When Pickles Are Your Life's Calling

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The business imperative led us to make a choice to use packaging that lacked the artisanal aesthetics of the original but was tremendously more efficient. As I had found in my earlier life in TV, there are dozens of choices you make every day between what will be better for the production and what will be better for the budget. It's a constant balancing act.

As my business developed, I continued to find areas that overlapped with my previous career. When you're a director, there's always a certain amount of cajoling and persuasion that goes into making the day's work a success: getting an actress to feel comfortable in a tiny red dress while she says silly promotional copy or rallying the crew to work an extra 30 minutes before lunch because the sunlight is perfect now for the shoot. You learn to pick your battles because those triumphs have to show up on the screen.

In the pickle business, the cajoling has to influence the quality of the product or translate into sales. In the business's early days, I was able to convince friends to show up at the market at 5:30 a.m. in a torrential rainstorm to help set up a tent, to drive 150 miles to get premium okra to the facility in time for production—and more important, to give up their weekends to be my demo people and hand out samples for customers in stores across the country. My friends were tremendously helpful and I made sure that their contributions really counted.

Pickling Instincts

Branding was another area where I was able to draw on my experience in TV to good effect. Our small startup could not afford fancy ad campaigns, so we had to make sure the label would communicate the Rick's Picks brand identity with crystal clarity. I talked with various food packagers and other designers who'd worked with quality brands in different industries.

What I was after was a look that brought together a sense of the time-honored pleasures of home-canning and the contemporary flavor profiles of the pickles. And I wanted something unique and memorable. I ended up hiring Stiletto, a video and print design firm I had worked with at VH1 (VIA). They intuitively got what I was after and rendered it beautifully. Their background made them an unconventional choice, but I just trusted my instinct and acted on it. In a larger sense, it's what guided me to pickles in the first place.

In turning my hobby into a thriving business I was certainly able to draw on existing skills. But I've developed new ones, too. Film and TV projects have a definite rhythm of beginning, middle, and end: writing, shooting, editing. You can dole out your energy against that timeline. Small business, be it selling pickles, sunglasses, or widgets, rolls on continuously. It's never over. There's never a moment that mirrors the closure you get when editing is complete. This sense of open-endedness is fresh and exciting when the business is new, but when things are no longer fresh, that's when you really need to be tough-minded.

The good news is if you make it that far, you've built a sample set of experience and data you can use to make good business decisions. I never thought my life's calling would be about cucumbers, label machines, and 10-kilo boxes of all-natural wasabi powder, but I know I'm right where I'm supposed to be.

More journals are available in our ongoing Entrepreneur's Journal series.

As told to Stacy Perman