I love my job, but work can be stressful sometimes. Thankfully, if any of us ever gets stressed around here we just squeeze a puppy. Buddy & Nyoki, the two smaller members of our office pack, are always eager to oblige!
Wild Mushroom & Truffle Season is ON!!!!
People go bonkers over morels in the spring, but few people outside of the Pacific Northwest take notice of the Fall season. What are you thinking people? Morels are great and all, but there are six varieties of fantastic wild mushrooms that pop up in our forests between August and February. SIX! In fact, there are more … but only six can be packed in a FedEx box and shipped across the country, so those six are the ones that we tend to focus on:
Lobsters, Chanterelles, Matsutake, Porcini, Black Trumpets & Hedghogs. Add to that the parade of truffles from the PNW, France, Italy and Bulgaria. We are on the threshold of 2010 shroom heaven people!
Mushrooms are so incredibly fickle and unpredictable. Some years some varieties pop up in abundance. Other years, not so much. Availability changes weekly. Mama nature has her ryhme and reason, but it beguiles us humans. We’ll get word that a particular variety is done for the year … and then a couple days later, it comes back on strong. I always cross my fingers that shrooms will fruit in abundance, because that means that prices will be low and I can sell a lot of them.
We’re not sure yet what this season will bring, it’s anybody’s guess…kinda like predicting the weather, but I wanted to pass on to you a couple predictions from two of our pickers’ crystal balls: Oh, nevermind, I just read through their emails and all I read are “if”s “maybe”s and “hopefully”s.
Here’s one thing I do know: Chanterelles and lobsters have been available for a few weeks. Porcinis and matsutakes are in as of today. And, White Italian Alba Truffles are supposedly coming in tomorrow. Music to my ears…or rather…alba truffles to my palate.
Stocking Stuffers & Win-Wins
Me packing up sample boxes for our mushroom recipe challenge. I don’t have kids yet, so this is the closest I get to stuffing stockings. Ho ho ho, Recipe Challengers!
“Creating win-wins” is one of my mantras, but that phrase has unfortunately also become a platitude. If only I was linguistically creative enough to come up with a better phrase.
I deeply believe that the sweet spot in life is in the creation of win-wins. If life is a game, I don’t think it is a zero sum one. It is in that spirit that we jumped head first into the blogosphere with our first blog. I have since spent many looooooooong days in the office having fun, editing, and scrambling to manage recipe contests on deadline. If we didn’t have blogs, my job would be a lot less fun but I would probably also have fairly normal work hours.
I guess part of the purpose of this blog is transparency, but in business that also means making things transparent to your competitors. Competitors: follow me if you want … I don’t mind … because if you do, then you’ll always be a step behind. He he.
The point is that I love win-wins … and sending samples to bloggers is a great example of a win-win. Next week, a bunch of bloggers will get five varieties of dried mushrooms that they would otherwise have to spend a bunch of money on, if they could even find them in their local store. The bloggers go to town and create some awesome recipes and challenge themselves to take their culinary skills to the next level. Meanwhile they fill the web with recipes for our products. And, some of them even send their readers over to our little store for some shopping. Win-win? I think so.
Getting the job done…
I think I know what this blog is going to be about. Not that anybody is reading it yet, but if somebody is, anybody … this post is more of a managerial thought post because I do think I have some good management philosophy stuff to share.
Often I use a restaurant analogy when describing how a small business owner needs to be a jack-of-all-trades in order to succeed. The small restaurant owner needs to be good at SO many things … think about it … here are just a few things the restaurant owner needs to be able to do: take care of guests … cook when necessary … understand all the aspects of business from purchasing to marketing to HR to finance … when something breaks, he heeds to be able to fix it … etc etc etc. Right?
It’s basically the same in any small business. I deal with it every week. And, it has always struck me as a pragmatic necessity only. You gotta take care of business.
And, this week I realized there is another huge reason why the small business owner needs to be engaged and willing to step in to get the job done. I have a decent-sized team now, which means that I am somewhat removed from many of the day-to-day tasks. Once upon a time, I did them all. But, there are some functions now that I haven’t done in years.
My staff has been slammed with work since we are in the final stages of readying MarxFoods.com 5.0 (to launch in a couple weeks). So, I had to pitch in and take a rather big, but entry-level, project off my team’s hands. It was no fun, but I did it. And, in the process I re-learned the function which will make me very able to train the next person that has to do it. I will be a better manager as a result.
And, more than that I realize … As the leader, I set the example. If I have no ego issues with doing entry-level work, my team will see that. And, then it isn’t a matter of my team knowing that ego is unacceptable on our team. But they will simply be more than willing to do what it takes to get the job done. At the end of the day, my team is awesome … they had that attitude to begin with!
I read a lot of food news today. Stoked to find that some of it was good.
The New York Times reports that the USDA is about to ban the use of antibiotics as a growth-stimulating tool. Good.
And, whole foods is going to color rate their seafood, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. We are a step ahead … we have had our seafood color coded for some time.
How do Credit Card Companies get away with it?
Credit card companies are one of this year’s favorite bogeymen. I won’t recite any of the common threads that are widely reported in the media, but I will add a new wrinkle.
We obviously take credit cards. The credit cards companies analyze and authorize each transaction. They look for a few things. For example: do the street address and zip code entered in the shopping cart match what the bank has on file? If the transaction meets their criteria, the bank authorizes it. We pay a fee, anywhere from 3-5%, for the privilege of being able to take credit cards. I would have thought before that was the end of the story … if there was a fraud, then the bank would not charge the customer but also not withhold payment from the merchant. The idea is basically that we pay for a service and that once the bank authorizes the transaction and we ship the product that we should get paid. Well, apparently it doesn’t work that way. The credit card companies apparently get to charge consumers high interest rates and charge merchants a fee, but then don’t assume any of the risk, even though they are the party that facilitates the transaction and makes nice money in the process.
Recently, we had a fraudulent transaction (that we now know, based on hindsight). The transaction met the bank’s criteria so they authorized it. We shipped the product. A month or so later, the cardholder reported the transaction as fraudulent. In my mind, the bank should stand behind this, right? Isn’t that one of the things that we pay a fee for? Basically, the credit card told us that we are shit out of luck because the shipping and billing address didn’t match. Okaaaay. So, what are we supposed to do about gifts? Or, in the event that the billing address is a PO Box and FedEx can only deliver to street addresses. Basically, the bank is telling us that we are on our own. WTF?
It gets better (rather, worse). Over the weekend, we received a large order. A really nice order. The kind that we really like because there is a fair bit of profit in it. We decided to be proactive. The bank authorized the transaction, but we also checked to make sure that the billing and shipping addresses match. We looked at the address on Google Earth, we checked the white pages to see if their name on record matched the customer’s name … and we even called our credit card processor to see if there is anything else that we can check. Their answer was basically: It doesn’t matter … the credit card companies can back out of any transaction that they want.
How does that make any sense? I guess it makes sense because the main credit card companies have a practical monopoly. We have no choice but to ship the order … and take the chance. Can you imagine if we declined all the orders that didn’t have a shipping/billing address match? Our customers would be pissed. What are we supposed to do?
The Prohibited List
I regard myself as a progressive eater. Like other aspects of my life, I am looking for win-wins … foods that bring me quality, purity and high green and animal welfare standards. I am not perfect, but I am constantly trying to be more and more so.
MarxFoods.com is kind of the same, but there is an added requirement: profitability. It is part of the inherent conflict in business between sound social/enviro choices and choices that lead to maximum profits.
We don’t trumpet our eco or humane credentials very often because corporate green-washing is a pet peeve of mine and we have a handful of achilles heels on that front. But, if you look at our product offerings, there is a sustainable/humane thread running through many of our product categories.
A customer asked us today to source tiger prawns for them and we had to politely decline. There are few special requests that we decline. What we have decided is that we aren’t going to tell people how to eat, but we also aren’t going sell the foods that I avoid at all costs. Farmed salmon tops that list, along with tiger prawns, milk-fed veal, foie gras and wild turtle meat.
Foie gras is a particularly tricky one for me, because our sister companies sell it to distributors and restaurants. Certainly, if we offered it through the web, we could make a lot of money. My partners like to remind me of this.
I am constantly conflicted about whether to wield my own biases and judgments when it comes to not selling something. Any thoughts on this? Should we just sell everything that foodies might want? Should we add more items to the prohibited list and if so, which items?
When being an attorney is helpful
Since my job is not to practice law, people always ask me whether it was worth getting my law degree. The answer is invariably, Yes!
I don’t do very much legal work these days, but maybe it is 5% of my job … the worst 5%. It is the skills that I acquired in law school that have proved to be most valuable.
Today, I am reminded of this. On my desk sits a 4 inch binder that is overflowing with submissions for a recent contest. We asked bloggers to review our palm plates … we shipped out dozens of packages … and got dozens back. Now, it is my turn to do the work of selecting the best reviews.
The law degree is relevant in that I have ingrained in my mental capacity the ability to sit down, focus, and churn through mountains of paper. And, that is how I will spend the afternoon. Given that I could’ve just as easily been a practicing attorney, I will spend the afternoon thanking my lucky stars that I am reading creative works, rather than dealing with an actual legal issue.