My Home Business Story

How Breadroots Began

This is a fairly long passage from my book “My Home Business Story” available on Amazon.com

How Bread became part of our life

Since we made sandwiches (in our Deli in Bewdley)obtaining bread became an issue. For a while we got mass market bread delivered but that did not work out because we did not have the volume required. One of our customers mentioned a Stickling’s bakery in Peterborough that sold a really good all natural 7 grain bread . I made an appointment and Hans Stickling came to visit us. Basically he said we could sell his bread but that we would have to pick it up which we did. It was really great heavy duty bread though it was a bit too filling for a regular type sub sandwich. Some of our customers loved it but we still had a problem selling it all until our customers suggested that we freeze it and that they would buy it frozen. So I would pick fresh bread up and sell it fresh that day and before I closed the store all the bread went into the freezer. This system worked so well I was later able to recommend it confidently to my health food stores as a practical way to merchandise our bread without losing money by throwing out moldy bread.

Stickling’s Bakery also sold their products at the Peterborough Farmers Market and I could see first hand how well the bread sold to the public. Stickling’s stall at the market was always crowded and they always sold out by 12 noon. My sausage booth was close by so I could see how well they were doing which was a whole lot better than me. I knew how well my deli customers liked their product and I could see the crowds around them at the market so I knew there was a good market for the product. I got to know Michael at the Bakery and at the market and one day I mentioned something about selling their bread to stores. He was open to it but it took several months before we both acted on that original idea.
Initially, I really had no idea of where I could sell the bread other than go to some of the same folks I had gone to sell my sausages. One week in April 1993, I ordered samples and went to visit 6 or 7 stores that I though might be interested in the product line. All of the them but one said they would try the product. It was a promising start I thought but for anyone who really knew the bread business it would have been pathetic. I didn’t know it was pathetic so I just plugged along delivering to these stores every Thursday afternoon like clockwork. I kind of liked getting out and talking to people—the bread was sort of incidental. I also liked that I did not have to bake it and best of all I did not have to clean up as I did when I made sausages. I soon realized that this little delivery business was doing better than my sausage business with far less work on my part. I just needed a whole lot more customers to make it really workable.

As you start a new business you should learn something from the last one. This is simply part of the educational process called the “school of hard knocks”. When I started the sausage business I spent money on all kinds of things like signage, business cards, crests for shirts, and, of course, the major equipment I needed like a walk in cooler, a display cooler, and a cash register. When I started the bread business I spent no money, in large part, because I did not have any left. I had spent tons of money in the sausage business with no financial return at all and I had no appraisal or real estate work . The only income we had was the monthly rent from the library and Pat’s part time job at the school board. I realized that I now had the income that I had read about in the “back to the land” books which preached about the merits of subsistence living. I had achieved the income level but I never got the farm. Watch what you read and think about because you just might get it.
I had briefly considered getting a job but I felt I was unemployable. I was 48 years old and had been self employed for about 15 years so I had got out of the habit of looking for a job or even thinking about one. The thought of someone else telling me what to do, when and how much never appealed to me. The only job that I felt I wanted was teaching and that was more because I felt compelled to do it as in a vocation. It could be the primary reason why I am writing this book so I can teach others about becoming an entrepreneur.
As the title suggests, entrepreneurs are created, they are not born. The concept first appears in your mind and then you act on it. It’s an inside job. Unfortunately, entrepreneur ship is not taught or even talked about in the school system. The educational system is all geared towards achieving the “American Dream” by getting a good job so you are set for life. That may have been true in the 50’s or 60’s but it’s definitely not true any more. Jobs are no longer long term where you work for one company for 30 years and retire in bliss. People with jobs should view themselves as independent contractors with certain skill sets that are marketable to business. Keeping these skills current in a fast changing business environment that we live in could be one of the greatest challenges. In many ways, employees may want to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset to govern their careers. This means you take charge of your future not your boss.

As a result of the sausage business, I now knew that spending money to make money had limitations. You need a product and customers who will buy it first. Once that cash flow emerges then you can add money to make it better and bigger. You need a fire burning first then you can throw gasoline on it to make it better. Instead of buying a van, I used the small family VW Fox station wagon as a delivery vehicle even though I envied seniors in their mini vans. The Fox held about $600 worth of bread which was just enough for one of my routes. If I was short on room I would simply take the bread out of the boxes and stuff it in any nook I could find. I realized much later that this small vehicle put an automatic lid on my business because I had no room for more customers or new products but that didn’t matter much at the start. At the start everything was done on a cash basis so I would collect all the money, deposit it and pay Sticklings one week later. After about five years of doing this, I had only one accounts receivable and that was my only supermarket, Davis Valu Mart in Port Hope. It was simple to figure out how much money I made back then.

At the beginning I had no firm idea of who were my bread customers. My first thoughts were that they were specialty food owner operated stores like delis, cheese shops, butcher shops and green grocers. The best places during the first few years were roadside markets that catered to the cottage crowd on the weekends. These types of stores kept me in business for a while but every winter I sales went down because these stores would all close up. I also discovered that these specialty stores did not sell as much bread as I thought they should. It took a while before I realized I was trying to sell all natural bread to stores that sold products full of preservatives (delis) and fat free bread to stores that sold nothing but cheese. The market I had targeted was basically the wrong market but I had to learn this over a couple of years. Sales were ok but not great.

One store that did a good year round business was Joannes Health and Beauty Products in Peterborough. This was a health food store that liked the Stickling’s Bakery because the products were all natural. (the organic market had really started yet). I was by no means a health nut and looked at health food stores as a little strange. My mother used to shop at one of these stores in Toronto and I always viewed her as as a little weird for shopping there. It was with this attitude that I started selling to Joannes. I found the women who worked there very friendly and caring and not weird at all so my image of health food stores changed a little. I even started reading some of the promotional material as I was delivering so I became more educated. As I got to know the staff better I would as l questions. They became my best source of information about food products. I found out about trans fats in the mid 90’s (that did not become mainstream until about 05), wheat free breads, gluten free breads and all kinds of other natural health information. I would often ask them what products they wanted that they could not get.

Stickling’s encouraged me to find more suppliers for some unknown reason because I was fairly happy just selling their great product line. At the same time health food stores would give me ideas for new products, often suggesting new bakeries to me. Sometimes this worked out and most often it didn’t. One of the first new bakeries I dealt with was Natures Own Bakery in Barrie, Ontario, with had spelt and kamut sourdough breads as well as gluten free products. The one big problem for me at the time was the time and distance required to pick these products up. Up until now, I picked up Stickling’s Bread on the morning of a route then continued on to do the route. For Natures Own, I had to drive to Barrie the night before the pick up the bread. This took 4 hours there and back and about 400 km. No wonder I had given this many second thoughts over the first years. The basic problem is it often takes time for a product line to catch on so you have to be prepared to do the work to allow it to happen. Of course, sometimes no matter what you do nothing happens but you don’t know this up front.

I learned over time that my job was to find products that might interest my customers even if I may not like them for what ever reason. It was then up to the customers to decide if they wanted them not just me. About 7 years ago there was a line of mini bite size chocolate muffins that I considered but did not carry because the first ingredient was sugar. Health food stores abhor sugar especially in it’s refined white form as in this product. Knowing this I avoided carrying the product until it was almost forced on me so I relented. Within just a few weeks we started selling this product like crazy totally mystifying me. From that time on I decided not to make decisions for my stores but rather let them decide what I should carry via their weekly order volume.

I was able to interest some of the local health food stores in these two bakeries (Sticklings and Natures Own) so the business grew a little. In the beginning I focused on Peterborough not knowing how poor a market that was for my products. This only became evident years later. Using a combination of health food, bulk food, butchers shops, green grocers and summer time roadside markets, I expanded the Peterborough route to two days a week on Tuesday and Fridays. On Fridays, in the summer, my route I would become part of the vacation country get way from the city crowd. In some strange perverse way, I felt like I was on my holidays too. Maybe I felt good just because my increased sales were good for my business.

I started another route on Wednesdays that focused on Lindsay, Port Perry, Whitby, Ajax Oshawa and Bowmanville. I had one store called Shisko’s in Whitby that was my best store for years. I remember telling Dan and Flo Shisko that if I had ten stores like them I would have a great business. Shisko’s sold a lot of organic produce, meats, dairy before the supermarkets got into the act so they did very well. Unfortunately, they decided to pack in the business when the supermarkets got into the organic business. Luckily for me I had moved on by then. I had another store just outside of Port Perry, called Reids, who did the same thing. I considered both of these families smart business people and couldn’t really figure out why they did not stay in and compete rather than give up and quit. Perhaps the market just was not big enough for all these players at that time.
For about a year I had a route that went to Kingston serving 4 stores there and one each in Trenton, Belleville and Napanee. I was not much of a route with only one good store in Kingston called Tara. Tara is a virtual food institution in Kingston being a favourite destination for many of the university students at Queens. Delivering to the store once, I can still see this young student telling her mother with great pride “and this is where I shop”. While I fully appreciated Tara, I remember thinking how far this route was and how poor the sales were relative to the time and distance. As if to highlite this dilemma there was one store called Foodsmith that was located in Perth, Ontario that requested delivery but I turned them down because they were too far away being an hour north of Kingston. Little did I know that this one store could make a huge difference.
It was while delivering to Tara that I first met Steve from Stephano’s Bakery. Steve and his family live way up north near Barry’s Bay where they have a fully equipped bakery making several kinds of granola. My wife and I went to his house to meet him and his wife Annette to discuss our business together. We sat on their back deck and were entertained by numerous humming birds all afternoon. I had never seen as many before or since that day. It was sort of magical.

One Saturday afternoon, I was trying to take of the storm window from my office window when the step ladder I was standing on buckled under me and I fell on my paved driveway and broke my heel bone as it slammed down on the hard surface. I couldn’t quite believe it because I did not fall far but it was enough. Luckily my son Dylan was at home as well as my neighbour so I made it to the hospital to have xrays and a cast put on.
I was firmly convinced that I was going to still deliver bread, cast and all. I had to. Pat had a full time job and both my kids were in school so I had no help there. I had broken my left heal so I was still able to drive an automatic but even though I wanted to I could not carry a box of bread and manage crutches at the same time. Some of you probably think I should have got a new walking cast. Apparently they work for broken ankles not broken heals.
My sister Marigold volunteered to help out even though she lived in Oakville which is about 2 hours west of here. I broke my heal sometime in late May or early June so Marigold came to help me 3 times a week for 4 or 5 weeks until school was out. This was a huge time commitment for her as well as a monetary thing because gas was not free. Also we never paid her because I had no money to do that either. Who else would do that for you but a close family family member? Nobody. Marigold also bailed me out in Europe when I was a university student after I missed my charter flight due to an airport strike leaving me alone and penniless in London. Thanks to an Irish Priest and an Irish Immigrant society in London I managed to get a room and some meals while waiting for my sister to arrange a new ticket for me so I could fly home. The bread business continued to survive in the summer when Pat and the kids looked after the delivery of the bread. Until then, I also got help from my niece Genevieve Kenny who lived in Toronto and my nephew Paul O’Hara from Oakville. It was a time to be very thankful for family help or the fledgling bread business would have probably died. It was certainly an option at the time. It wasn’t much of a business as Marigold would politely say but it’s all I had. If I had been a negative thinker I would have just closed for 6 weeks and probably lost the business but I looked for possibilities and found one that worked. The worst time for me was when I was waiting for Marigold at a gas station in Port Hope to save her some driving time. I realized my right rear tire was flat so I had to change it. Changing a tire requires a certain about of leverage which is difficult to apply when one of your legs is in a cast. It was painful, sweaty, teary eyed experience that I didn’t need. It didn’t do much good to my cast either—now it was all soft and dirty. If I had been in a quitting mode that would have been the time to do it.

Space in my VW Fox was a bit of an issue because I was not 100% sure everything would fit in the car when I ordered it so when Stickling’s told me they were selling their old VW Vanagon I decided to buy it. Now VW may make some great cars but this wasn’t one of them. I believe Consumers Report said that it had very good seats so you should be very comfortable while waiting for the tow truck. I spent a lot of money on repairs on this European contraption and only one mechanic in the whole area knew anything about it. One time the spindly gear shift stick broke off in my hand just above the floor leaving an inch long greasy fitting. The only way I could change gears was by applying my vice grips to this fitting. It got me to the garage where they said it would be at least a week before they could get a new gear shift stick in. So I spent the week changing gears with my vice grips, starting the truck in second, sometimes third gear and burning out my clutch. So in my desire to stay in business by keeping the truck moving I had again preserved the business but this time it cost me a lot more money to fix the problem.

Latter I would burn out the clutch again but this time it was because the truck was permanently stuck in 4 wheel drive because a part was installed backwards. The only time 4 wheel drive really paid off was when I was making a delivery in a snow storm and a highway off ramp had not been plowed. The Vanagon plowed through about a foot of snow no problem and for that I was thankful because I was in no mood to be stuck on that busy off ramp. I had enough of the Vanagon and sold it to a guy who collected strange vehicles like this and rented them to the movie industry.

Before I sold the Vanagon, I tried selling a new pita bread from Mediterranean Bakery in Toronto. It ended up being a costly but good education. My health food stores weren’t very interested in the pita because it had preservatives in it so I was really marketing this product to a new type of store for me, the supermarket. Mediterranean wanted me to cover some stores in Eastern Ontario and I was happy to do it at first because it sounded good. One store in Port Perry did really well but I had another one in Picton that was pathetic. I was able to do the Port Perry store easily but the Picton one required hours of driving to make no money. In fact, it cost me money because the supermarkets had a guaranteed sale from Mediterranean except the money came out of my pocket. I would drive to Picton over long boring, barren stretches of real estate some of which was used as airports landing strips to pick up almost all the bread I had left there last week and replace it with fresh bread for another week. To top it off Jim Livingstone, the Mediterranean manager paid me in Pita Puffs which I then had to go out and sell to make my real money. What a deal that was.

The pita was also packed on stackable plastic bread trays which you often see around supermarkets. On most vans, especially cube vans, trays are not an issue but for the Vanogon, they were a problem because the engine was at the rear so most of the cargo space was above my waste which forced me to lifting these trays above my head. After a few weeks my body started to hurt especially my shoulders because I had developed tendonitis. I lived with it for a while but there was one night in Bewdley that when I got home I plonked my self down on the bed and couldn’t get up because I had no strength in my arms to do it. Lying there, I really started wondering how I was ever going to deliver the bread the next day. It seemed like a truly hopeless case that even I couldn’t overcome. I mean I was already wearing not one but two arm slings while delivering bread. I was quite the sight—I think I was limping too. Pat suggested we go to Port Hope hospital which we did. An hour after taking the drugs I was like brand new again. I could hardly believe it. I soon after dropped the pita line and stayed away from plastic trays and guaranteed sales for a long time afterwards.

I finally did sell the Vanagon and went for a mid size Oldsmobile station wagon which worked
out well for a number of years. Even though it was a used car, it did not require a lot of repairs when I owned it and routine maintenance was inexpensive. I drove that car until it was ready to go to the wreckers and apparently they fixed it up and put it on the road again. (A good car is hard to keep down.) After a few years sales picked up a little so I was forced to look at bigger vehicles. I did not have a lot of money so I wasn’t in the market for anything too expensive. Luckily for me one of my stores was selling its Chevrolet Beaumont full sized van. I would see this van every time I made a delivery to the Main Ingredient in Peterborough and I knew the owner, Doug Fraser well. Doug was the kind of person who looks after a vehicle so even though this truck was about 15 years with over 300,000 km on it I knew it was in relatively good shape so I bought it. It was fortunate that I did because the very first delivery day that I used it I really needed it because the bread sales went up. Instantly, I also had room for more bakeries and more stores. The downside to this van was the cost of gas. Since this van was an ’86 it used a carburator so gasoline consumption increased form 20 miles per gallon down to 10 mile per gallon which effectively doubled my fuel overhead. So I knew I had to increase sales to offset this. On the upside, this van was required few repairs and actually gave me a false impression of truck maintenance costs which would later haunt me.

The Bread Business Gets A Real Name

Thoughts of expansion filled my mind but first I wanted to take care of a somewhat overdue detail—the name of my business. Every since the beginning I had used my own name in the bread business. All cheques and all invoices were in my personal name because I did not want to spend any money on non essentials so I didn’t. Now the time had come to come up with a good name. All I knew is that I wanted the word “bread” in the name. One Saturday mid day, I was in the hall just outside my home office and Dylan, my son, was sitting at the computer. I started rattling off names with bread in them, one of the names was “bread routes”. Dylan said “bread routes” was good but change the spelling of “routes” to “roots”. As soon as he said this, I said “that’s it” and so it’s been “Bread Roots” ever since. Since we deal with Spelt and Kamut breads which are ancient grains, I thought the word “roots” was very descriptive of what we do. The fact that it was also a play on word with “routes” also appealed to me. The name change seem to give me energy and I am sure helped our business image as we set out to grow the business.

In another personal development, we sold our property in Bewdly and moved to Cobourg. This was far more than simply a household move, it was a mental leap. Living in Bewdly had been a constant downer for me over the past few years. Even though the property was listed for sale there wasn’t any interest. For the first time in my real estate experience, I was stuck in a house I couldn’t sell because it was too much real esate for the neighbourhood. It wasn’t a good feeling. In order to make it easier to sell so I got a severance to split the property in two in order to make it easier to sell. At the beginning of January in 1995, I decided that I wanted to be moved into a house in Cobourg by the end of August just in time for the kids to go back to school. I fire my old real estate agent and got a new one and it worked. By early summer we had sold the house portion and moved into a the cramped second floor of an old farmhouse close to Rice Lake. I would have lived in a tent for months if I had to in order to sell that house. A few weeks later, we were able to purchase our present house exactly in the area that we wanted to be. It was a much better area for many reasons and I have been eternally grateful to God for letting us have this house. It was like a new beginning: I had a new van, a new house and a new attitude towards Bread Roots.

Bread Roots Growth

The tremendous growth that Bread Roots was about to embark on was fuelled by 2 bakeries at the beginning. By far the more important one was Grainfields followed by Pita Break. Pat and I had past by Grainfields Bakery many times late Tuesday night as we picked up Vel snacks from K.L. Foods on our way home from our usual Amway meeting in Toronto. Several times we though about stopping in at Grainfields just to see what was going on and finally one night we did drop in. Henry and Sally the owners were busy baking but talked to me as they worked. It was a long interesting conversation about allergy breads as Henry called them. This was the first time I had ever seen Grainfields bread and we left with samples. I was impressed with the bread but really did not know how well it would sell with my customers. After talking to Henry about terms and wholesale pricing we offered the bread for sale but it did not sell well at all at first. In fact, there was only one store that gave me any hope at all and that was Suntree Foods in Port Hope. Now Suntree Foods never sold a lot of bread back then or even now for that matter but the lady that worked there back then,///////, really like the product and sold it to her customers. I couldn’t understand why this store could sell 20 loaves of bread when other stores could only sell 2 or 3. My constant thought was that if Suntree could sell 20 loaves, there had to be a good market for Grainfields. I told the Suntree story to all my other stores and I also got Henry to reduce his wholesale price. (to my amazement). Sales were still slow but growing for the first six months and I often thought of dropping the line because not only did I have to pick up the bread but I had to sort the bread into boxes by store myself. By this time, I had already worked about 10 hours so I was tired and sorting bread is not really a fun activity. Henry said that once I got to a $1,000 per week Grainfields would sort the bread. When he first said that that goal looked impossible but we made it a reality faster that Henry even expected. How we did this is explained by one word “Ottawa”.

I had long known that Ottawa was a good market because Andrew who also distributed for Sticklings back then was often loaded his rusty old truck for Ottawa when I was picking up my measly load in my station wagon. I always felt inferior for good reason. Andrew was and is a natural born salesman and even though his truck was rusty it was full of bread. My daughter Erin also decided to go to Carleton University in Ottawa so we all had a to make a few trips up there. Suddenly, Ottawa became much more meaningful to me and it didn’t seem so far any more.

Armed with a new bakeries, I decided to check out the Ottawa market. I started by doing a complete search on Google for health food stores in the Ottawa area. I got the names and addresses of about 30 stores, plotted them on a map and went to visit them. The purpose of this visit was to find the stores that best suited our product lines. It always surprises me a little to go into a store that calls itself a health food store and find no real food but with shelves full of plastic bottles containing supplements. I know these are important but they are just supposed to supplement a good diet of real food. Anybody who picks a name that includes “heath food” should know that. I call non food stores that call themselves health stores, “pill” stores with the worst being those places that have stacks of those huge tins of whey protein for muscle builders. When Pat and I inspected the stores in Ottawa we were looking for stores with organic fruit and vegetables, organic dairy products, organic meats, and gluten free products. We then checked out what kinds of breads they were selling. Once we found a good store, I found out who ordered the bread and spent a little time asking questions to see if they were open to what we had to offer. The response was fairly positive so we planned Stage 2.

Stage 2 was all about samples and price sheets and setting up a time schedule of the stores we were going to visit. With my car loaded with samples Pat and I headed for Ottawa. It was a very encouraging trip and we knew that we would have a route in Ottawa but we did not know how good it was going to be. You never do until you start getting orders, delivering the bread and getting the reorders. This all takes time and often you lose money upfront before a route starts to pay for itself. We decided that Wednesday was a good day to deliver bread to Ottawa so we set off at about 6 am with about $2,000 worth of bread which was good for the first order. The delivery went well and I was back by 9 pm . This was the first of many 15-16 hour days that were to become the norm for me over the next few years. Over the next few months we gradually increased the sales by a couple of hundred until the 1986 Chev was bursting. The biggest problem were the Pita trays. Bread trays are made for trucks with big boxes on the back, not for vans. I knew the pita business was going to get bigger so I started looking for a cube van to buy. Luckily I was thinking used which kept the monthly payments down but I should have made the lease term for 3 years not 5 years. In retrospect, I should have purchased the truck but I didn’t know enough back then. If you want to read more about truck economics see my article in the Appendix. Almost as soon as I got the my “new” Ford E350 diesel Cube van I needed it for more product. My first impression when looking in the back was that “this is empty, I need to find more products” Right then, I realized I had been holding back my business with the station wagon without really knowing it. After a while of increased sales, we decided to go 2 times a week to Ottawa, Tuesday and Fridays and we still do that now.

Michael Walters from Stickling Bakery wanted me to investigate the Montreal Market and somewhat reluctantly I did. Montreal is a French speaking city and I did not speak French. I had dropped French in Grade 10 because I was only getting about 65% and because I felt kind of awkward trying to speak a foreign language. I had heard that it was really hard to break into this market because of the language. I kind of knew that was true because I had tried to get into a few stores in the Hull-Gatinuea area of Quebec across the river from Ottawa without any luck. It took a couple of years but now we have 3 good stores there. Anyway, Michael from Sticklings, pushed me more and more and Pat and I went. We did the same thing I did in Ottawa and then went to survey the stores. First, Montreal is a lot more imposing than Ottawa. It’s bigger, it’s got way more traffic, much more congestion of traffic and of course the vast majority of people spoke only French. After doing my initial survey I had no idea how were even going to get around Montreal because of the one way streets, the language and the traffic. It was very intimating. It frequently amazed me of how well the route worked once I set it up. Except for the very last leg of the route when our truck headed north, my drivers managed to stay away from the bottle neck traffic patterns which characterize both Montreal and Toronto. When we were leaving the city after our first visit, I remember saying to Pat that the pita would probably sell there. It did, big time but unfortunately the other breads did not.

Because of the language issues, ordering was a little dicey but I had just got incredibly lucky to find a new secretary called Nicki who could speak French. I knew Nicki because she was a long time worker at the gas station across the road from Sticklings. She was obviously over qualified for that job but she did it while going to school. As luck would have it I asked her if she knew anyone who spoke French and she said “yes, me”. What’s more she was available to work for me and did a great job of getting orders, typing and organizing the office. Nicki was the one who started me on payroll deductions which I had avoided up until then. She knew how so she started doing it manually. After she left, I was able to do it until Sylvia came along. If it wasn’t for Nicki I don’t think we could have got the first orders form Montreal. She made the stores feel comfortable and was able to help them get the products they wanted. After a while, I found that many of these same people who had met on the first go around actually knew how to speak English, they just didn’t want to. I think it’s because we made efforts to accommodate the language via Nicki and our bilingual order sheet that we developed that the people who worked in the stores then started accommodating us by speaking English. It worked out so well that when Nicki left we were able to survive just speaking English although I would have liked to have had a bilingual office.

As I indicated at the beginning of this Montreal piece, it was inspired by Michael at Sticklings at first but kept going by Pita. After we got back form our first sample trip to Montreal, we phones the stores and got orders for all our breads. We faxed our orders to Sticklings and before we knew it they telephones to say they had got another distributor. Now Michael knew I was down there with his bread because I had got samples for Montreal for him. But he waited until I had visited all the stores to introduce the bread until he pulled the rug. This was not the first time or the last I would be screwed by Michael from Sticklings Bakery.
Like all my routes I started making the deliveries in my 1986 Chev van. Because of the pita trays it was a nightmare but I got through it. We had about 15 odd stores stores to start and this grew to about 30 as time went on. As I had hoped and expected I needed a second cube van for Montreal so I got a 16 ft Ford 450 diesel cube van. There was so much pita sold in Montreal that I had to get an even bigger truck, this time a 20 ft Cab over chassis Hino. This was our first real truck since cube vans start out as a van and then you add a box. Montreal was about 350 km further than Ottawa on a round trip which added about 3 hours to the day. This meant that the driver could not go to Montreal from Cobourg and come back the same day so the driver always stayed overnight in Montreal. This added about $5,000 per year on the annual cost of maintaining the route which was ok when we sold a lot of pita. While we did sell other baked goods in Montreal, products that sold well everywhere in Ontario did not sell that well in Montreal. For example, when we first started we sold about $600 of Grainfields bread and after about 4 years of delivering to Montreal we were still selling $600 per trip. There were a few other significant differences between the Montreal route and all other routes. All other routes have anchor stores that do really well and sell lots of our products. In Montreal, there were no anchor stores—they all hugged the minimum order line as if that was good business for them. Sourdough breads did not sell in Montreal as well as yeasted breads. This was the reverse of Ontario for us. In Ontario, we did not sell that much pita but in Montreal it was our main product by far.

Pita Break, our pita supplier, always had its eyes on Montreal as a possible market for their product. That was ok with me because Montreal and the Province of Quebec is a big place so there was room for more distributors. Bread Roots has survived selling pita in Ottawa when Pita Break went there a few years after we started there so I expected we would survive them going to Montreal. Unfortunately someone at Pita Break hungered after our sales in Montreal and went in to our customers and undercut us as well as offering 2x a week delivery. Overnight we lost some of our best pita stores and over time we lost more. Our sales in Montreal were cut in half so it was not economically viable to keep going there. If it had been closer we could possibly have continued but it was just a few hours and a few hundred kilometers too far. I regretted canceling the Montreal route because we had some great customers and I really liked many of the people who worked in the stores.

At about the same time we went to Montreal, we started a North Bay-Sudbury run which was even longer than the Montreal run but with about half the sales. The problem back then was I did not really know how big this market was and where the market was. The only way you could find this out was to start a route and see what happens. This can get expensive when it doesn’t work out but I felt I had to try. Ottawa had worked out great, Montreal had worked out great for many years but North Bay and Sudbury did not. For a number of years I used George as a sub contract driver using his own vehile to deliver up north because he was already going there with other products. This worked well until he basically retired and then Bread Roots terminated most of the route.

The London route was started with great hopes that it would be another Ottawa route. It has a lot of good store on it especially in Kitchener Waterloo, Stratford and London itself. All the preliminary work had been done, the stores identified, the samples were distributed and the first orders were taken and on Sept 12 2001 we made our first delivery. Except on September 11, the world changed with the attack on the World Trade Centre and nobody on the London route was interested in anything new. Every body sort of froze in their tracks and did nothing for a few a weeks. I figured the best thing to do was cancel the route for a while and restart it later when and if things ever returned to “normal”. All the other routes were firmly established with familiar products so they did ok through this tragedy, sales were slow but they were still ok. About a year later, I started this route again and this time it was fine. It is now our second best route after Ottawa.

Staffing is Key

None of the growth at Bread Roots could have happened without having the right people doing the right job. At the beginiining, I did everything. I got the orders, faxed them to the bakeries, typed the invoices, picked up the bread from the bakeries and delivered the bread. You could say I was very busy especially when we expanded to Ottawa and even busier when we expanded to Montreal. For over a year I was working (driving and delivering) 80 hours per week and walking around like a zombie on the weekend. To give you an example of how this worked in practice, I would get to bed by 10 pm after just getting home from picking up bread in Toronto anmd at 3 am I had to be up to drive 360 km to Montreal so I could be there by 8 am. I would deliver all day long there and drive back to Cobourg by 9 pm. Go to bed asap and get up at 4 am to drive 300 km to Ottawa to deliver bread there all day long .I barely revived on the weekend to start it all over on Monday. It was a very exciting time because I knew I was building a significant business.

By the time I was doing Ottawa and Montreal I had a full time secretary, Riva and a full time bookkeeper, Sylvia, who also took orders from stores. Riva was exceptional and she stayed for over 5 years before leaving to live in Ottawa close to her grandchildren. Sylvia is still with us. Both these people took a long time to find. I went through 4 or 5 people and several months of disorganization before Riva came along. Sylvia left for a while to attend to personal business and was replaced by another so called bookkeeper for a year or so. She left one day in a huff , leaving the books in a mess, and Sylvia offered to come back and she’s been here ever since, thank God. I learned my management approach from Tom Nutt in the appraisal business. Hire the right people and let them do their job. If you have to keep fixing their mistakes or doing part of the job for them, they are not the right person so you have to fire them and move on.

Hiring the right person was especially true when it came to delivery drivers. First drivers on are their own for up to 15 hours at a time so they have to be self starters and self directed. They have no boss looking over their shoulders to help them at every step. lSecond they were driving my vehicle and mistakes while driving can be costly and scare the hell out of you. (me). I got lucky at first when I hired Paul Hieminga from Port Hope. He was a good safe driver who had a good personality so he could relate to my customers well and do the necessary paperwork. Paul would do the routes I could not do as well as some of the pick ups. After Paul I hired Warren Seeley and another driver on the same day to take care of the Ottawa and Montreal routes. Warren ended up falling in love with Montreal and when he had to leave for health reasons, his customers in Montreal asked about him for years afterwards. Now that’s a Delivery Driver . Warren was so good that I rehired him years later to do one day a week which suits him just fine. The other driver I hired was ok but he had a habit of bitching and complaining every single day about something. Everyone in the office complained about him but he did his job well enough so I kept him too long. Finally., I had enough and had to let him go. This meant I did the Ottaawa route until I found a replacement driver. I found it took about 3 months and about 4 drivers before I found the right person. Since I was paying these new people full wages, this got expensive. Usually, I had a two week training period where I would go with the new driver. First they had to satisfy me that they were good drivers and second they had to show me that they undertood the delivery process. Finally, they had to remember where all the stores were (without gps), which door to use and where to place the bread inside the store. The first week I would expect to do a lot of training on how I wanted it done and the second week I would observe them to see if they learnt anything. It usually took until the last day of the 2nd week to decide if they qualified or not. This was often painful for me if they did not qualify. (sometimes I was happy with them, and they simply did not want the job—hours were too long) First I had just paid this person about $900 for 2 weeks work while I sat beside her/him teaching him or her how to do the job. Second, I now got the route back until I found somebody else who did qualify. Once I did hire a person who sort of qualified but he ended up getting into two accidents of the three accidents we’ve ever been in 15 years. Even though the driver got into these two accidents, I felt personally responsible because I hired him with some reservations. When you hire a driver you can’t have reservations.

Back in May 2005, I had just hired Kevin Clarke. Kevin was almost an instant hire because he worked out well right from the beginning. On the very first day, I got distracted talking to an old customer while delivering to a store. Kevin just went ahead and made the delivery on his own without my help. It was so impressive I was struck in awe. My customer saw what was going on and said “you better keep that one” I did. I was a lot luckier than I thought when I hired Kevin because 2 weeks later I was hospitalized and unable to work for 4 months which would have been disastrous for my business if Kevin had not been hired.

Three New Sprinters.

It took about 4 months after my surgery until I finally felt sort of normal and 6 months before I was normal. In November 2004, I had ordered new trucks and in September 2005 Bread Roots took delivery of 3 brand Sprinter 14 ft cab chasis trucks to replace our Ford E350/E450 diesels. I was looking forward to some good numbers a s a result of this transaction but that was not to be. I did not want to replace my Fords because they were expensive to service: they needed complete brakes every 33,000 km and I was always replacing alternators, and wheel bearings in the front. Everybody seems to be aware that Fords having lousy transmissions but ours lasted until over 350,000 km before I needed to replace them so I was sort of happy with that. The gas Ford E250 van only lasted until 80,000 km before it needed a transmission. The Hino wasn’t that bad but nobody outside of Toronto or Montreal even knew what a Hino was. I got the Hino at about 200,000 km and sold it at about 500,000 km and never replaced the brakes or the transmission but we did have other routine type issues. It ended up being more truck than we needed and being a standard needed a real truck driver to drive it. Being a cab or chasis design, it was also a real cold truck to drive to Montreal at 4 am in the winter. Over 2004, my truck repair bill was over $30,000 which looked kind of high to me. Luckily my payments were low which really helped more than I knew.

The first six months with our new vehicles was good even though I had to take each one of them to the Sprinter dealer for service every 20,000 km . This was a round trip of about 160 km and took the best part of a day to do since I had to wait for it. The cost of a routine maintenance was about $350 plus my time. I knew when I leased these vehicles that service could be an issue but I was told Mercedes and Chrysler were expanding their network of approved Sprinter Dealerships so this would be less of a problem in the future. My best advice after doing this for years is this: If you don’t have a Sprinter dealer close to you don’t get one. Routine maintenance was one problem but anytime something other than routine maintenance popped up (and that was often) the dealer would diagnose the problem then get the parts. The vast majority of the time parts were not in stock so I had to wait 5 business days before parts would arrive. I was really glad I was not a contractor who had all his tools and basically his business on board a truck stuck at a dealership waiting for parts. All I needed was a ride home or sometimes I would have to go rescue a driver. I had a back up van, my Ford E250, which filled in for these Sprinters when they were in the shop. I used the Ford far more than I though I would and I should have figured this into the cost equation when deciding to get these Sprinters but who knew? Next time a truck salesperson says to me you need a new truck to save yourself from huge repairs on a used vehicle or to save yourself from breaking down on the highway, just look at them and say “riiight” and then leave.

After the first 6 months our warranties started to expire but not without a few engine lights coming on for a multitude of reasons. I don’t know how many sensors Sprinters have but they also seemed like one’s coming on soon. Maybe, it’s because I had three of them. I can tell you I was starting to wish I had only one or even none of them. One of the fundamental reasons why I invested in Sprinters is because they were sold to me a purpose built work trucks. They were unlike the typical North American Cube van which was based on a van body and the “cutaway” to make a truck box at the back. I believe the box is too heavy for the van frame which causes all kinds of problems which you wouldn’t get if it was just a simple van. I researched the Sprinters on the Web several times and found no evidence to suggest it was anything but a good work truck. A few years later, I was glancing through the Consumer Report magazine and looked up Mercedes Benz. It confirmed what I now already knew: Mercedes Benz, the pride of German engineering, can’t seem to, make a transmission that lasts. Too bad I didn’t connect the dots a few years earlier. All I saw on the Web was that everybody seemed happy with the fuel economy which was good. For instance, I was able to average 17.5 miles per gallon compared to the 10 miles per gallon I was getting on my Ford Diesels so I liked this part of the equation. What I missed through all of my research was the 100,000 km warranty. Given the high prices of Mercedes cars, this warranty is woefully inadequate and for a truck it is pitiful. Sprinters are marketed as heavy duty work trucks that are supposed to last anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 kms as most decent trucks do but the warranty doesn’t match the marketing hype. Apparently, the transmissions don’t either.

I have noticed a lot more Sprinters on the road in Ontario since I got mine in 2005 so there should be more of a track record now than there was back then. Back in early 2007 after I had my trucks about 18 months, not one, not two but three transmissions went over a 3 month period when the mileage ranged from about 125,000 to 135,000 km. The total cost to repair these transmissions was $15,000. I appealed to Chrysler who eventually sent me a cheque for about $2,000 for the first one but would cover the 2nd or 3rd because I did not change the transmission fluid at the appointed times. (change it every 100,000 km). Chrysler did give me a $2,000 credit for work done on the computer of that truck though even though that’s not what I asked for. Even though I appreciated the compensation from Chrysler it was difficult to get over the $15,000 shock. I never looked at those Sprinters the same way after that. I just couldn’t wait to get rid of them but there was over 2 years left on the leases. I t was kind of like having a house in Bewdley that I couldn’t sell. It wasn’t a good feeling but I suffered through it until the end. One of the Sprinters needed a second new transmission at about 320,000 km just as the lease was about to expire. Transmissions have gone up quite a bit since the first one—This last one done by Mr Transmission cost me $6000 which was cheap compared to the dealer price of $10,000.

Needless to say, I was looking forward to the end of my leases in September 2009 for years but in July I got another shock. In my original discussions about the leases I was sure that at the end of the leases I would simply return the trucks to the dealership and that would be it. When the salesman Mark Bull from Davison Chrysler, now defunct, told me what the residual value calculated by Chrysler was ($15,000) I stated that I didn’t think they could get that for a truck with 350,000 km on it as mine would when they came back. He seemed to think they could. What I did not realize and nobody bothered to wise me up was that I was the one supposed to get the $15,000. If I had known that I would not have consented to the deal . If you remember I was recovering from heart surgery back in the summer of 05 so I definitely was not thinking straight all the time but I don’t think I was that crazy. I remember telling Mark Bull that they (Chrysler) would never get the $15,000 so why didn’t he make it clear to me who was responsible.? That would have ruined the sale, so he didn’t.
So instead of getting rid of these trucks in September 09 I had to wait. One of them was on a separate lease with a lower buyout so I sold that one in September which helped a bit. After the second transmission went on the other one , I just basically parked the trucks for 5 months until I paid the lease down to about $10,000 and sold them both to a film crew who were going to use them as a portable film studio. I figured any body who bought these trucks at $10,000 got a good deal even if they were expensive to repair. Why? Well they would not have the high monthly payments as I did as well as the repair bills.

Finally, I have to say that the seats were fully adjustable and very comfortable and the ride was very car-like even though we had a 14 ft box on the back of our Sprinters. Your driver or you will be very comfortable while waiting after you call 1 800 363 4869 which is the Chrysler emergency service number for getting a tow. I don’t know how people I asked at the dealership level about this service but no one knew about it. I only found out because of my dealings with head office about the transmissions.

I replaced my Sprinters with 2 full size Chevy 15 seat vans and removed all the passenger seats. I got the passenger van because they are better equipped than the cargo vans. First they have traction control, second they have dual air which is good for my cargo, third they have better lighting, fourth, quieter ride because interior insulated, and fifth all these extras don’t cost any more since cargo vans and passenger vans almost sell for the same price. After over 8 months on one and almost 12 months on the other they have worked out very well. I bought both of them used at about $18,000 on a 3 year terms so they will be paid for when the mileage hits 350,000 km. I expected they will last until 500,000 km as I am using synthetic oil and getting them serviced regularly. Sometimes, it’s a very tight fit to load all our product but so far we have managed. On the very odd day I can always send a second truck which is a whole lot better than running half empty trucks year round.

This is a fairly long passage from my book “My Home Business Story” available on Amazon.com