Irrational Persistence. Zilko Dave

we did the first 400,000 bottles this way, through five Michigan winters. We could see our breath when we first walked in. My parents gave me a couple of space heaters and after a while that, coupled with our body heat, brought the temperature up to a relatively humane level.

      No worries in the summer, however, as again we had air conditioning.

      For the most part we’d make our product at night, and in the day I’d balance my time between the various commission-only jobs I arranged, either selling commercial real estate or life insurance, while also trying to market my line of premium marinades.

      I was actually getting some nice publicity, even being interviewed by the Food Network on their daily “TV Food News and Views” show.

      After taping my segment with one of their hosts, The Dean & Deluca Cookbook author David Rosengarten, he was kind enough to escort me out of their Manhattan studios down to the street.

      Rosengarten was also at the time the New York City restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine. I asked him whether he had any idea how much money he spent dining in Manhattan per year.

      “Funny you should ask that,” he replied. “They have me use a dedicated American Express Gold Card for all my restaurant meals for the magazine. Just last week I was looking at my statement, and so far this year I’ve charged just under $95,000 to the card.”

      This was in early November. Nice work if you can find it.

      And sure enough I was getting picked up by local food retailers and then by a few national accounts as well. T.J. Maxx, for example, who had just started selling specialty food, and even QVC, who featured my marinades for years.

      Although accounts were buying my products, getting it to them was another story.

      Heat wasn’t the only thing I was lacking in my little makeshift 300-square-foot kitchen. I couldn’t afford a forklift either.

      Every time I needed to ship an order, I’d wheel all our product out on a cart into the parking lot, load it onto a pallet on the truck by hand, stretch wrap it myself, and use the truck’s pallet jack to get it into the back of the trailer.

      After a while it was difficult to even get trucks to come, as sometimes they’d be there for upwards of an hour.

      One day a woman, Michelle Marshall, came out into the parking lot. About a decade before, she had started a specialty food company of her own, launching a British pub style mustard she called Mucky Duck, and by chance her kitchen was directly across from mine.

      I’d like to think Michelle felt sorry for me, seeing me loading pallets in the snow. In reality she had a doctor’s appointment and could not get out of the parking lot, as the truck was blocking her way. She blessedly offered to let me use Mucky Duck’s forklift.

      That soon became a standard practice for us, and I befriended her as well; I thought she was terrific personally and professionally and believed she had developed a great product, verified by the fact that Mucky Duck Mustard won the 1996 World Championships of Mustard.

      A few years after that chance first meeting, after I had been encouraging Michelle to partner with me, she said she was retiring and moving to Phoenix and that if I wanted to buy Mucky Duck, now was my chance.

      We closed on the company three weeks later, an all-cash deal that the bank financed 100 percent, with my dad guaranteeing the $108,000 loan.

      I figured at least I was consistent: I founded my first company via financing courtesy of my girlfriend and I financed my first acquisition via my dad’s credit worthiness.

      So now I owned a mustard company, which was very exciting. Even more exciting was that I finally had a somewhat professional commercial kitchen to work out of, and at that time I defined “professional” as having a place with heat and a working forklift.

      The day after we closed on the Mucky Duck Mustard Company, we moved across the parking lot to our new professional commercial kitchen. After moving a vertical spice rack we had against the wall in our old American Connoisseur space, one of my employees looked at me, somewhat aghast, and called me over to that wall.

      “Uh, Dave – you want to take a look at this?”

      I walked over, somewhat concerned, and could not believe what I saw; it was a second thermostat. I flicked the switch, just as my landlord had implored me to do so many times, and sure enough the heat came on. Just as we were leaving the space for the very last time.

      An even bigger surprise was waiting for me when I showed up for the first day of production as the new owner of the Mucky Duck Mustard Company.

      Most American mustards are made with mustard flour and vinegar that is mixed with maybe turmeric and, when whipped together, comes out as mustard.

      It was just my luck, though, that I did not buy an American mustard company but one that produced a British pub style mustard, which typically have more personality than their U.S. cousins; they’re made with eggs and sugar and employ a multi-day process to produce.

      So I soon found myself getting up at 5:30 every morning to go in and break eggs for that day’s production, something I did for years, and one day I looked back and estimated that the hands that are typing these words now have conservatively broken 800,000 eggs in their lifetime.

      Things they don’t teach you in grad school..

      But I wasn’t the only one in our family breaking eggs. My then-girlfriend-now wife Jill, whose signature on that $2,500 Discover credit card loan launched our company, was pregnant with our first child, our son Christian. On her days off from her job working at the cosmetic counter at Neiman Marcus, she would join us in our kitchen and break eggs as well.

      As Jill’s due date drew closer we found ourselves in our OB-GYN’s office and he informed us that Christian was breached and that as a result he’d have to be delivered by Caesarian section. We were thus able to pick a date and time in which Christian would be born. We subsequently picked a Monday, which the doctor thought was great; then he suggested a time: 11:00 a.m.

      I asked if we could make it later that day, as I had a truck coming that morning that I’d have to load. Thus, we scheduled the appointment for 1:00 p.m., and our eldest son was brought into this world about 45 minutes after 1:00 p.m.

      The mustard order went out as well that day.

      At this point I was six years into my entrepreneurial adventure, still not making money, certainly not enough to raise a family and live on, still piling up debt. Jack and I did not even know each other yet; in fact, we would not even meet for another five years, but it was at this time that his entrepreneurial adventure was beginning, and he was enduring similar experiences with Garden Fresh.

LIFE IN THE DARK ROOM: JACK AND ANNETTE

      Like me and my marinades, Jack too started with blenders in the back of his Clubhouse Bar-B-Q restaurant on a little red Formica table.

      “It would take me about 20 minutes to make six pints, which I thought was pretty good,” Jack recalls. (Today six pints of Garden Fresh Salsa roll off our assembly lines every nine seconds.)

      It wasn’t long, though, before he sensed that he had something special on his hands. “People started coming from 20 miles away just for this salsa. We couldn’t believe it.”

      As the crowds grew and as more stores in the surrounding area started carrying Jack’s salsa he and his wife Annette eventually walled off part of the Clubhouse Bar-B-Q’s dining room and converted that to salsa production. They soon realized, though, that their restaurant did not have the cooler capacity to handle their new production levels.

      So they rented an 8-by-20-foot walk-in cooler and located it in the back alley of the Clubhouse Bar-B-Q even though doing so violated the local zoning ordinances. Annette soon found herself running outside into the often muddy alley to get their raw materials, then at the end of the production session running finished product back out to it.

      It was at about this time that Fox2 News did a story on Jack. “It didn’t even dawn on me that we weren’t exactly up to code,” Jack recalls. “That didn’t happen until the city manager showed up the next day.”

      Together,