Free With Love and Quiches by Susan Axelrod Page B

Marshall rotary oven. It was a reconditioned twenty-four-pan gas oven with six shelves that rotated like a Ferris wheel so that the product was constantly moving through the heat. (Later, we added a second rotary oven with an eighteen-pan capacity.) The installation of our first Middleby Marshall was a major case of taking my company to the next level for me, but it was business as usual for Jimmy the Baker; he was used to real machinery.
    My mentor Marvin Paige introduced me to another equipment supplier—a guy named Jack Harris, who became a mentor to me himself—who sold me a very large storage freezer for the baking side of our new workspace. Shortly after, he sold me another freezer—this one for the packing side—that made the previous one look tiny. It was about eighteen feet by twenty-four feet, almost the size of our first shop! This holding freezer enabled the staff to operate more efficiently by providing them with a place to store longer runs and to stage orders for shipping each morning. We were still delivering directly to our restaurant accounts, which meant we had a lot of very tiny orders to pack daily—two of this, one of that, and one of the other thing. (Yes, we were still selling eaches, not cases. The thought of cases hadn’t yet occurred to me. Still clueless!)
    We bought plenty more racks, more mixers—some holding 180 quarts!—and more pans. Finally, we were ready for a real education in the industry. I had a feeling that this facility would be my proving ground, and I was right.
Love and Quiches Begins to Grow Up
    Our years in Oceanside gave us time to grow both as a company and as an organization. We were rounding out the company with a growing number of support staff as the company began to take on more shape. With Jimmy the Baker to help, our product line was still growing. He was training our young recruits in mixing, baking, and cake decoration (or “deco” in bakery manufacturing parlance).
    At first the front office was run by my friend who had moved with us from the first small shop across from the firehouse. After she announced that she had not intended to be working so hard and was leaving, she was followed by a more experienced head bookkeeper, Mildred, who stayed with us for the rest of our time in Oceanside. She was an old-fashioned bookkeeper who was ardently committed to her manual ledger and had no use for the encroaching wave of computerization. We also hired a customer service rep who called our customers weekly, sometimes daily, for their orders. All of our invoicing was still done by hand, but at least we wrote them out on printed triplicate forms. This was an important baby step for us, one among many others that had begun to add up. We also started to do a bit of almost embarrassingly rudimentary advertising in local newspapers to attract more walk-in retail customers, and we set up a tiny area in the front office as a retail counter.

    Purchasing responsibilities were shared by whoever was around and had some free time in the front office, since this function did not warrant a full-time position as of yet. We were still a fairly small business, but even so, we used quite a few suppliers. Under Jimmy’s tutelage, we always compared prices to keep them competitive. Jimmy the Baker was familiar with all the local distributors, so he compiled the list of needed supplies, and the rest of us pitched in to make sure he got what he wanted.
    We bought another truck; this one was white with raspberry lettering instead of the other way around, because the hot pink on thefirst truck had faded pretty quickly into a really dull color. Naturally another truck meant another driver—actually two because Don finally moved inside full time as the day manager, while Jimmy the Baker ran the night crew.
    We had an endless supply of young people who wanted jobs, all of whom were friends and had grown up together in the neighborhood. They became our drivers, and soon we bought another and