2 Coping with everyday stressors

This chapter could also be titled “This Chaos Is Normal” or “The Tough Stuff Never Ends—It Just Changes.” Nothing is ever smooth in business. Things rarely run exactly as they should without challenges that keep you up at night. You run out of cash, you lose a big customer, a key employee threatens to quit, or you have to deal with brutal competition. You might have a product crisis or family complications that impact your productivity at work: a sick kid, problems with your partner, a dying parent. Sometimes you think that if you can just get through this tough stuff, you will get a break. That almost never happens. Each new leap you take feels like the same height as the last huge leap, and leaps you used to think were big don’t seem so big in the rearview mirror. Now you wish you had a “small” problem like the one before, a problem you have already learned how to deal with.

In this chapter you will read some stories about how entrepreneurs got through their everyday stressors, large and small, and lived to tell about them. These entrepreneurs found help, learned to take care of themselves, and realized that reflecting on the stressors helped them grow their businesses. Lisa talks about using a calm, steady approach to implement change at Vermont Bread Company. Margot discusses the importance of taking action rather than assigning blame during a crisis. Joe explains the challenges of finding a balance between hiring and not hiring and between controlling your employees and giving them autonomy. And Carol Berry of Putney Pasta reveals her story about a company tragedy, giving us the confidence that even the worst nightmare can be weathered with some patience and time.

If you sometimes feel that you are at the end of your rope and you need to know that other people get stressed, too, here’s the chapter for you. Hopefully the practical tips at the end will give you calming antidotes for those times when you feel frayed and spent.

Mantras, Patience, and Taking Care of You

LISA

Before I got into the bread business, I never even thought about how food got to the supermarket. In truth, it’s very complicated. It’s an everyday stressor! There is always something to worry about and be stressed about. For instance, one spring, the lab we worked with sent me enriched-flour values for my labels rather than the unenriched-flour values I needed. So, on a line of five products, all my vitamin counts were wrong. The Food and Drug Administration told me to pull the mislabeled products off the market and relabel them. Another rainy spring, the mold spore count in the Northeast was the highest it had ever been, and our product was getting moldy before the date marked on the package. I’ve faced all sorts of other stressors I couldn’t have imagined before I started Vermont Bread Company.

As I think about these stresses and what helped us day to day, I realize that the sayings we repeated regularly and the rules that became chants helped us through some of our most difficult times. “The bread will go out” is a good example. This phrase became our overarching mantra. In the bread business, the basic saying has to be “The bread will go out ” because today’s bread has to be delivered today to fill the empty space on the supermarket shelf. The balance sheet for a bake-to-order wholesale bread factory does not have a “finished goods inventory” category.

It’s a crazy business model if you think about it: all the bread must be baked, sliced, bagged, and put on tractor-trailers to go to warehouses. It has to be separated into routes, picked up by drivers in bread trucks, and delivered to every store we service by 10:00 a.m., five days a week. This environment has little room for error, so it can be very stressful, especially if machines break down or remakes are needed to replace poor-quality products. “The bread will go out” was the answer whenever a machine broke down: I would ask the engineer how it was going and his first response was always “The bread will go out.” This meant, for the last shift of the cycle, if the orders were not complete, nobody even thought about going home. It meant if we were short-staffed, any one of us would fill in for a production worker. That led to another of our sayings: “It’s all my job.” It was not an accounting clerk’s responsibility to work at the oven every day, but if asked, the answer always needed to be yes. Another saying we had was “We and ours, not me and mine.” It reflected an attitude of teamwork that was important in our culture.

In order to deal effectively with everyday stressors, we also tried to instill the clear value of respect in our dealings with one another. One of our strict rules was “Thou shall not yell, swear, or name-call in the workplace.” And the companion rule was “If you are feeling close to doing any of those things, go outside immediately and walk around the building as quickly as you can.” When the morale of our office staff was slipping and I noticed more irritation in people’s voices, more sighing, and more rolling of the eyes, I started posting “If you are not having a good day … Fake It.” For the most part, these rules were honored and repeated, and many new hires told me they had never been so well treated, so welcomed, and so respected by any other manufacturing company they worked in.

With everyday stressors, a calm, patient approach usually worked. Sometimes, I was virtually alone in my rules and mantras, saying them over and over again and hoping that by doing this I could implement change. It could make me feel lonely and futile, but if I used a steady, unflustered approach, change would eventually happen. For example, early on we had to switch from allowing hats for headwear in the production areas to requiring the more professional and sanitary use of hairnets. This change was met by surprising resistance from our production workers. Every morning I would walk out onto the production floor and calmly say again and again, “You have to wear a hairnet.” A couple of hours later I would say to the next group coming on shift, “You have to wear a hairnet.” I did not raise my voice or use an irritated tone. Finally, the change happened. A small group gave in, and they started to help with the chant. Then more people joined until we all had hairnets on our heads. Then I began again: “The hairnet needs to cover all the hair on your head to be effective, even if your bangs look better hanging out in front.”

Another stressor at Vermont Bread Company was the is -sue of safety. Because we were working in manufacturing, we needed to be really aware of safety and backup plans at all times. At the bakery, we used to have a machine called an intermediate proofer that was ten feet tall, held over three hundred baskets of bread, and was driven by a chain as thick as a belt. The chain wound around a metal sprocket about as large as a dinner plate. Removable safety guards prevented anything from getting caught in the machinery. Time and time again I issued safety warnings and repeated the mantra “Do not take the guards off. Do not run the machine without the guards. Do not bypass the guard system.” My workers used to take the guards off anyway. When they were in the middle of a production run and moving quickly, the guards could make the bread loaves jam, so some of the workers figured out how to bypass them. Without the guards, the workers could quickly and easily reach into the machine to clear out the loaves that were piling up. Then one long-term employee put his hand in there and got distracted, and the chain came up around his arm. Fortunately, the machine stopped because of a torque limiter my partner had installed after watching the workers take the guards off so many times despite repeated warnings.

This incident was a really good lesson that in order to deal with everyday stressors, you can’t just blindly plow forward. Mantras like “Do not bypass the guard system” are good ones, but you must be aware of what is really going on. This was true, too, with mantras like “The bread will go out.” I remember one Sunday morning I stopped by to check on a new highspeed machine that sliced, bagged, and put a plastic closure lock on the bread. Nothing was going right. More bread was being destroyed than packaged. We were running behind schedule. People were trying to hurry. The bins that held the rejects were overflowing. The trucks were held up leaving the bakery and tempers were running shorter by the minute. The runners were having a difficult time sliding the full stacks of baskets across the floor because of the piles of waste bread. I didn’t just say, “The bread will go out”; I assessed the situation and acted accordingly. Even though we were running really late, I shut down the line, grabbed a broom, and had everyone join me in cleaning up the packaging room. People grumbled, shook their heads, and rolled their eyes, but they cleaned. Within thirty minutes we were back up and running. Everyone’s mood had lightened. There were smiles and laughter. We got it finished at a much faster rate than we had been working at. And the bread did go out!

Chanting mantras in the workplace and using a calm, steady approach to implement change were two of the ways I dealt with everyday stressors while running a socially responsible business. When I was most stressed at Vermont Bread Company, though, I needed to remember why I was in business in the first place, and I would stand at the oven and watch the loaves come out and go through a depanner. In that spot in the plant, a person can really get connected to the product. It was always a place I would go to calm down. I considered it a meditation.

Communication—the Path of Least Resistance and a Weekend Away

MARGOT

One thing I can say about stressors is, they’ll show up every day in one form or another. A good thing to remember while you are going through them is that there is almost always an inherent lesson in a stressor. Finding the lesson can be the silver lining in the cloud; however, often you have to look for it. For example, one year we had just started shipping our spring sandals and were eagerly expecting another forty-foot container, holding twelve thousand pairs of sandals. When it pulled into our parking lot, we quickly became dismayed as we began to unload the merchandise and discovered that somewhere along the way, the container had sprung a leak and had sat in the rain. Many of the sandals were soaking wet, and a few already showed signs of mildew. We called our insurance agent, who said to let everything sit until someone came to assess the damage. We had no time to find the culprit—more shoes would get ruined. Instead, we needed to take immediate action and rescue as many shoes as possible. We took photographs of the mess to establish our claim and went back to work. Quite a few sandals could be salvaged, but the shoeboxes were a total loss. Our manufacturer in Germany sent thousands of replacement boxes and original tissue paper on the next airplane. Luckily the shoeboxes were collapsible for easy stacking; otherwise, getting them quickly would have been almost impossible.

That day we recognized that sometimes stressors can have the benefit of promoting interdependence, developing understanding, and enhancing communication and cooperation be -tween departments. Because of our dire emergency, all the workers were pressed into service, no matter what department they were from. We organized shifts to unpack and dry shoes. When the new boxes arrived, we reboxed and relabeled everything. It was a monumental effort, but we rescued the season. The crisis connected people who had never spoken with one another before. Working side by side on a rather mundane task made us realize that every job was important and necessary for the good of the whole. When we were small, this particular issue had never been a problem because most people worked in more than one department and wore more than one hat. But once we had gotten to a certain size, that changed and some “silo thinking” had set in. This crisis helped to change that.

You can learn just as much from long-term stressors as you can from acute crises. Other stressors popped up that were not so immediate but affected the company on a day-to-day basis. For instance, some workers had a hard time with certain parts of their jobs. I wanted to keep the employees, yet it was a constant struggle to figure out how to get around their apparent weaknesses. An example of this was a young woman working in marketing. She didn’t like the flowery speech the other people in her department used. She preferred to “tell it like it is,” and this did not endear her to the rest of the team. She was smart and a good worker, and I didn’t want to lose her, so I asked if she liked numbers. She loved numbers, so we put her into accounting. With numbers you have to tell the truth—you have to tell it like it is. She worked out wonderfully! Thinking creatively and outside the box could help tremendously when we had a long-term stressor we were trying to solve.

Sometimes your stressor is that you have people you can’t deal with at all and you have to fire them. But sometimes you can’t even do that! One man who worked for us was getting very cocky and wasn’t good for morale. I had just gotten up my nerve to fire him when he went on a joyride on his new motorcycle and had a bad accident. Of course, I couldn’t fire him then. His injuries weren’t bad enough that he could go on disability, so I had to drag him along for another six months or so so that he could heal and be ready to look for another job. That was a terrible situation for which there was no creative solution.

How do you prepare for everyday stressors, and what do you do when you can’t get rid of them? Usually the stressors were nothing that a nice weekend away in the country couldn’t fix, but I also liked to sing rousing songs at the top of my voice while driving to work every morning. Nobody could hear whether I was off-key, nobody could interrupt my pleasure, and singing put me in the right frame of mind for the challenges that lay ahead.

Getting and Keeping Good Employees

JOE, CREATIVE MACHINES

One of my stressors when I first started came from the fact that I wasn’t running my business like a franchise. Some pretty good business books out right now are geared toward how to run your business like a franchise. They tell you to create jobs so the intelligence is in the system rather than the people. It’s sort of like making McDonald’s french fries: you don’t even time it yourself—the fryer beeps when you need to do this, it beeps when you need to do that, it beeps when you need to put the salt on, it beeps when you need to put a new batch in. I don’t really think that all your jobs have to be “beep jobs,” but I didn’t have any beep jobs at Creative Machines, and I had to learn the hard way that you need a mix of beep jobs and creative jobs. I didn’t think my employees would appreciate this, but actually they did. Back when I had only one or two employees, I made the mistake of thinking they wanted what I wanted. I was trying to make a work environment for a dozen mini-mes, so I gave them a zillion choices of what to work on, and I came up with something new to do every day. However, my employees were frustrated. They didn’t want a zillion choices and something new to do every day. They wanted to come to work in the morning, have a clear plan of what they were going to do, and accomplish it. They wanted to take home their paychecks and be with their families on the weekends and then come in on Monday to do it all over again.

As with any challenge, I learned a lot from that. More than creative thinkers, I needed flexible thinkers: people who could deal with new situations, people who not only were creative but knew how to manage creativity. It took me a while to hire the group I have now. Now when I get applications from people who say, “I would love this job,” and they proceed to tell me how the job would help them express their creativity, I know I have to be careful. I’ve learned that the reason for hiring people is not to fulfill their own creative life journeys. That’s their responsibility. Making public art and museum exhibits seems attractive to a lot of people, and some people want to work for us so badly they overlook the reasons working here is not an ideal job. Over the years I’ve learned to devote a good portion of job advertisements and interviews to the bad parts of the job. I’d rather have people start with a balanced view rather than deciding it’s not for them a few years down the road.

Not hiring people has also added to my stress along the way. As my business grew, it always seemed easier to just do the extra work myself rather than to train the next person. A lot of times I was working in panic mode to get work done, and it felt quicker to put off hiring someone rather than to have unproductive time when I was putting an ad in the paper, interviewing, and then training. But hiring was essential to making the business move, and it alleviated everyday stress in the long run.

Hiring people with good judgment and then helping them develop that judgment is a big part of my everyday challenge. It takes good listening, good intuition, and a little luck. What we do is semicustom, so I need people who can think on their feet and have good judgment. They need to be able to tell the difference between times when a project is good as it is and will get only marginally better with an increase in work and times when they really do need to work on the project more. If they are making a complicated exhibit with a lot of moving parts, they have to know in what order to put the pieces together. They have to think about what social environment the exhibit is going into and ask themselves if it will need to be serviced regularly, whether anyone should be able to get into the cabinet with just a screwdriver, or if it would be better to limit access to those with a key. Some of those are mechanical questions, but some of them are judgment questions.

I have created stress by letting employees work too in -dependently, by not having them talk aloud about these choices. It’s not that they aren’t smart enough to work independently, but when an employee doesn’t have someone to bounce an idea off of, he can make mistakes. If he’s not forced to articulate something, if he works in a vacuum, he can make bad choices. For instance, one employee made a water exhibit using regular steel instead of stainless steel, which caused warranty problems down the road. It’s the sort of mistake he shouldn’t have made. He seemed very independent—he didn’t want to collaborate or talk about what he did, so I left him alone. In a way, it was my mistake for allowing him to work too independently. I didn’t give him an opportunity to articulate what he was doing. Now I try to have people work in teams because you think differently if you say things aloud. Your brain is activated in a different way when you speak aloud. When you are forced to say something like “Should we use this bolt here?” you think about the task again in a way that you wouldn’t if you were working alone. Being an employer is sort of like being a psychologist and figuring out how people do their best work.

What’s helped me with the stress? There are all sorts of formal techniques for stress management, but I think a lot of people just discover what works best for them, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve used a lot of visualization techniques and ways of calming myself to take the pressure off. Breathing and stretching work best to calm and focus me. Then in my mind I start from square one, and I think, “How stressed can I be? I’m not starving. There are no immediate physical threats to my life and limb or to my family. We’re not in imminent danger of being killed. Anything else can be worked out.” A lot of stress is psychological, so I find ways to cool off and ask myself, “What do I really have to do to solve the problem? Let’s imagine that I’m going to succeed. What are the steps I need to take to get there?” Rather than try to think of the most creative solution, I try to think of the simplest, dumbest thing I could do. I might think, “Well, I could borrow the money I need from this source because we have a line of credit there. That’s a solution I don’t necessarily want to pursue, but it’s a fallback.” Then that suddenly frees me up, and I am able to see other, better solutions. Considering the obvious makes me less driven to find the really cool answer, but I’ve learned that psychologically, it makes it easier to let go in my thinking in order to find a more clever solution.

My business isn’t me, even if it feels like it is on some days. If the business fails, I’ll find something else to do. I’ll start all over again and—who knows?—it might be an even better life. I can’t imagine that now—I love what I do—but you have to be ready to do the best you can and then brace yourself for what life brings you.

Weathering a Company Tragedy

CAROL, PUTNEY PASTA

I had more than what most people would call an everyday stressor, though the threat of a similar incident is a stress that many business owners hold onto every day. When you run a plant and you work around big machines every day, you sometimes forget how dangerous they are. You forget that someone could die in the blink of an eye. When it actually happens, it is one of the most horrible things that a business owner can imagine. Having something happen to someone at your plant is similar to when something happens to a member of your family for whom you are responsible. I remember I was leading my stepson on a horse; this was maybe thirty years ago, but I still remember it very clearly. He just kind of slid off onto the ground. He broke his arm. Some friends were there, and we all found ways to feel guilty, to blame ourselves.

In manufacturing, unless the plant is closed, you are never absolved from responsibility, and that can be stressful. You could be halfway around the world, but the people at your company still have to be able to reach you by phone. I had gone on vacation the day before the accident at my plant happened. I was visiting my mother in Las Vegas, and from there I planned to go to California. I had just woken up the morning after I arrived at my mother’s when I got a call from the town manager. She said, “Bruce just died in your equipment.” I said, “No. No way.” I couldn’t believe it. The town manager was a friend of mine, and when the call came into the town office, she had followed the fire trucks to my plant. I was on a plane by that afternoon, and I cried all the way back. I still feel the heartache and the tears today as I write about this.

In order to get through stress like that, you have to find ways not to beat yourself up, and you have to have really good friends who won’t back down when the going gets tough. After the accident happened, I was with my employees. We were all reeling from the shock and the grief. At the same time, I had to deal with brutality in the press, a public whipping in the media, and deep humiliation. All I wanted to do was give myself to my employees and my grief. I had to isolate myself for a few days. At the time, Lisa Lorimer said to me, “It could just as easily have happened in my bread plant.” Those words meant more to me than anything else I heard during that time. Someone actually recognized that we didn’t do something god-awful. We ran a really nice plant and in any plant you can find places that could do a lot of harm. I weathered the storm and got back as soon as I could, but I couldn’t have done it without my friends. They were wonderful. Their support was terrific. They stood beside me the whole time. That’s how I got through my grief.

What We Learned

You are not the only one who sometimes feels like your company is a house of cards. The stressors are real, they are tough, and they don’t ever end. Over time, they may change, and the tasks that used to be difficult may seem easier, but no company runs smoothly all the time. Our entrepreneurs’ stories offer some ideas for helping you get through the stresses that inevitably come your way:

Make sure your mantras are on target with your business goals and values. What are the mantras in your company? Have they shifted over the years? Do they need to shift now? Use them with patience and quietude to make the change you want to see.

Find the place in your company that reminds you of your core mission. Be sure to continually make a connection to the passion you have for your work. Lisa often went to a place where she could watch the bread come out of the oven. Where is this place for you? Remember to visit there when the everyday stressors pile up.

Read the “What We Learned” sections and “Practical Tips” sections at the end of these chapters. The coping strategies that have helped us deal with stressors are collected in the tips at the end of each chapter. These tips provide actions you can take to create some quiet space so that you can be reflective rather than reactive. For instance, one of the suggestions is to create an advisory board so you have a place where you can hit the pause button and get some help working on your business, rather than the business working on you. Even if some of these tips sound hokey at first, try them.

Everyday stressors will always be there, but by taking care of yourself and finding ways to release tension, you can be steadier in the face of any challenge.

PRACTICAL TIP

Use Your Commute Time to Change Your Attitude About the Everyday Stressors

Margot liked to use her commute to sing rousing songs at the top of her voice: “Nobody could hear whether I was off-key and nobody could interrupt my pleasure. It put me in the right frame of mind for the challenges that lay ahead in my day.”

PRACTICAL TIP

Try to Find the Simplest, Dumbest Answer First

Like Joe, you might try to think of the simplest answer rather than the most complicated one when you have a problem. This way of thinking can free you up to find more creative solutions. Having a “fallback” plan can take some of the stress away and allow you to think more clearly. Don’t let your ego or your pride get involved when thinking of these “easy” solutions; just make sure you have one last resort you can go to if all else fails.