Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
If you’ve ever packed lunches for your picky kids—no crusts for this one, hair-trigger gag reflex for that—imagine trying to please 45,000 mostly school-aged customers a day. That’s the challenge for Nancy Close, founder and CEO of CKC Good Food.
At age 24 she bought her parents’ restaurant and soon started a catering business, preparing food for a relative’s day care business. “I had an extreme interest. I had a little nephew there. It was so important every day to do the best I could,” she recalls.
Today she’s 63 and a new inductee into the NAWBO Minnesota Women Business Owners Hall of Fame, with a killer growth story. CKC Good Food has 220 employees. “I started with my dishwasher and myself,” she says. “We’re serving 45,000 meals a day. It’s staggering.”
A separate business, Menu Freedom, is a web-based platform to help schools plan menus that meet complicated U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines and gain “really good, from-scratch recipes” to service their students. “My team built a rocket ship to the moon for foodservice. It’s another way to grow.”
Her core values? “You have to listen to what people want, and then you have to explain it to people working with you, so they understand what the goals are,” Close says.
For her, listening is a constant process with multiple groups of people, followed quickly with actions.
The kids are first, of course. “We have so many different cultures of students that we serve. If you think about serving a Latino group of kids with a Somali group of kids,” she says, “even the hot sauces taste different and they may not like that. Every day we get a recap, and every week we discuss every comment.”
Every year, CKC invites a group of people to its commissary for hands-on feedback. “We go over their three favorites and three least favorites, and then we get down to the tasting. We listen carefully and document everything they say.” One result is more than 200 different menus served daily.
The idea extends beyond customers. Around 2012, she was told she needed to hire an HR director. “I said, ‘I need what?’ You need a professional. That was one big learning curve. For about a year, I kind of scowled when I walked by, because I’m not supposed to be interviewing any more, and it was about setting up systems and processes. That can be so hard to go from when you’ve been running things on your own, but it’s the best thing you can do,” she says. “You don’t lose the beautiful way you want to be with your employees. All you do is strengthen that, and I didn’t know that.”
CKC went through a branding process last year and the firm that did the work interviewed employees. “One of the questions they asked was: What is your greatest concern with CKC? The answers were: when Nancy retires,” she says.
“First of all, it was the greatest compliment. But second it told me to focus on helping my leadership develop the same relationships, the same type of closeness” that she has with employees.
Listening is just step one for Close; what comes next is key. “It’s leading with listening, and then doing something about it.”
