Another great female entrepreneur: Cordia Harrington

THE BUN LADY

Cordia Harrington and the Tennessee Bun Company

In 1990, Cordia Harrington was tired of standing up all day, smelling of French fries. She owned and operated three McDonalds franchises, but as a divorced mother of three boys, she yearned for a business that would provide for her children and let her spend more time with them. As if she didn’t have enough to do, her fellow franchisees nominated her for the McDonalds Bun and Bakery Committee.

“The men thought that was hilarious because of the word ‘bun’! They didn’t know that McDonalds would be picking me up in the corporate jet to see bakeries around the world! Every time I went to a bun meeting, I was obsessed. I loved it. This was exciting!”

Harrington’s experience on the bun committee opened her eyes to a global business and she wanted in. So two years later, when McDonalds decided that they needed a woman-owned business to supply them with buns, Harrington became determined to win the contract.

“I could see this could be my big break,” Harrington recalls. “You see a tiny crack in the door and that’s it, you just have to run through it. I really believed I could do this.”

She lobbied McDonalds for four years, sending everyone she met baseballs saying ‘Let’s play ball’ or photographs of herself, in white baker’s hat and jacket, saying “I want to be your baker.” Harrington didn’t own a bakery and had no experience of running one. Everything she knew about buns she had learned running her restaurants. But finally, in 1996, after 32 interviews, her persistence paid off.

“If they’d just wanted a bakery, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. But they wanted a diversity supplier and I could see that that was my big chance. Maybe what convinced them the fact that I’d been so persistent for so long. When you want to pick someone, you’re going to pick someone determined.”

As a McDonalds supplier, Harrington was able to borrow $13.5 million; she also invested everything she owned. With her team of five – an accountant, two engineers a baker and a supplier - she set out to build the fastest, most fully automated bakery the world had ever seen.

“I wasn’t intimidated by what I didn’t know. In some ways, it was better that I wasn’t an expert because I would ask questions that helped the rest of the team to ask: why not? “

The Tennessee Bun Company opened, ahead of schedule in 1997, just in time for an unprecedented slump in fast food sales. Before she knew it, Harrington was down to her last $20,000, not enough to cover payroll. Her agreement with McDonald’s required that she sell exclusively to them – but she knew the business would never survive that way.

“It was a crisis of huge magnitude. I cried myself to sleep many nights. I really did think: I am going to go bankrupt. I never regretted it – even when I was thinking of slitting my throat or jumping off a bridge – because I’d had the chance to try it. But it was years before we could break even.”

Against McDonald’s wishes, Harrington agreed to supply Pepperidge Farm. “It took a lot of conversations with McDonald’s to get them comfortable,” Harrington recalls. “But they could see they’d get the benefit if prices went down, and no benefit if we went out of business! That deal saved us.”

Today, it takes just 11 people to turn out 60,000 buns an hour for customers across the US, South America and the Caribbean. When she became dissatisfied with her delivery service, Harrington started her own trucking company. She’s since added a cold storage company and, in 2007, another bakery that supplies fresh dough to restaurants. It’s an unconventional group of businesses but Harrington has always done things her own way.

“I am not smart enough to run a business like a person with a masters degree. I have no formal training. All I’ve had to offer was my heart and my passion and I’ve tried to give that freely.”

Grateful for the breaks she got, Harrington’s passionate about providing opportunities to her 224 employees. “We give people a lot of cross-training. It costs the company money but we just think: how can we help our employees be the very best they can be? That is unique for the baking industry where most bakeries have been running in the same way, every day, every shift. ” In that spirit, the company has hired refugees from Rwanda, Laos and Sudan. She says they are – like she was -- resourceful, determined and persistent, the ultimate entrepreneurs, grateful for the chance to prove themselves. For Harrington, growing her people and growing her business have become indistinguishable.

“I think financial success is the most fun when you can give it away. We had a project that came in under budget one year, and we gave everyone a car with a big bow! And you can do a lot more of that when you have a big business.”

And it is a big business. What started as a joke earned $50 million last year, with continuing double-digit growth. Cordia Harrington doesn’t have to be on her feet all day long any more, and her sons have grown up, but she’s as eager as ever to keep learning and growing.

“I started this business because I wanted it to be global. And that’s still my dream today. I want us to be known throughout the world as having one of the most dynamic baking companies in the world.”

Q and A

What made you into an entrepreneur?

I had good roots of love and encouragement. When I got crazy ideas, my Dad would say: you can do that! Even as a little girl of 11, I had a nursery school in my back yard and I’d charge 25 cents for 3 hours. I’ve always thought something could be done better. So I think being an entrepreneur is about how you think, always believing there’s a better way to do things.

Do you have very high standards?

Very. Extremely. I’m not happy unless everything has been done absolutely the best it can be. If we have an inspection, I don’t want us just to pass – I want us to get the highest marks. We give everyone a $50 bill to reward that high standard because I keep saying: how will we know we’re winning unless we play by the rules? I always want the best of the best.

What do you think has made your business so successful?

Our culture isn’t the only one that can be successful, I wouldn’t pretend that. But we run our business as a family business and, unlike a lot of companies, we welcome family members to work with other members of their family. Because the work can be unpredictable sometimes with goofy hours and I think it is important that people stick together.

What do you think are the most important characteristics to be successful in business?

High integrity, transparency and visibility- with your employees and with your customers. Passion and persistence. So many times – I felt like I was walking up staircase and I didn’t know where it was going and wasn’t sure where it would end. But you just have to keep going.

And if you had to choose just one of those qualities? Integrity. Doing what you say. What you see is what you get, in the numbers and in the person. We may not be perfect -- but people know we have given everything to make it work.

You don’t give up easily?

I have a saying – instead of moaning and complaining, you have to take that energy when problems happen and put it to getting you to the next level. There’s never an easy path if you’re an entrepreneur. No matter how good you are, you’re gonna have problems. You just got to keep going, be persistent, have passion and enthusiasm and be flexible and resourceful

Are you a very impatient person?

Probably, either that or antsy. My nickname is Aunt C! (antsy) When I was a little girl and they’d say dinner’s ready, I’d have to run round the house 10 times first! I’ve been always been high energy or antsy all my life.

It sounds like you spend a lot of time on relationships?

That’s what I enjoy the most. With me, you know what you see is what you get. Maybe my style isn’t great for everyone but candor is appreciated.

Are you a natural sales person?

I can sell something I truly believe in – a cause or a person. I couldn’t sell something I didn’t believe in or to someone if I didn’t believe in their values. So I couldn’t sell something I didn’t believe in. I’m too transparent. Everyone can see it in me.

Do you bake yourself?

I love to cook and entertain. But I’m not a very good baker! I take our dough home and bake that. But if I had to do it myself from scratch, we would be in trouble.

BAD NUMBERS
Why do US students study all the wrong stuff?

The worst fact of the week? That the biggest undergraduate major by far in the US today is: Business. 22 percent of B.A.s are awarded in business, compared with a paltry 8% in education, 5% in health professions, less than 4% in English and a tragic 2% in history. No wonder, as a nation, we’re stupid, sick, inarticulate and prone to repeating bad mistakes.

22 percent of B.A. in business should panic the business community. When I was running companies, I didn’t want kids with B.A.s in business. I wanted kids who could speak, write, think about the world, who even had some sense of context. They were like gold dust. My best employees were invariably Russian, Chinese, Indian, gay, Jewish, female. Being outsiders, they’d had to struggle and struggling, they’d learned about the world. They'd also, usually, had an education that was both broad and deep.

I wanted – and still want – people who pay attention, reflect, and can handle complexity. But almost everything about current career structures militates against this. Do business in college, get a job in sales, specialize in high tech, then super-specialize in telecoms. Before you know where you are – you know almost nothing. Making people narrower and narrower as the world gets more and more complex is a terrible way to build the smart workforce we’re supposed to need for an innovative economy.

And let’s face it: the teaching of business to undergraduates is not exactly the acme of academic achievement. What I’ve seen – from employing interns and from employing business graduates – is that they’re mostly learning outdated, macho rubbish that replaces creativity and commonsense with doctrinaire, slick mumbo jumbo. And they’re usually learning it from people who couldn’t run so much as a lemonade stand. What’s even more obscene about that 22% is that these kids are paying for this. They’d do better to take a year out, get a job, and learn from that. They’d end up wiser and richer.

American education is the most expensive in the world. If you’re paying over $100,000 for a B.A. in business, all that tells me is that you have no business sense at all.

M and A: The boys' favorite corporate Kool Aid

When DaimlerBenz CEO Schrempp called the ‘merger’ with Chrysler “a merger of equals” – what was he drinking? He was drinking the same corporate Kool Aid that TimeWarner and AOL found so refreshing, that Vivendi’s Jean-Marie Messier thought would make him the hottest ticket in town. Schrempp and Eaton were merely following in the line of Chief Execs who think that big deals will make them big men. “Within five years,” Chrysler’s Eaton predicted, “we’ll be among the Big Three automotive companies in the world.”[1] Grown men should know that size really isn’t everything.

Mergers and acquisitions have a failure rate of 50 to 80 percent. You don’t have to be a Wharton PhD to understand what that means: you’re probably better off passing. But even as business leaders around the world struggle to make their behemoths nimble and entrepreneurial, they are fatally tempted by size.

The language gives it all away: Synergy, economy of scale, co-chairmen, cross-branding. These are weasel words and, in any business, should set off alarm bells. The minute a CEO spends billions of dollars while promising that nobody should fear change, you know you’re being lied to. In the words of Schrempp himself, “The Merger of Equals statement was never a reality[2].”

Indeed, there was nothing real about this merger. Only American hubris could imagine Europeans salivating over big, spongy American cars. And what genius seriously thought you could cross-brand Chrysler with Mercedes – when every savvy marketer in the world has been saying, and growth has been demonstrating, that strong markets are niche markets? What consumer lusts after a Mercedes on a Chrysler wheel base? Aiming for the middle takes you to no man’s land, the Somme of marketing.

Mind you, it was probably a very long time since Schrempp or Eaton had spoken to a real, live customer. Because that isn’t what these big-deal CEOs do. The bigger the company, the further from serving customers they get. Maybe, for some guys, that’s the whole point. Harvard’s Shoshanna Zuboff calls this managerial narcissism: that moment when obsession with internal politics becomes more compelling than external trade. All the time DaimlerChrysler managers spent at workshops on German Dining Etiquette was time they weren’t talking to customers.

Schrempp said that what he wanted out of the merger was Chrylser’s talent for innovation. But companies don’t have ideas – people do. And after the merger, the best idea the Chrysler people came up with was to leave. In business leadership the further you get from customers and employees, the further they will get from you. It isn’t marketing; it isn’t HR. If you’re CEO, this stuff is your job.

Of course the big men responsible for the deal didn’t suffer; it was the little people – shareholders, retirees, employees – who took the hit. The people to whom lipservice is regularly paid, who don’t take the decisions but inevitably suffer the consequences. If the Bancroft family really cares about them, what should they do this weekend as they contemplate Rupert Murdoch’s own special flavour of Kool Aid?

Put a photograph of Bob Eaton on the desk as a memento mori and remember: he wasn't a bad man or a stupid one. That means you can make mistakes just as disastrous.

Whenever anyone tells you nothing will change, they’re lying. No one spends millions or billions of dollars to maintain the status quo.

You can destroy a culture – quite easily in fact – and you will never get it back.

The bankers don’t work for you; they work for themselves. They may pass out the Kool Aid but please note: they don’t drink it. Take advice from bright people whose only interest is in the continuing vitality and success of you and your firm.

Deal frenzy is like romance: it makes you feel giddy and look glamorous. But it's a psychopathological state.



[1] DaimlerChrysler Merger Takes Shape” Detroit Free Press Detroit (5/8/1998),p.3
[2] DaimlerChrysler will seine Autos gunstiger verkaufen” Handelsblatt, Frankfurt, German (10/30/00) p.3

You can't be an entrepreneur AND a mother - can you?

I was speaking at Babson College the other night when a smart young woman told a terrifying tale. She was doing her MBA at Babson when one of her professors told her:" you can be an entrepreneur. Or you can be a mother. You can't be both; you have to choose. " She wondered what I thought.

Well the first thing I thought was: this guy should be retired by now! Never mind that he's narrow-minded; he's ill informed. I could have spent the rest of the evening listing the staggering entrepreneurial mothers I know who've built fantastic businesses WHILE raising their kids. Women like:
*** Doris Christopher. She started PAMPERED CHEF because she wanted to spend time with her kids and she couldn't find a job anywhere that would take her seriously AND let her see her kids as much as she wanted. So she started her own company. Warren Buffett did not buy Pampered Chef because it was a hobby but because Doris had built a big profitable business -- all the time she was raising her kids and spending time with her family.
*** Doreen Marks who started her company, OTIS TECHNOLOGY at the age of 16 and did NOT stop when she had two daughters. Of course her business now sells around the world and runs a state-of-the-art manufacturing center which also does many of the other things people tell you businesses can't afford: like offering full medical benefits, educational support and on site child care.
*** Karla Diehl who runs Edison Automation and has just joined the Inc 500 as one of the fastest growing businesses in America. Her company and her kids are about the same age. And she learned a lot about management from her kids (as every parent does.)
*** Eileen Fisher who learned from her kids that whether as a parent or a CEO, you have to keep evolving to respond to the needs around you that change all the time.

Come on Professor - do your homework!!

Yes Women Do Work Well Together

HOW SHE DOES IT is officially out now. It's a strange experience, working on a book for years, finishing it - but then not having it out in the world for months. Then one day: it's there. People often compare it to giving birth but, in my experience, it's nothing like. Birth is (if you're lucky) a fairly continuous process; publishing a book isn't. I finished How She Does It months and months ago and then, in effect, it went away. Now it's back and out in the world.
http://www.amazon.com/How-She-Does-Entrepreneurs-Changing/dp/0670038237/sr=8-1/qid=1169476475/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-9829664-5393431?ie=UTF8&s=books

The best part of writing the book was meeting the phenomenal women in it. I don't think any one of them thought of herself as remarkable. Is that because we are socialized to be modest and understated? Perhaps. We fear drawing attention to ourselves and our achievements lest it make others feel uncomfortable. That's why Nancy Pelosi's tea party was so thrilling. Regardless of your political views, it was exhilirating to see a woman proudly owning her achievements -- and paying tribute to all the other WOMEN who had helped her.

The fact that she owed so much to women is especially interesting because so many of us have had experience of women being horrid to each other. Like my first boss, who hated to see me doing work that would advance my career - so she'd try to interrupt by asking me to deliver her dry cleaning! Many women write to me and say that their worst work experiences are with other women - I know that this can be true because I've been there. BUT I do think it is changing. The rising of women's networks is phenomenal. I've been involved in two lately and I've been moved and impressed by how they work.

The first is a group called the Women Guru's Network. This is ten women all of whom write, speak and think about work, business and gender. Leadership gurus like Sally Helgesen, marketing mavens like Marti Barletta, language experts like Connie Glaser. We got together in New York to talk about our work and our businesses and were able to throw a lot of light on what each of us is doing, how and where we might find more challenging assignments. Because we mostly work alone, it was a great way to break down isolation, pool information and dream up new ideas. Interestingly, some women who'd been invited to join resisted because they felt we could be competitors. But isn't this just the point? Yes, we may compete -- but we're still stronger together than apart.

The second experience was of a women's healthcare network called X2HN, founded by Medseek's founder, Gale Wilson-Steele. She created the organization with the many women working in healthcare, whom she otherwise only ever saw at conferences. Not working in healthcare myself, I was fascinated by their current topics: automation in healthcare (pharmacy robots!) automation of medicine delivery, the chronic undervaluing of nursing. The group is a combination of entrepreneurs, executives and consultants working together to help each other in their industry and their careers. Here was a room full of women doing what men have done for centuries: finding out each others' needs and helping each other. It really was the opposite of the notorious Queen Bee syndrome - and the only antidote for it.

So yes, women have been socialized to compete with each other for the attention of men and this has proved hideously isolating. But we are getting over it. And being so brilliant at relationships, we can get over it fast!!

How She Does It

My new book "How She Does It" is OUT!