Chapter 8

All of us were standing around, watching the bagging machine infusing gas into the little plastic steak piece packets. Our first production run had been for forty thousand pieces. I'd argued for making a much smaller run, just to make sure everything was set up properly, and that no mistakes were made. Jim and J.C. overruled me. Both men thought my nervousness was funny.

It had been decided that I'd get the first twenty thousand pieces, and the remainder would be loaded onto the new delivery van and trucked over to Milwaukie, for Earle to place with one of his local grocery chains. I was really looking forward to that happening.

I'd noticed, early on, that customers on my direct sales route who had purchased my products at retail from one of my commercial outlets, were anxious to get in on what they now realized was a half priced bargain. As a consequence of this, my direct sales volume kept increasing, and that seemed not to have had any negative effects on the sales volume at my commercial accounts. I found this to be a pleasant happenstance.

I had to eat seven pieces of the new steak piece product to satisfy myself that there were no differences in the taste. I was very much relieved to find out that there wasn't any difference, in the flavor, the bite, or the texture. I was counting on the steak pieces to be my premiere product when I moved down to Los Angeles and started really opening up new commercial accounts.

I was happy, and I also noticed that Jim and J.C. had been waiting with slightly nervous expressions on their faces while I satisfied myself that the product had lost nothing in the location transfer. When they saw me smiling in satisfaction, they too broke out in wide grins.

"I told you there was nothing to worry about, Ralph. As long as the meat and the cure are the same, it doesn't matter much about the smoker or the drying rooms. You want to wait around here while we get the jerky jarred up for you too?"

"I need to get back up to the storage locker as soon as possible. I've got a lot of angry accounts screaming for this product. I'll probably sell all of this in the next three days. Can you deliver the jerky to me tomorrow? I'm renting the locker right next to my old one, because we're not going to have room for everything when we get caught up on standing inventory."

"Earle has been calling me everyday, wanting to know when his product will get there. He told me you've been going great guns with his new cross cut?"

"So far so good. He's only delivered to me forty five thousand pieces so far, but the product has been well received thus far. Half my stores are buying two hundred at a time of it now, and my direct sales and all my resale's have been great too. I still think your steak pieces will still out sell his, by about two to one. Nancy and I are thinking about hiring two new girls to help us out with route servicing. I've been helping her out when she needs it, but that means I haven't had time to go out to find new outlet's. I think Nancy wants to keep me from ever getting to two hundred accounts. She doesn't want us to move down to Los Angeles."

I hadn't gone into a lot of detail with Jim about the difficulty Nancy and I were having over my unshakeable commitment to moving down to Los Angeles in order to really grow the business. As far as I was concerned, that was the Mecca of beef jerky consumption. There was a lot of competition down there as well, but I now had two products that no one down there had anything that could compete with them. Pricing in Los Angeles was different too. Retailers paid eighteen dollars for a forty count jar of jerky, and twelve dollars for a thirty count canister of pepperoni. I knew I'd be able to get a lot of business by just staying with my current pricing structure.

Jim and I had looked into freight costs from PDX to LAX, and, while higher, it wasn't an insurmountable obstacle for us. I told Jim that I'd pay him for the difference in freight charges. For the steak pieces it only came to less than one third of a cent per piece. Shipping jerky and pepperoni was somewhat higher, because of the extra weight, but still easily manageable for me at the price I was buying the product from Jim for.

We hired these two girls that Nancy had known since childhood. Callie had been in a management training position for a fast food company, until she decided to quit, after breaking her engagement with her district supervisor. She was twenty three years old, about average height, and was a slim brunette with a nice sized chest. Her father was a dentist, and she had the most perfect teeth I'd ever seen on a regular person. I didn't really see that much of her, because I had Nancy do all the hiring and training. Nancy told me that Callie was a natural for this kind of work because she had a friendly personality, and was good with people. She could also add and subtract, and, as I quickly found out, she had good penmanship too. Her sales books were always neat and easy to read and understand.

The other girl was also one of her cousins, on her mother's side of the family. Victoria, was twenty five years old, and was the daughter of Nancy's Uncle George, the uncle who owned the tire store over in Portland. She had a somewhat plain looking face, short cut light brown hair, and, at five foot ten, was tall, as well as exceptionally thin. She had been an athlete in school, and from what Nancy had hinted at to me, found other girls more exciting than she did boys. I ended up spending more time with Victoria for two reasons. Victoria seemed to make Nancy nervous, and Victoria surprised all of us by having a definite aptitude for sales work. She told us she really didn't really want to be a "delivery drone", and wanted the chance to go out and create some sales herself.

I handled Victoria's training while Nancy went out searching for a third new employee. During the first two or three days of training, it became obvious to me that Victoria didn't really need any sales pointers from me. She quickly learned the product pricing, and had no problem handling any sales situations I put her in.

She already had everything she needed except for a vehicle of her own to go out and sell all by herself. She rode around in her little Vespa motor scooter, but that wasn't a vehicle she could use for high volume smoked meat sales. I was impressed enough by her potential to go out and buy her a well used truck for two thousand dollars. I made a deal with her for paying me back by telling her that I would take one dollar off of what she owed me for every jar of jerky, or fifty pieces of steak pieces or honeyed jerky that she sold. Honeyed jerky was the name we were calling Earle's new product. I said I'd take fifty cents off for each canister of pepperoni she sold. In addition, I paid her three dollars commission for selling fifty pieces of the individually wrapped products, two dollars for every jerky jar, and one fifty per pepperoni canister.

The first day she was out selling by herself, despite my explicit instructions to her not to do it, she opened up three new commercial accounts. I wanted to fire her for doing that, but Nancy convinced me not to. In addition to opening three new outlets, Victoria had made over a hundred dollars in commissions, while also paying off the first thirty eight dollars of her two thousand dollar truck loan balance. It really bothered me that she'd deliberately set out to do something that I'd expressly warned her I didn't want her doing.

"She did it because she thought you didn't believe she could open up new accounts. She wanted to prove to you that you were wrong. Vickie likes to test other people's limits anyway. Don't ever give her a dare, because she doesn't refuse dares at all. She bit the leg off a big live bull frog once, just because Art Oldham dared her to do it. She was nine years old."

"I don't like her thinking she can just do whatever she feels like doing. She's supposed to do only what we tell her she can, no more, and no less."

"You told me yourself that you hated the idea of not leaving anyone here to sell product to your direct sales customers when we go down south, and now we do have someone. Besides, with the three she opened today, and the five new ones you got, we passed the one seventy mark for commercial accounts. You were the one who told me it is a lot easier to get a route service driver than it was to get someone who could go out and create their own sales. Leave her alone for a few more weeks, and we'll see how she does out on the direct sales routes. You don't have to like everything about her. She is honest, and she works hard too."

Lydia, a woman in her late twenties was the next hire we made. Lydia was the older sister of Callie's best friend, and she really needed a job. She was a single mom, with two young children, and had been laid off when the floral shop she was managing went out of business suddenly, due to a divorce of the owners. Like she had with Callie, Nancy trained her, and took care of all her employment paperwork.

It took me another two weeks before we reached our goal of having two hundred commercial accounts. I was now ready to head south to Los Angeles.

By the time we managed to open our two hundredth commercial account, Nancy and I were grossing fifty thousand dollars a week, just from that commercial account part of the business. We were paying our two route delivery people four hundred a week each, for what usually amounted to five or six hours of work each day, Monday through Friday. We'd also gone out and purchased two brand new delivery vans, on the strongly worded advice of our new accountant, another one of Nancy's relatives, one of her many real aunts.