Farm. Other times, I navigated the New Jersey Turnpike, driving east to the airport from my organic vegetable farm near Princeton.
Knee-deep in muck and milk, respectively, we fell in love. Gary had big dreams and a twinkle in his eye. I liked the twinkle -- though I wasn't so sure about the big dreams. But when we married, I also became hitched to his entrepreneurial vision of changing the world, one yogurt cup at a time. I left a job I loved to move to his farm, where he and Samuel were making the world's best yogurt while losing tons of money -- one yogurt cup at a time.
A Hard Place to Crash
In January 1986, we moved my things into a rambling, dilapidated 18th-century farmhouse, which was partitioned into our apartment; that of our partner (along with his wife and five daughters); the offices for the yogurt business; and the tiny yogurt factory. Donning factory whites and a hairnet, I assumed my role as helpful passenger on my new husband's arduous journey.
We labored in those early days under scowling creditors, mountains of debt, and looming bankruptcy. Business-as-usual consisted of an endless parade of catastrophes: spoiled product, broken filling machines, delivery trucks futilely spinning mud-spattered wheels as they groaned up our mile-long dirt driveway. There was no privacy -- no doors had locks. Our first two children were born at the farm. God knows what the employees were thinking as they vicariously endured my labor pains, which were audible through the house's thin walls.
Our wood stove could not compete with the farmhouse's leaky windows -- my hair would ruffle in the winter wind, indoors. Unidentified furry creatures often skittered over my slippered feet as I loaded laundry in our dirt-floor basement. One winter, when my brother Bob was visiting, the Dumpster caught fire and nearly incinerated our barn, which contained all of our nonperishable inventory. After Gary dealt with the fire, Bob headed up to his freezing bedroom and deemed Stonyfield Farm "a hard place to crash." The moniker stuck.
Even the coming of spring heralded problems. The effluent from the yogurt plant was piped into the leach field adjacent to our bedroom. As soon as the weather warmed, the sickening odor of fermenting curds and whey wafted through our windows as we tried to sleep. When I was nine months pregnant with our first child, Gary and I laid polyethylene tubing through an overgrown field to direct the effluent away from our bedroom window so the stench would not be drawn in with our newborn's first breath. The field turned out to be overrun with poison ivy. I went into labor a couple of days later, my skin itchy and red.
I hadn't bargained for this level of turmoil and stress. Like most people, I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I vaguely knew that I wanted to work to make a better world, which eventually led me to apprentice on an organic farm. I went to ag school and got a job managing an organic vegetable operation. I didn't have two nickels to rub together, but it was satisfying work, and I felt like I was contributing to an important cause. I was thrilled to meet a man whose dreams were similar to mine -- only his were incubating in little plastic cups. My vague desire to heal the world by cultivating one small piece of it was trumped by his very concrete, bold, and much grander vision. I got sucked into his enterprise -- our livelihood now depended on it -- and though I had little input into its direction, I stood to lose everything if it failed.
Some Loss of Enthusiasm
Gary often quotes Winston Churchill's famous remark that "success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." We certainly became practiced at ricocheting from failure to failure. It's hard to say when we had our darkest hour. There are so many that could qualify. Was it in 1987, when my desperate husband asked me to lend the business the only cash we had left? A year earlier, I had told Gary that we were going to pretend that the $30,000 my father had left me in his will didn't exist; it would be the down payment on our home, if we could ever afford one. But our new co-packer had suddenly gone belly-up, and we had to start making yogurt at the farm again. "I need the cash to buy fruit," he said simply. Numbly, I pulled out the checkbook.
Or perhaps the worst moment occurred the following spring. A large dairy had agreed to partner with us and retire our debt -- Gary had worked with the company for months on a detailed agreement. I was excited and relieved on that day in April when he and Samuel drove to Vermont to sign the deal; in our recently completed fiscal year, we had burned through $10,000 in cash each week and lost $500,000 on sales of about $2.3 million.
The meeting did not go as planned. The dairy executives and their lawyers knew we were strapped and in trouble, and had changed the terms of the deal. They basically offered to run off with our company for a song. Defeated but unwilling to sign on the dotted line, Gary and Samuel got back into their car for the long, dreary trip home -- during a freak spring blizzard, no less. But as they drove, the two men quickly emerged from their funk. Turning on the car's dome light, they came up with a bold plan to raise money to build a bona fide manufacturing plant.
When they arrived back in New Hampshire late that night, I excitedly greeted Gary at the door, eager to get confirmation of the newly minted deal. "Oh, no, that didn't work out," he said, "but for just over half a million, we can build our own plant!"
I wept that night, pressing the damp pillowcase against my nose and mouth to filter out the stench from the yogurt waste still souring in our backyard.
The Two People I Love Most Are Nuts
Gary was driven, in equal measure, by lofty vision, desperate hope, and abject fear. He dreamed of each little cup of yogurt serving as a billboard to educate consumers about the benefits of organic agriculture and the power of voting with our food dollar for a saner world. Starting with Gary's mother, Louise, many friends and family members bought into that dream. They invested in our young business, and Gary toiled around the clock to make sure their money wasn't lost -- a possibility that I found deeply chilling.
