Edible magazines grew from desire for more from life

Edible Ojai was the first in what is now a family of 70 magazines

Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian didn’t set out to launch a national chain of popular locavore magazines.

In fact, even as they began to think they were on to something, multiple people told Ryder and Topalian launching print publications in the 21st century was a bad idea. But they barreled forward anyway, creating an organization of 70 magazines that received the James Beard Foundation’s first “Publication of the Year” award this spring.

Ryder and Topalian had a successful graphic design firm doing work like the Ojai, Calif. visitors’ guide and tourism websites.

But about 10 years ago, Ryder’s father died suddenly of a heart attack at 61 and the loss pushed her to re-evaluate her life priorities.

“My dad was my hero,” Ryder said. “It got me thinking, “What’s really important here? We’re running out of time.”

Carole Topalian and Tracey Ryder, founders of Edible Ojai, which grew into the 70-magazine Edible Communities

Ryder recently spoke to me by phone about the Edible Communities. While Topalian is still very much involved with guiding Edible into its next phase as well as doing all of the food and location photography for the cookbooks the company is producing, she is  semi-retired from day-to-day operations so she sat out the interview.

Ryder grew up in a farming family, and recalled that about the time her father died, she had recently read “Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods” and “This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader,” so starting a local magazine called Edible Ojai focusing on local food felt like a good fit.

The 16-page, one-color quarterly magazine was a hit. In a town of 8,000 people, they were printing 10,000 copies and running out within a few weeks. Ryder feels that although the food magazine niche was already crowded, many of those focused on cooking in or dining out, not on local food production, distribution and politics, in addition to what tastes good.

Their success got Ryder and Topalian thinking maybe they’d start five or six other similar magazines up and down the California coast. They reached out for help developing a licensing model and got a cool response, including being told that 85 percent of media ventures fail.

Folio magazine wrote in 2008:

The magazine sparked a nice local response but business consultants and even other publishers didn’t grasp the model. “They basically patted us on the head and said ‘You’re doing a great job with Ojai but we can’t help you,’” says Ryder.

Tracey Ryder

“I tend to be a little stubborn so if someone tells me I can’t do something, I pretty much want to do it to prove I can,” Ryder said. “It always felt like the right thing at the right time.”

Then in 2004, Saveur magazine included Edible Ojai on its Saveur 100, a list of food trends and trend setters to watch  — the exposure prompted more than 400 people to call saying they wanted something similar in their communities.

The pair quickly altered their concept to a licensing model, slightly different from a franchise, because they believed local ownership would lead to more authentic quality, essential for magazines writing about small-scale local food and drink. They worked up a concept like a niche Associated Press, where individual publications are independently owned but share resources via the cooperative.

The New York Times wrote in 2007:

… tailoring a single prototype to multiple cities or regions is an increasingly popular publishing format, adopted by magazines focused on weddings, society and restaurant menus.

“What publishers have discovered is that franchising a title that succeeds in one place is much simpler than producing a national magazine,” said Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, who studies magazine publishing.

After about four months of preparations, Ryder and Topalian loaded up their dog into their car for the cross-country drive to Cape Cod to help launch the first licensed addition to the Edible group, published by Doug and Dianne Langeland.

By the end of 2006, Edible Communities was turning a profit. In 2007, it hit $1 million in revenue. Edible is adding about 10 new magazines a year, with about 70 operating in North America and a total readership of about 15 million, most picking up the magazine for free but some getting it delivered by mail with paid subscriptions. They were profiled by Inc. magazine in 2010.

“In the beginning, we never dreamed it would become our primary source of income,” Ryder said.

While they are passionate about promoting local food, Ryder and Topalian are equally committed to profitability. They wanted to demonstrate that being idealistic and financially successful are not mutually exclusive.

They developed an extensive screening process to vet potential new owners, which includes the potential publisher talking to other magazine managers and Edible doing a background check and making sure the candidate has the stomach to be an entrepreneur.

Most of the licensees fall into two camps, Ryder said — either young couples looking for a business opportunity that fits with raising children or early retirees in search of a second career. Only two have any prior media experience, which Ryder called a plus because they don’t have to unlearn any old ways, just how Edible does things.

Carole Topalian

Licensees pay $95,000 — $35,000 up front, $60,000 over the next five years — then 5 percent of gross revenue for the life of the magazine. Edible provides not just a full-color magazine template but also the design work for the first year, along with a website, email addresses and training in how to sell ads, cultivate freelancers and blog.

Headquarters sells a small number of national ads, but most magazines sell about 90 percent of their ads locally. The publications are required to maintain a balance of at least 51 percent editorial content, and they manage their own content, ads, printing and distribution.

Ryder said what’s surprised her most is how well the group works together, which she surmises is in part because of the emotional and moral connection people have with food. Publishers all mail each other a copy of their magazines, and participate in an active email listserv to share ideas and help each other solve problems.

“We encourage them to borrow enthusiastically from each other,” Ryder said. “It’s a really self correcting and self governing community.”

While they continue to add magazines, Ryder and Topalian have other ideas for expanding the Edible empire, including:

• Their first book, “Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods,” which features stories from around the country and Topalian’s photos
• Four different podcasts, covering food politics and locavore food issues. Ryder fantasizes about doing a show herself, but has her hands full running Edible
• Four regional books with a similar premise, bringing the locavore feel of Edible to hard copy with recipes and stories in Brooklyn, Seattle, Dallas and the Twin Cities in Minnesota
• Expanding their online and mobile content, with the hopes of aggregating content from across the publications to make it easier for readers to see trends beyond their own communities

Edible has just three full-time employees at its office: Tracey Ryder, Carole Topalian and their administrative assistant, Kelly Day

Even as they explore these possibilities, Edible has just three full-time employees at headquarters: Ryder, Topalian and their administrative assistant, Kelly Day.

“We’ve been very fortunate to have found a balance between running a robust company and maintaining a focus on a high quality of life,” Ryder said.

Today the pair spend their time on corporate projects, not the Ojai magazine, which is an adjustment.

“Carole and I still get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from Edible and we both feel it has exceeded every expectation we could have ever dreamed in terms of success and number of magazines after 10 years, especially since the core values of the company are still very much in place,” Ryder  shared in a follow-up email. “I do miss writing very much. These days, all I write are emails    … and I used to be a good writer. My writing skill feels like a muscle I’ve let atrophy. Hopefully, in the near future, there will be opportunities for me to write again!”

And since losing her father prompted Ryder’s career evaluation and soul searching, what would he think of what she’s done?

“My dad would love Edible and he would be very proud of the work we’re doing for sure,” Ryder emailed. “We don’t still have working farmers in our family but my cousin, Barbara Hidde Salie, has moved her family back to the Adirondacks where we all grew up and is finding ways to enjoy local food. She shops locally, cooks seasonally and keeps chickens.”

Ryder and Topalian receive their James Beard award:

Dotmine day planners sprang from goal of better work life

Sarah Nicoli and Lisa Edwards of Dotmine Day Planners

When I met Sarah Nicoli and Lisa Edwards, I expected them to tell me they’d founded a company selling day planners because they’re busy moms and they simply had to have a better way to keep their lives scheduled.

I was wrong.

True, they are busy moms running their own business, Dotmine Day Planners. But the inspiration didn’t come from frantically managing their families and shouting “There’s got to be a better way!”

Instead, it came from an intentional focus on wanting their work lives to be enjoyable. We talked about their career evolution over a long, wonderful conversation over brunch and margarita recently, when the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based duo were in NYC for the National Stationery Show.

Colleen and Lisa enjoy round #2 of brunch margaritas at Dos Caminos

Nicoli had been a sales manager at Procter & Gamble, Edwards had been in sales at Jockey, and they’d both grown weary of corporate life.

“The birth of our business started with the birth of our friendship, which began with the birth of our first children,” Edwards recalled. That was about a decade ago. Lisa now has four kids, Sarah three.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work any more,” Nicoli said. “I had a great career. It just didn’t work for my family life.”

Edwards recalled taking her oldest to day care for one day. She decided that day it wasn’t going to work and resolved to figure out another plan.

The pair began discussing what would work — a career that allowed them the flexibility to make their families a priority, to work with people they liked, doing something they enjoyed.

This Dotmine planner is called the Renee, inspired by soprano Renee Fleming. It's a 17-month leather-bound planner.

The idea of starting a business together came before the business idea itself, which came from their husbands, who first suggested making planners. After Nicoli and Edwards did some research and considered their individual strengths, they landed on the right mix for Dotmine.

Now Nicoli and Edwards both have home offices where they work most of the time, but they also schedule one formal day per week together. Over the years, this has sometimes meant  planning around their kids’ naps or other priorities. So, they’ve continually adapted by meeting in each other’s houses and with business partners at local restaurants, cafes and other public spaces.

They’ve split their duties so Edwards focuses on the finances and operations, Nicoli leads on customer relations and marketing. Part of the reason their partnership works is a respect for each other’s responsibilities.

A decade in, they’re responding to a major change for the business — their biggest customer has been Ann Arbor-based Borders, but even before the book chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Dotmine began to emphasize selling direct to consumers on their website and building visibility via social media.

“I don’t want to say it’s do or die,” Edwards said. “It’s do different or die.”

Sarah told Constance Crump late last year:

“Our presence had made a huge difference with fans on Facebook. Lisa and I also make sure we call or email every customer inquiry personally. They so appreciate hearing from us. They feel like they’re part of the family.”

I especially like the Dotmine road map, which includes space for what you want to accomplish and how you're going to get there. It's a higher-level view of a planner than just dentist appointments and birthday parties.

Another part of their growth has been to use focus groups. As part of a recent new product launch, they invited 20 women to Nicoli’s living room for breakfast and asked them to bring whatever organization system they use to manage their own and their families’ lives. Not surprisingly, most of the women were the social secretaries and home managers for their entire households. They brought wall calendars, Franklin planners, day books, smartphones and more.

Dotmine borrowed from what they saw to make sure features like quarterly master calendars and tear-out to-do lists met their customers’ needs.

As they say on their website:

Like all great businesses, we continue to evolve, inspired by your comments that even in this high-tech world, you want space to record your life happenings, take notes, and put a pen on a piece of paper to cross things off your-to-do list. While there’s no such thing as a 100% perfect planner, we’re confident you’ll find a dotmine product that makes life good, every day.

And how do the owners of a planner company organize their own lives? Does all this talk about weekly priorities and shared information put them on a Martha Stewart level of perfection?

“We, too, try to juggle it all but sometimes a ball gets dropped. The reality is, we’re just like anybody else,” Nicoli said.

Would you like to try one of Dotmine’s planners?

Sarah and Lisa are offering two free planners as prizes for the best comments from Newvine Growing readers. Share your biggest time management challenge or your best time management tip and you could win a Dotmine planner. Deadline to enter is June 19, 2011.

Blogging disclosure: I am rarely unbiased about anything I write about. Think of Newvine Growing as my version of Oprah’s favorite things. In the case of Dotmine, Sarah and Lisa treated me to lunch after a mutual friend of ours introduced us by email. I make no representation of impartiality — I would love for them to be wildly successful — but I have also not used their product so this post is not intended as an endorsement.

Guy Laliberté driving Cirque du Soleil to $1 billion empire

Timed to Cirque du Soleil bringing its new show, Zarkana, to New York this summer, the New York Times offers up a lengthy profile of its creative force, who is described as a “very nice bulldozer.”

With the caveat “analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him,” writer Jason Zinoman sits in on a rehearsal with Guy Laliberté and profiles the impresario who has built a modern circus empire:

The truth is, circus is Mr. Laliberté’s third passion. His second is travel. His first is business. Within the Cirque empire he has been the major fund-raiser since the beginning; in 1983 he landed a $1.3 million grant from the provincial Quebec government to present a show as part of the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada. At the time his company was a modest nonprofit that divvied up beers at the end of rehearsal in a rented gym. But his original presentation included a five-year plan with multiple shows. He was 24.

Cirque had its breakthrough in Los Angeles in 1987. “Cirque Réinventé,” staged by Guy Caron, was new for American audiences familiar with Ringling Brothers. It was dramatic, emotional, occasionally slow and highly theatrical. Disney made an offer to buy the company. So did Columbia Pictures. Mr. Laliberté turned them both down, insisting on creative control.

Mr. Caron left the company following a dispute over money, and eventually returned, but Cirque’s history is riddled with power struggles that end with one survivor. “I survived three putsches,” Mr. Laliberté says with his usual swagger.

It’s a fascinating peek into a creative mind that clearly understands the financials of what he’s doing. Click here to read the full story.

The Good, the Bad and the Freelancer (via Lorena’s Epiphany)

I got my first job when I was 16, and before that, I’d been babysitting since middle school.

Working for other people is something I’ve had decades of practice doing. Working for myself is new.

So I was glad to stumble onto Lorena’s Epiphany, a blog by a Lebanese freelancer with good pointers on how to be successfully self employed.

Her tips include:

1- It’s gonna take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to stand completely on your own. You’ll probably be working a lot more than you ever did at any agency and nothing is ever certain by ways of work. You may have a great line-up of clients to work with for 2 months and then a dry spell for a few months after.

3- Plan the legalities. Register yourself and learn a few things about the accounting side of things. Many times I wear different hats – designer, client manager, accountant and PR. You’ve got to be ready to follow-up with clients consistently, be open about discussing rates and then ensuring your projects get done in time. It helps to learn the most you can about everything so that once you start hiring employees, you already know what to expect. No one likes a boss that’s a dummy.

4- Being a freelancer doesn’t mean working in your PJs. Work in your PJs if you must a day or two during the week, but don’t make it a habit. I recommend having a space outside your bedroom to freelance from. That helps you take your freelancing more seriously and get dressed in the morning – it’s very psychological. Getting dressed + a space to work + lots of coffee = Mental readiness for the tasks at hand.

5- Get ready to talk money. It was never easy for me to confront clients about what I should get paid. Even harder when you’re a woman. Many times I settled for lower rates than the project merited just to ensure I was getting paid that month. It’s not pretty nor do I support that, but when you’re starting out, you have to make a few sacrifices. Also, NEVER EVER start a project without a signed agreement and ask for a deposit upfront (even if it’s as little as say $200). Clients will take you and your work more seriously if they’ve already invested in you.

7- Cold calling is chilly, but something that leads to bigger things. The best projects I’ve worked on where projects where I called people and said “hey, I love what you’re doing and would love to find a way to collaborate” Then comes the selling. You’ve gotta be ready to highlight your skills and achievement and have an idea in mind why the hell you’re calling them. One of my friends took this idea to a whole other level when she wanted to get more web design projects. She started the Digital Cleaning Lady – a fun approach to reviewing websites and then providing them suggestions for their layouts. More often than not, the suggestions were well taken and that would open doors for her working with them.

If you’d like to read more of Lorena’s pointers on self employment, check out the link to her blog below.

Whenever someone asks what I do and I explain that I’m a freelance designer working out of my own studio, I tend to get the same reaction “You’re so lucky! I wish I could work on my own too.” But becoming a freelancer wasn’t something I really planned in advance. It sorta chose me. Yes, being a freelancer certainly has its perks – I won’t lie. I get to wake up at 9 or 10am on most days and head to the studio at my own leisure. You also get the fr … Read More

via Lorena’s Epiphany

Equal pay for equal work. Or: why do ovaries make me worth less?

According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, Equal Pay Day was April 12 — which means women had to work three and a half months into 2011 to earn what men earned in 2010, because we earn about 77 percent of what men do.

We talked a lot about the gender pay gap in one of my favorite business school classes, compensation and motivation. The conversation included some of the ways women contribute to the gap including:

• the careers we choose — the stereotype of women as nurses and teachers comes in part from our tendency to perform caring professions, which are historically lower paid. Are they lower paid because women predominantly did them? That’s a separate debate. But if high paying careers like finance, engineering and medicine are dominated by men, that will obviously skew the numbers.
• raising children — women are more likely to take time off when they have children, and still shoulder more of the parenting responsibility, so if you prioritize your kids over your career, that might slow your rise on the corporate ladder, along with the raises that come with it.
• our reluctance to ask for raises — this one wasn’t as obvious to me, but apparently men are more comfortable demanding more money when they take a new job and asking for raises once they’re there. So if a man and a woman are hired in with the same resume to do the same job, he might drive a harder bargain at the start and push for bigger increases along the way, leading to a bigger and bigger gap as time goes by.

So if we want to earn more, there are some pieces of that puzzle we control.

That doesn’t make the inequity less frustrating.

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Equal Pay Day, Mariko Chang, author of “Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can Be Done About It,” wrote:

While it’s true that men tend to enter higher-paying fields than women, that difference alone does not explain the gender wage gap. Even when they work in the same occupations, men earn more. For instance, the median weekly salary for full-time male pharmacists was $1,954 in 2009, compared to $1,475 for female pharmacists, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. And men even earn more than women in traditionally female-dominated occupations. For example, full-time female registered nurses earned an average of $1,035 per week, whereas men earned $1,090 — or an extra $2,860 per year.

If different occupations don’t explain the pay gap, might it be caused by women’s decisions to work less outside the home in order to care for their children? Researchers have found that even when differences in work experience, education, age, and occupation are held constant, women continue to earn less. In fact, research by Columbia University social work professor Jane Waldfogel reveals that mothers receive a 4 percent wage penalty for the first child and a 12 percent penalty for each additional child. In contrast, University of Washington economists Shelly Lundberg and Elaina Rose find that men’s wages increase 9 percent with the birth of their first child. One possible explanations sociologists offer is that, upon parenthood, men are perceived as more committed to their work and women less.

Christine Jacobs, an operations executive who managed power plants for NRG Energy and Exelon and Pharmaceutical plants in the Americas for the former Rhone Poulenc Rorer while raising three children as a single mother, blogs at leading-women.com. She wrote a piece for Forbes about women’s pay that said in part:

we must talk about women’s equality as unfinished business.

We repeat the refrains of “Who would have thought that in the year 2011, there would still only be 15 women CEOs in the Fortune 500? Who would have thought that only 15% of American corporate board positions would be held by women? Who would have thought that only 17% of the US Congress would be women?” And we are frustrated.

I earned my MBA in part from a desire to improve my earning potential, but I did not follow some of my classmates to Wall Street where pay can be stratospheric. So I’m far better off than my mother was, with her high school diploma and a working life that included waiting tables, bartending, bookkeeping and tax preparation, but not as well off as I could be. I suppose that’s still doing my part to push the percentages.

What do you think are the causes of the wage gap and what could help close it?

Apparently I was learning marriage concepts in business school?

Click here for a five-minute video about how to apply economic theory to your marriage.

I’m late to discover it, but I was recently reading a different WSJ.com story when I found “The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much” on the list of most popular articles.

On Valentine’s Day, Paula Szuchman, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the new book “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes,” blogged five tips to a better marriage that apply economic theory to relationships.

Szuchman introduces her five tips by saying:

One of the first things people say when they hear about the book is something to the effect of, “Isn’t that kind of unromantic?” Well, yeah. But what’s romantic about dishes, laundry, diapers, bills, mortgages, in-laws, TiVo, company picnics, circular arguments, BlackBerries, hamsters, PTA meetings, and all the million other little things that go into a marriage and detract from the actual romance between two people who once loved each other so much they decided to keep each other company for the rest of their lives?

All that stuff is the business side of marriage, and to navigate it successfully, you don’t need chocolate hearts. You need sound reasoning. You need to be practical and efficient. You need to allocate your scarce resources wisely and make smart trade-offs, so that at the end of the day, you can enjoy the company of that person you promised to have and to hold until death (death!) do you part.

Since we arrived in New Orleans for a wedding, and I am a girl who cries at weddings, we spent several days steeped in that special kind of romance. Who could argue that the spark of your first kiss to the first I love you to the moment you agree to wed aren’t magic?

But one of my first editors, Maria Stuart, taught me that romance is not a dozen roses once a year, it’s your beloved holding your hair while you throw up. So why couldn’t it be romantic to cooperate better on the roommate part of being married so you have more time and energy for enjoying each other?

As you probably gathered from the headline of her article, Szuchman advocates having sex more, talking less, and not worrying so much about 50-50 division of housework. She also says you should lose weight and scheme — or as she says, think strategically.

You can read the whole piece here. Then come on back and let me know if you agree with her theories?

More about marriage:

• 10 marriage lessons learned in 10 years of marriage
• Marriage tips from 10 years of marriage, part II

 

Goin’ to New Orleans: sinking in to a city we love

Me and our super-fabulous hostess, the bride who's helping make the plan come together. Here we're toasting in her kitchen -- and we will most certainly toast her numerous times in the weeks to come. Thank you, Cara!

It all started with the idea that we might have to skip Jazz Fest this year.

While I’m getting my business off the ground, our cash flow is reduced, so we’re looking at all the expenses we can possibly trim to live within our means. We love going to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every spring, but it’s optional. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge we’d at least be in NOLA in March for our friends’ wedding.

But then I started putting the pieces together for an exciting little scheme:

• My new part-time role allows me to work from home, so I can do that work from anywhere there’s Internet and cell service
• Likewise, the work I’m doing for my business can be done anywhere
• John’s self employed so he can paint and do graphic design anywhere
• The bride at the wedding we’re going to in March is moving in with her groom after the wedding, leaving her cute house in the Garden District, where we’ve often stayed during Jazz Fest

We began to investigate the pieces so we could stay in New Orleans from the wedding through Jazz Fest in early May, and every sign pointed to it being a good idea:

• The bride agreed to sublet her NOLA house to us at a rate that’s less than our NYC rent, so assuming we’re able to sublet our place, we come out ahead in living expenses
• Changing our flights home from late March to early May would have cost more than $500 — but one-way tickets from New Orleans to New York in May were cheap.
• John has picked up several new design gigs in the last few weeks, which will help keep his cash flow up while we’re away
• I was worried I’d have to put piano lessons on hold — but my teacher here is on Skype and I lined up a place to practice in New Orleans. Maybe you’ve heard of Preservation Hall? I’m helping them with some marketing work around their 50th anniversary, and their marketing director said I can practice there during the day.

John made a painting that's a vision of my life -- see the music and the Mardi Gras beads? This plan is getting more of both into our lives.

Before you post a comment that says “I’m so jealous, I wish I could do that,” let me share with you an excellent blog post from Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Out. It’s headlined How to Jailbreak Your Life So You Can Live the Way You WANT and it arrived in my email this week, just as we committed to New Orleans.

It’s a long post but well worth reading if you wish you could do what we’re doing. Here are a couple of highlights:

• Is your job to be somewhere in a physical place, five out of seven days a week? If you love your job, I mean truly love your job, love the people with whom you work, love your office, love your commute, then hey, you know what? RESPECT. You’ve got it. Enjoy it, baby. You’re done with this blog post, and I give you mad, mad props. For real.
• We all need to work. We all need to make money. With the exception of trust fund babies, we all gotta find a way to make some cash and live our lives. Some people just choose to do it a different way than others. Some of us choose to work for a living, and some people choose to incorporate work into living. For the past 16 years, I’ve worked harder than almost every person I know, yet I’ve never felt like I’ve worked a day in my life.
• I will never, ever begrudge someone their fear. If what you’re doing works for you, that’s fine, but if you’re jealous, then you got a problem. See, being happy and being jealous don’t mesh. So it usually comes down to you being angry about your fear. But here’s the thing: Fear keeps us healthy. Fear keeps us alive. It’s what got us through the age of mountain lions and other big-ass animals that could have us for tea. But here’s the thing – Fear is built-in because we used to have no other options. Wanted to eat? You had to face your fear and kill something. Back in the age of the stone, Dean and Deluca didn’t exist. Fear now exists primarily to hold us back.

Are you motivated? Are you thinking of how you could ask your boss if you could work from home three weeks out of four so you could go live in your dream locale? Or contemplating how you might live someplace with a low cost of living so you can launch that business you’ve been fantasizing about?

If you aren’t now, maybe you will be in a few weeks when we start filing dispatches from New Orleans.

When I first started blogging, back in late 2005, it was to chronicle a one-month stint in NYC. John and I sublet an apartment on the upper east side to test drive living in New York, and I wanted to share the experience with friends back home. So consider this round two of sharing a cool life experience with you.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Robert Fogarty reinvents himself by helping transform New Orleans

Robert Fogarty believes in raising money for hurricane evacuation enough that he'd paint himself gold and ask for donations in New Orleans' French Quarter.

Robert Fogarty didn’t set out to become a New Orleans community activist.

He just knew New York wasn’t for him.

Fogarty moved to NYC after graduating from University of Oregon with a degree in journalism and communications in 2005. About a year later, he began searching for an exit strategy.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m cut out for this place,’” Fogarty recalled. “I though, ‘If super for-profit New York isn’t working, then what’s different?”

He found his solution in Americorps, because unlike the Peace Corps, the uptake process was only a few weeks and he got to not only choose what region he wanted to go to domestically, he got to apply to specific jobs.

Fogarty was looking at opportunities in late 2006 and early 2007, just as New Orleans was recovering from the devastation of hurricane Katrina. That timing helped lead him to a one-year commitment in the mayor’s office doing public advocacy and coordinating volunteers.

Happy Mardi Gras from Dear New Orleans

And so it was that a native of the Pacific Northwest, not exactly hurricane territory, two years out of college became the city’s point person for volunteers when hurricane Gustav hit in 2008. He worked on the plan to get people without cars out of the city.

“I was over my head helping the city evacuate for Gustav,” Fogarty recalled. But “going through that was an invaluable experience.”

Drew Brees showing off that SuperBowl ring

Invaluable in part because it led to the Evacuteer, an all-volunteer not-for-profit Fogarty founded. From their website:

Evacuteer.org recruits, trains, and manages evacuation volunteers (evacuteers) who assist with New Orleans’ public evacuation option called the City Assisted Evacuation Plan (CAEP). The CAEP activates when a mandatory evacuation is called in the city of New Orleans and is designed to move 25,000-30,000 New Orleanians without transportation. The City has successfully implemented the plan once, in advance of Hurricane Gustav (Sept. 2008), when 18,000 residents utilized the CAEP.  Evacuteer.org is an organization created out of lessons learned from that experience. Through an existing agreement with the City of New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (NOHSEP), the City of New Orleans has authorized evacuteer.org to manage all volunteers who work within the CAEP at 17 neighborhood pick-up points, at the Union Passenger Terminal (hereafter UPT) for evacuee processing, and at City Hall to assist with hotline operation.

Here's a group answering the Dear New Orleans question, "What inspires you?"

To date, the organization has 27 non-profit, faith based and neighborhood based partner organizations and has over 700 “evacuteers” ready to assist should a mandatory evacuation be called.

Long term projections for the organization include a nationwide proof of concept in New Orleans to export to other American cities. The organization also develops academic, peer reviewed emergency preparedness research, new and social media emergency preparedness campaigns and its current flagship initiative is working with the City of New Orleans to commission public art to double as hurricane evacuation pick up point markers.

New Orleans piano legend Dr. John has a message for BP

While important, an all-volunteer effort doesn’t pay the bills. So about a year ago, Fogarty founded Dear New Orleans, a photography business that donates 10 percent of its revenue to the Evacuteer, helping to demonstrate its financial viability to potential donors.

Dear New Orleans encourages easy expression: you write something on your hands with a marker, and Fogarty takes your picture. Sometimes the messages have a theme — the BP oil spill or the anniversary of Katrina,  for example, or new year’s resolutions or “the moment I knew.” Other times it’s whatever the portrait subject wants to say.

“This really simple idea is really accessible to people,” Fogarty said. He’s done photos of Drew Brees, Susan Sarandon, Mos Def, Dr. John and James Carville, among many others.

Fogarty is just 27, and he says he used to fall back on youth as a crutch. Not any more. He realizes he’s growing something powerful, he’s part of the New Orleans entrepreneur community and providing an important service to the city.

“If you have value and provide something of value, your age doesn’t matter,” he said via cell phone, just before ducking into a networking event in his new hometown.

Dear New Orleans did a school event and asked kids for their messages on the theme "I will ..."

It all comes full circle this week — Robert Fogarty will be in New York March 2 and 3 with Dear New Orleans.

d.b.a., a bar with locations in New Orleans, Manhattan and Brooklyn, will host photo shoots. You can attend either event to help support Dear New Orleans, Evacuteer and Fogarty.

• d.b.a. Manhattan (6-10, Wednesday night)– 41 First Avenue , between 2nd and 3rd Streets in the East Village
• d.b.a. Brooklyn (6-10, Thursday night)  — 113 N. 7th St.,near Berry, in Williamsburg

A social innovation conference in New Orleans the week of Jazz Fest called Second Line is underwriting a portion of the expenses to make photos only $10 per person.

Here's Robert with his own Dear New Orleans message, courtesy of Bob Dylan.

 

Here's my Dear New Orleans portrait from South by Southwest 2010

Moving into semi-entrepreneurship, following my life plan

I have always been a girl with a plan.

I lived life like a chess game, thinking through how my current move will ripple through three moves ahead:

• Getting good grades in high school would help me get into college
• Doing internships during college would help me land a job after graduation
• Taking a job at a small newspaper would give me the experience to move to a bigger paper

After getting my MBA and moving to New York, I purposely stopped looking forward. I had worked long and hard to get here and I wanted to savor the present.

Then last summer, I started to get restless. For me to work hard, I need to know what it’s leading to — it’s my life’s version of the return on investment. I began to pray for guidance and clarity around where I should be heading.

When you ask a question like that, be prepared to get an answer.

Mine came when I learned my full-time job would be eliminated.

That reminded me that I did have a plan. When I applied to business school, my intent was to work for three to five years at a corporate job for the real-life experience, then launch my own business. And this spring marks five years for me in NYC.

While I have been drawn to entrepreneurship, the uncertainty scared me. I crave security and stability, even though working as founding editor of a start-up business journal gave me a taste of the excitement of building something from scratch.

Recognizing this internal conflict, I built a plan with the best of both worlds. I call it entrepreneur light.

After learning I was to be laid off, I submitted a proposal to instead create a new part-time position with benefits. I demonstrated how I would generate enough new revenue to make the job pay for itself, and the bosses said yes.

That reassured the stability-craving part of me as the entrepreneur part rejoiced at the opportunity ahead.

Now I am in aggressive business-building mode, making connections, establishing myself in the social media conversation, polishing my business plan.

I am focusing on marketing communications for farmers and farmers markets. It is an idea I have been researching and shaping for a year or more, inspired in part by Four-Hour Workweek’s approach to selling expertise and role models like WebbMedia and Ariel Publicity, two marketing consulting firms run by smart, enthusiastic entrepreneur women.

I will offer a guide to marketing communications with loads of farm-related examples, as well as a getting started package that creates all the necessary accounts like Facebook, Twitter and HootSuite. I am learning Blog Talk Radio so I can do audio lessons, making it easier for time-strapped, overwhelmed clients to get pointers on the go, and plan to supplement with printed resources.

So this is what was knocking around my head last month when I was writing posts like “Reflecting on forks in the road, on being conservative or taking a leap.” I am excited and terrified, and happy to have a plan for the future again.

This is my website in progress, as proposed by my phenomenal designer Lauri Karisola.

Ari Weinzweig, lapsed anarchist, shares the business philosophies of food mecca Zingerman’s

Ari Weinzweig

Ari Weinzweig’s latest book landed on Inc. magazine’s best books for business owners of 2010.

Maybe a little surprising when you see the title: “A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business.” Maybe not so surprising because the lapsed anarchist has helped build a business with an impressive national profile — the New York Times called it a corner deli with international appeal and Oprah scored their brisket sandwich an 11 on a scale of 1 to 5.

Weinzweig, co-founder of the iconic Ann Arbor deli Zingerman’s, is quick to point out the difference between anarchy and anarchism. While he was a history student at University of Michigan in the 1970s, he read the teachings of anarchists who advocated respect for the individual and freedom from the restrictions of government or external authority, not bomb throwing and chaos.

That philosophy of freedom spoke to Weinzweig’s suspicion of business — until he co-founded a business with Paul Saginaw, and learned that structure and leadership can actually help people succeed, rather than just oppressing them.

“Paul taught me many years ago that business is really a tool, that you can do good things or you can do bad things. I used to think you could only do bad things.”

Thus was borne the Lapsed Anarchist series. The newly launched Zingerman’s Press is selling the first collection of Weinzweig’s musings on the philosophy behind their $35 million nationally known food mecca, and he’s working on getting the second one out in late 2011.

I have many lovely food memories around Zingerman’s — it’s the place I learned to love olives, it’s where John and I bought the goodies for a party we threw our first New Year’s Eve together. But when I sat down with Weinzweig recently, we talked more about his approach to leadership than about the full-flavored food that’s at the heart of their business.

Zingerman’s as a sustainable family farm

My mouth waters just seeing a picture of the oddly shaped Zingerman's Deli.

One of my favorite ideas in “Building a Great Business” is Weinzweig’s comparison of Zingerman’s to a small, sustainable family farm, as opposed to a corporate factory farm.

Where a factory farm is about maximizing output, ensuring consistency and cost controls to get to short-term returns, Zingerman’s aims for something more holistic and good for the ecosystem.

In their quest for full-flavored food you can’t get everywhere else, they use high-quality ingredients and lab0r-intensive methods that mean high production costs. They manage in an inclusive way, having 17  Zingerman’s Community of Businesses managing partners engage in the process, surely not the fastest or most efficient way to operate. They do considerable care and feeding of the community, including founding and running the nonprofit Food Gatherers.

Weinzweig feels strongly this is not some hippie feel-good approach, but simply the most logical path to success.

“It has to benefit everyone or it doesn’t work,” he said, comparing the old way of doing business to strip mining your human resources. If employees have to unionize to get what they want, and you get locked into battle with them, who wins? he asked.

“I feel like we’re just going with nature and they’re going against nature,” he said of the corporate farms of the business world.

Bo Burlingham’s edgy, insightful 2003 Inc. magazine article calling Zingerman’s the coolest small business in America spoke to the business’s culture:

It was at (a ZingTrain) seminar that Todd Wickstrom first experienced Zingerman’s. At the time, Wickstrom owned two franchised bakeries in Chicago that he wanted to improve, and he thought the session might give him new ideas. It did. On his return to Chicago, he sent Weinzweig an E-mail message: “The seminar made me realize you can live your ideals in the food business. The bad news is, I can’t do it here.” Weinzweig invited him to become a managing partner of the deli, and Wickstrom jumped at the opportunity. He sold his bakeries and moved his family to Ann Arbor. “I would have come in as a dishwasher to be in this environment,” he says.

The environment is, indeed, ZCoB’s most striking feature, combining a strong sense of community, a deep belief in people, a fascination with management and business, and a passion for great food and great service. It’s an entrepreneurial environment in which good ideas become real businesses, and employees with good ideas have an opportunity to become owners. More to the point, it’s an environment that many can’t resist. “Working here has never felt like a job to me,” says Wickstrom. “I’m constantly learning about managing, about food, and about myself.”

Inclusive management style

Though Weinzweig’s lapsed anarchist approach does advocate for strong leadership and clearly documented structures, he is also passionate about openness and inclusion of their 500 employees. This ranges from an Open Book Finance style that teaches staffers about company financials, as well as including staff in setting company vision and copping to making mistakes as the boss.

“In the moment, it’s not always easy,” Weinzweig concedes about this openness with employees. “It can be awkward and uncomfortable.”

But while there’s short-term benefit to just telling people what to do, the long-term payoff of helping employees understand their part in an overall strategy is that they do a better job. They can see where they’re headed and adjust course if necessary. They care because they see why it matters.

Weinzweig tells the story in “Building a Great Business” of hurrying to the deli in the Northeast blackout of 2003. He found the staff so in control of a situation they never could have anticipated or trained for that he left for a run.

Zingerman’s Press

Ari's book isn't actually a trapezoid. This is a sketch in the distinctive style of Zingerman's marvelous marketing materials.

Restaurants are legendary for the grueling demands they place on owners, but Weinzweig is disciplined about making time for various activities he values, from working the floor at Zingerman’s Roadhouse filling water glasses to running to writing.

Zingerman’s Press, a small self-publishing business, is selling Weinzweig’s book Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon, in addition to Building a Great Business – first in a series on the Zingerman’s business philosophy.

Weinzweig said much as ZingTrain, their $700,000 year training business, has helped them hone and refine their approach to employee training, writing has sharpened his business approach.

“For me, it’s hugely helpful because it helps me get clear on what I’m thinking,” he said. Plus, coming from a family of academics, it lets him research new ideas and teach those ideas both internally and externally.

He’s hard at work on the next volume: “Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 2: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being a Good Leader.”

2020 vision

Weinzweig, true to his anarchist roots, is openly skeptical of business buzz words. He writes, “Twenty years ago or so I was pretty solidly certain that mission statements were little more than a serious waste of time and one more dumb ‘flavor of the day’ thing for businesses to do instead of taking care of their real work.”

Today he’s been won over to the value of crafting clear, compelling mission, vision and planning documents — all of them serving different purposes. From ZingTrain’s description of Zingerman’s Annual Planning:

Planning—and even more importantly following the plan—has become such a normal part of what we do that I can’t imagine trying to guide an organization without it. Yet based on conversations with hundreds of specialty food managers and owners, my guess is that many businesses do not create an annual plan.

Basically, the plan is how we map out the future we want to strive for in the coming year. We begin planning activities, not with the present-day reality, but with a vision of a better tomorrow. This process is sometimes referred to as “positive futuring, or “beginning with the end in mind.

The mission statement should answer four questions:

1. What do we do?
2. Why do we do it?
3. Who are we that are doing it?
4. Who are we doing it for?

A vision is something related but different. It’s a clear, compelling view of what the organization will look like some distance in the future.

Some 20 years ago, Paul asked Ari what his vision for their business was 10 or 15 years down the road. That question prompted them to spend a year or two writing “Zingerman’s 2009,” which declares their commitment to high-quality food and to creating career opportunities through growth, among other principles. An MSN article described it as the way Zingerman’s overcame its midlife crisis.

What do you do when your company has reached the point of a “midlife crisis”? Sales are flat. Profitability is dipping. Growth is limited. Employees seem to just punch in and punch out. Arguments persist within the leadership team. And you’re paralyzed by risk avoidance. This is exactly what happened to Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Zingerman’s Delicatessen in the early 1990s.
“At some point in the life cycle of a business,” said Zingerman’s co-founder Paul Saginaw, “you come to the realization that fundamental change is needed. The first order of business is coming up with a vision of where you’re going to go.”

A vision helps them get clarity both to where you’re going and where you aren’t going.

Their new and improved 2020 vision, for example, calls for growing the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses to include 12-18 unique businesses, all in Ann Arbor. “We are strongly rooted in the local terroir,” it states, affirming Zingerman’s decision not to expand or franchise outside of the community.

From an Open Forum article by Ed Levine:

You might expect someone with a proven business model like Weinzweig’s to take it elsewhere, expanding across the country or the world. But Zingerman’s, for him, is synonymous with Ann Arbor. “We chose to create what we call the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses”—a collection of Zingerman’s businesses, each with its own food specialty, all in Ann Arbor. “We like the community, we don’t like replication,” Weinzweig says. “Businesses lose their soul and become uninteresting.”

Also in the vision are commitments to radically better food and service, sharing the growth and financial opportunity across the organization and having “improved our fun factor by at least 380 percent since 2007.”

“Who wants to do anything if it’s not fun?” Weinzweig said matter of factly. “Fun is not an accident. It’s an intentional choice,” he said, but quickly distinguishing between a workplace with positive energy versus forced silly games, a la Hawaiian shirt day in Office Space.  Weinzweig told NPR:

Mr. WEINZWEIG: Fun is in our guiding principles and it’s in the 2020 Vision. Life is short, and even when times are hard, which they have been and I’m sure will be again, you know, it’s important to enjoy the people and the food and the customers and everything that we get to be around them. I mean, I feel very fortunate to be around such a great group of people and to work with such great products.

Because Weinzweig and Saginaw both enjoy what they’re doing, the vision doesn’t call for them phasing out of the business after three decades at the helm. Weinzweig said neither wants to retire. They plan to die in office, he said.

“We’ve spent 30 years making a place we want to go to work,” he said. “There’s nothing we can’t do now.”

Blogging disclosure: I am rarely unbiased about anything I write about. Think of Newvine Growing as my version of Oprah’s favorite things. In the case of Zingerman’s, we love the place and have been long-time customers. I bought my own copy of Ari’s book to review, though he did treat me to a tea during our interview.