It Ain't Over (39 page)

While Susan and Michelle maintained their game faces in meetings, behind the scenes, it was chaos. They slept on couches and floors, took red-eye flights to avoid shelling out for hotels, and camped out in Starbucks making phone calls, sending emails, and learning how to use Quickbooks.

“Laughing at ourselves made rough times easier,” says Michelle. “I remember one night we were catching the midnight bus out of New York City’s Port Authority back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where we were staying with my parents. I was so tired, I had fallen asleep while waiting and Susan had snapped a picture of me passed out on the bus station floor. When we finally got on, the driver told us there were no more seats. It was the last bus of the night, and our only option was the aisle. We were still dressed in suits and heels from a business dinner, but we just looked at each other and cracked up. Then we sat down back-to-back on the floor and opened our laptops. Chivalry, by the way, is dead.”

About six months after meeting with Bob, they had secured enough financing to start production. Then they hit a major snag. “We had talked to bedding manufacturers all over the country and no one could make the fabric we wanted on their machinery,” says Susan. “We tried to source it from Asia, but none of the fabrics were right. It was a dig-deeper moment.”

Susan and Michelle called the manufacturers that worked with athletic apparel companies but, wary of breaking confidentiality agreements, none would get back to them. Finally they connected with the president of the company that makes the yarn used in Under Armour products. “He introduced us to a designer who helped us figure out a manufacturing process that would create our ideal product,” says Susan. “The economy had bottomed out that year, and there was so little business, factories were willing to alter their machinery to fit our needs.”

They started out selling directly to consumers online and promoted SHEEX at athletic events like the U.S. Women’s Open. “It was really interesting to listen to what customers had to say,” says Susan. “Guys talked about the cool technology. Women liked that they were breathable.” Now it was time to get SHEEX on store shelves. “Our big break came,” says Susan, “when we landed a unique partnership with Bed Bath & Beyond,” which introduced SHEEX in almost 1,000 stores.

Since then, Susan and Michelle have expanded the brand to include pillows, mattress toppers, comforters, duvet covers, and sleepwear.

Although many people see Susan and Michelle as crackerjack businesswomen, they trace their winning skills back to the basketball court. “You’re always anticipating how your opponent will play the game,” says Susan. “Even though you don’t have an opponent in business, you need to anticipate every possible setback—that you may not get paid on time, that a delivery may not come through—and be ready to execute an alternate strategy.”

Their ultimate game plan now? “To become a billion-dollar brand,” says Michelle. “That would be like SHEEX winning a national championship.”

Robin Béquet, 54

Bozeman, Montana

T
he summer of 2001 was a train wreck, and Robin Béquet had a front-row seat.

She was an officer at the high-tech firm ILX Lightwave, and sales of its newest telecommunications equipment had been booming. Then, three weeks before ILX was to go public, the tech bubble burst, and six months later the company began laying off thousands of workers. After 20 years in technology sales and management—where she had earned the highest reviews—41-year-old Robin was let go.

“I tried to take the news as professionally as I could,” Robin recalls, “but after the meeting, I stood up and my legs gave out from under me. That’s how devastated I was.”

For the next two months, Robin spent time with her daughters—Rachel, eight, and Hannah, nine—while trying to figure out her next move. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of options in the small town of Bozeman, Montana,
where she and her husband had relocated four years earlier for his job. She tried to stay positive, telling herself,
A new chapter in my life is about to start, and I get to decide what to write on that page.

Still, “it was very scary. I knew I needed to choose wisely, because I didn’t know how many more chapters I would have left.”

That summer, Robin kept coming back to an interview she had read with business expert Tom Peters (the bestselling author of
In Search of Excellence
), who was asked, “If you were going to encourage someone to start a business, what industry would it be in?” Robin never forgot Peters’s answer.

“He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Drive down Main Street in any town, and you’ll see all sorts of successful businesses on your left and on your right. What matters is finding an unserved or underserved niche. Do something no one else is doing and do it well.’ I found those words so striking,” Robin says.

They were also humbling. What
could
she do well that no one else was doing? Starting her own high-tech company was out—it would take too much money and carry a lot of risk. Still, “I didn’t want to work in a sector that I didn’t fully understand,” she says. “I wanted to be a master at what I did.”

She knew that left only one thing: making caramel.

It was a talent she had picked up accidentally a couple of years earlier. A candy lover and experimental cook, Robin had set out to make toffee at first. “A coworker mentioned how much she liked great toffee, so I thought,
I wonder how hard that is?
” Robin says. “I bought a candy thermometer and followed a recipe I found in a cookbook. But it was a disaster—completely inedible!”

However, fate sometimes intervenes in fortuitous ways: On the cookbook’s facing page was a recipe for caramel. Refusing to end her candymaking experiment on a failed note, Robin made a test batch—with delicious results.

“I always liked caramel, but I had no idea how much better it was when
made fresh with real ingredients,” she says. She brought a plateful into work, then watched and waited. “People went crazy for it.”

From that point on, Robin and her coworkers were hooked. When she’d cook a batch at home, the leftovers came with her to the office the next day. She once made a gallon-sized bag as a going-away gift for a friend who was leaving the company, and afterward she passed out copies of the recipe. “I became known as the Caramel Lady,” she says.

From techie to the kitchen. Not a logical step. But she knew that what she had done in the tech world she’d have to do in the candy world—be the best. “I knew that was the only way I could be excited about it.”

So Robin decided to find out if what she was making
was
the best. She started asking friends and family to take part in blind taste tests using samples of her caramels alongside other brands that sold for $15 to $20 a pound. The results: “Seventeen out of 18 adults chose my caramel over the others,” she says. “That was the moment I knew: I’m on to something here!”

Robin decided she wanted to use her family name, Béquet, for the business, so she sent caramel samples to her seventy-six-year-old dad on Long Island to get his permission. Her father, Ray, had been in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II and was now retired from his job as a cargo superintendent for a New York steamship company. After Robin’s mom died of cancer when she was 11, he became a stalwart supporter of his three kids.

“I remember my dad sitting me on his knee and saying, ‘You can be anything you want to be in this world. If you want to be president of the United States, you will be president of the United States.’ I’m not sure every little girl heard that growing up.”

Robin’s dad not only gave her permission to use the family name for her caramels, but announced that he was coming out to Bozeman to help her start her business.

“It was just Dad being Dad,” Robin says, “but it meant so much to me. He knew I was going to be working long hours trying to get it all done by myself. Plus, he wanted to be closer to his granddaughters.”

Nearly every weekday morning that January, there they were: Robin and her dad, in the kitchen stirring up five-pound batches of caramel.

“It turned out my dad was great at it,” Robin says. “We did everything by hand: cutting the caramel into identical squares, weighing and wrapping each piece. At this point, I knew what professional looked like!”

Next, Robin called around to box makers, found one that had leftover boxes in just the dimensions she needed, and bought them for 14 cents each. “I found a way to launch the whole business for under a thousand dollars,” she says.

In the afternoons, Ray would pick up his granddaughters from school, always bringing candy for them and their friends. Robin, in the meantime, began driving to candy shops, espresso bars, and gourmet markets with a cooler packed with caramels in her car trunk. “I’d walk up to a clerk who didn’t look too busy, explain that I made high-end caramels and ask if they’d like to try one.”

And they always did. “Then, while they were eating, I would ask to speak to whoever makes decisions on purchasing new candies. I sold many orders that way.”

Before long, the stores began calling to reorder more caramels. Robin took a deep breath—she knew it was time to make a real investment that would take her business to the next level. That winter, she and her husband took out a second mortgage on their house and rented a former photo repair shop in a strip mall, transforming the space into a new kitchen. In all, they spent nearly $40,000, with the biggest chunk going toward a $27,000 candy-wrapping machine.

“By then I had wrapped more than 10,000 pieces of caramel by hand,” recalls Robin, “so this purchase was my favorite!”

Soon, caramel making became a family affair. After school, Hannah and Rachel would do their homework and then pitch in, pulling on plastic gloves to transfer squares from the cooling table to cookie sheets. When the cooking was done for the day, Grandpa Ray would offer up the long-handled spatula that he used to stir the caramel and ask, “Who wants to lick the stick?”

“A lot of family bonding happened at the shop,” Robin says. “We had fun.”

The first year, however, sales were just $35,000—less than Robin had expected, and not enough to pay herself a salary. “It wasn’t clear whether we were going to make it,” she says. “I remember sitting in the office, feeling my throat tighten with this horrible sense of ‘What
have
I done?’ ”

So to supplement her income, Robin decided to take on a second job, working 40 hours a week as a technology manager for a government-funded company at Montana State University. Using part of her salary, Robin hired someone to help her dad make the caramel during the day—then she spent another 20 hours a week at the shop on nights and weekends.

“It was exhausting,” she admits. “I remember taking the kids to piano lessons and nearly falling asleep in my chair while they were pounding away on the other side of the room.”

With the help of her new income, Robin also financed a trip to New York for the Fancy Food Show, where 25,000 buyers could sample her wares. That gambit paid off. “People would take a sample, walk five steps, bite into it, and then retrace their steps back to our booth.” Food show judges deemed Robin’s caramels one of the top 17 products at the show.

“It was amazing,” she says. “Here I was competing against Ghirardelli, Godiva, Jelly Belly—every big name in the gourmet-food industry—and they picked me as a winner!” Because of her selection as a top product,
Gourmet
Retailer
magazine did a full-page story on her business. “That really helped get us on the map, since we couldn’t afford advertising,” she says.

As sales picked up, Robin quit her job at the university to devote herself full-time to caramels again. By the time the business had reached its five-year anniversary, she was able to pay herself a modest salary for the first time: $2,000—or about a dollar an hour.

Now Robin was on a roll. She began hiring more employees—though her daughters, who worked at the shop during the summer and on Sundays leading up to Christmas, were always on call. “When the girls were in high school, if we were having trouble with the machines and it was time for the other employees to go home for the day, I’d call and say, ‘I don’t know where you are, but we need you,’ ” Robin says. “And they’d coming running, because they knew that meant ‘all hands on deck!’ ”

Today, Robin operates Béquet Confections out of an 8,300-square-foot facility, and she is making plans to double its size. Her caramels can be found in some Whole Foods stores and 900 gourmet markets and natural foods stores across the country, and Robin says annual sales are well over $1 million. “Right now it’s the off-season and we’re making 25,000 caramels a day,” Robin says. “Last year during the holidays we were making more than a ton of caramel a day.”

To fulfill all those orders, Robin employs 24 year-round workers (her dad is now 87 and in an assisted-living facility, and her girls are off at college). “One of my goals was to create jobs here in Bozeman,” she says. “Making a living in Montana is not easy. My proudest day was when we added health insurance coverage for our employees.