The Sweet Smell of Success

It took a long time to arrive for cookie magnate Lois Ford of Bellows House Bakery. But she has learned a lot along the way

by Karen E. Klein

Twenty years ago, mechanical engineers Lois Ford, 53, and Lou Ciercielli, 52, decided to go into business for themselves. This Valentine's Day, the brownies and cookies the couple bakes at their Bellows House Bakery (www.bellowshouse.com) in Walpole,N.H., will be featured in the Costco (COST) catalog, and they'll begin negotiating with exporters to sell their goodies overseas.

Ford's and Ciercielli's story is proof that while a few entrepreneurs enjoy overnight success, for most the road to prosperity is a long one. Ford spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about perseverance, climbing a steep learning curve, and what she would do differently if she could go back and start over. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Why did you and your husband decide to start your own business?

We both worked for GE (GE), and we realized that in order to move up in the company, we would have to transfer and move around the country. We wanted to stay in New England, and we were interested in the food business. We thought that opening a restaurant would be too risky, so we opened a bed-and-breakfast.

We have an historic home built by Josiah Bellows, where we still live. But we only had four guest rooms, so it was hard to be profitable. We shut down the B&B in 1999 in order to concentrate on the bakery full-time.

How did you go from a B&B to a bakery?

We would serve cookies and snacks in the afternoon and put plates of cookies on the guestroom nightstands every evening. People really liked them, and they started asking us to send them a dozen when they got home, or send a dozen to their friends or relatives.

We were stupid enough to believe it would be a lot easier than it has been, so we incorporated the bakery in 1988. All of these things you think, when you're starting out. I remember I thought that if the bakery didn't take off within two years, I'd give up. Well, I barely had letterhead in two years! Seriously, what was I thinking?

The best thing about the B&B, along with it being the best marketing tool for the bakery, was that it proved to us we could do something on our own, and it introduced us to so many people who were doing different and unique things with their lives. We met people who lived on houseboats, people who had started eclectic travel agencies. It opened our eyes to the fact that we could do something creative and different, too.

What were the early years like, trying to run the B&B and establish the bakery?

I didn't quit my full-time job at GE until 1990, and my husband didn't leave until 1995, so I was losing my mind. For a couple years, we tried to find a private-label manufacturer that we could work with to produce our baked goods. I visited many, many bakeries and finally converged on a bakery with whom we worked for a little over a year, during which time we learned a lot of hard lessons.

Everybody going into business thinks they can take their idea to someone else and let them do the work, but it rarely works that way. It's usually true that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. So after about 18 months, we brought the bakery back to our house, and then in late 1994, we moved to a true commercial location. We knew at that point that we had to either really make a go of it or shut it down.

Was the volume of orders overwhelming from the start?

No, actually the volume of orders was small. It was just that I personally couldn't keep up. I had a couple of employees helping me scoop, mix, and pack, but it was hard to make money after paying those salaries.

What I've realized since is that, although I was an engineer and a project manager at GE, I had never sat down and written out all the details involved in running the business. I didn't know what all the costs were, and what all the tasks were. Once I quantified all that, it was a tremendous turning point for the business.