Читать книгу Irrational Persistence - Zilko Dave - Страница 5

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO TAKE A BANKRUPT startup and eventually sell it to a Fortune 500 company for almost a quarter of a billion dollars?

This is a different type of business book, one that tells a story – an “Only in America” story.

Just not from the place in America you’d expect.

“Salsa from Detroit? You’re kidding, right?”

We’d hear it all the time, and frankly I couldn’t blame anyone for asking the question. It’s counterintuitive at the very least and borders on irrational.

I’d love to say the idea was born out of some ultra-chic marketing incubator. Where some bold and brilliant entrepreneurs concluded launching a fresh salsa company from Detroit was “so crazy it just might work” and “all we’ll need now is a slick ad and PR campaign and we’ll be on our way.”

But to be honest, we’re not that clever.

Instead, Garden Fresh Gourmet was born in the back of a small bankrupt restaurant just outside of Detroit when a 44-year-old man named Jack Aronson pulled out a five-gallon bucket and in 15 minutes developed a recipe for fresh salsa.

“I was just hoping to pay my electric bill,” Jack has since told me.

When I first met Jack and his wife, Annette, five years after he made that first batch of fresh salsa, they were still struggling, although no longer bankrupt. I, however, technically could not say the same; 11 years earlier I had founded my own food company on a $2,500 credit card loan, and let’s just say things were not going too well for me.

Soon after I met the Aronsons they invited me to be their partner and, despite our humble origins, Garden Fresh is now the largest brand of fresh salsa in the United States with-annual revenues well in excess of $100 million.

And Garden Fresh was just sold to the Campbell Soup Company for $231 million.

We all want to live the life we’ve imagined for ourselves. For most of us doing that does not just happen; we have to make it happen. Doing so requires sacrifice – often tremendous sacrifice. Sacrifice unimagined in common hours.

I refer to those 11 years between the time I founded my company on that $2,500 credit card loan and the time I met the Aronsons as my “lost decade.” And Jack and Annette had had a couple of lost decades of their own before we became partners. On top of that, it took us another decade to fully realize the company Garden Fresh would eventually become.

We persisted against seemingly insurmountable odds in a fashion that can only be described as irrational.

Just as salsa from Detroit is irrational.

It’s not lost on me, though, that a lot of people work hard, are determined, yet don’t make it, don’t end up living the life they’ve imagined for themselves. Very often there’s a missing strategic link that is the difference between success and failure.

Failure’s in vogue right now, and for good reason; failure is important in a lot of ways; we all learn more from our mistakes than we do from anything else. We should not fear it. Thus, I’m fine accepting it, even embracing it, as a necessary speed bump on the road to success.

But I’ve done it enough in my life to confidently state: failure’s overrated.

Another thing I can confidently state: it’s not as necessary as some people might lead you to believe. We can all learn from other people’s experiences.

In this book I share our experiences, a heartfelt story that only life itself could write, as well as the secrets that drove Garden Fresh from the back of that tiny restaurant to become the premiere deli supply company in the United States.

So that you can begin to live the life you’ve imagined for yourself. Ideally a lot quicker than we did.