I first met Emily Sunderman when we both worked at CMP Media, a publishing company on Long Island, in the 1990s. She was a business analyst and a great person. We both moved on and I hadn’t heard of her again until I stumbled upon her online.  Wouldn’t you know it, she and her husband, Michael Lee, are entrepreneurs. Their cheese-making business, Twig Farm, is based in Cornwall, Vermont. We reconnected and she and Michael were gracious enough to take time away from the goats to answer some questions about their entrepreneurial journey. I told Emily before she answered these questions that, looking at her website, I wanted to be a cheese farmer in Vermont just like her! After reading her answers, that fantasy hasn’t changed. Thanks Emily and Michael, and continued success!

What has been your greatest success as entrepreneurs? And your biggest failure?

Biggest failure first.  We tried raising buck kids for the Easter market this Spring—hundreds of hours of labor, lots of purchased feed, and we lost our shirts at the livestock auction. Live and learn.  Greatest success is we make a good product that we’re proud of and that people need, or at least want, very much.

What advice do you have for would be executive-to-farmer entrepreneurs?

Animals don’t take weekends, holidays, or two weeks paid vacation. There aren’t very many people who want to work Christmas so you can drive to Auntie’s.

When I went to your website, my reaction was, “I wish I was a goat cheese farmer!” It looks so idyllic. What’s it really like to be in the cheese-making business in Vermont?

It’s a lot of fun doing one shitty job after another–sort of a definition of farming. If you know that to begin with, it makes it all a lot easier.  Specifically to the cheese-making side of things, we’re part of a friendly community that rarely sees one another. We make a ridiculously small quantity of cheese, and have gotten very good at saying, “We don’t have any more cheese to sell you” in lots of very gentle ways.

Why did you get into this business, and what were your goals when you started in 2005?

I don’t remember.

How have your outlook and goals evolved since then?

We have a goal to take a family vacation next year.

What’s a typical day like?
Michael gets up at 4:45 to set up to milk the goats. By around 5:15 he gone out–this time of year wearing a headlamp as it is dark–to find the goats in the pasture and lead them to the milking parlor.  Milking and cleaning up are complete by around 7:30 and then Michael gets the milk into the cheese vat to start warming up.  We have breakfast together around 8:00 then chase down shoes for our toddler.  Michael drives our three year old son Carter to day care and Emily starts email and telecommuting at her job as a web traffic analyst. The cheese is usually ready to stir when Michael gets back from daycare drop-off and the cheese made is usually in the molds by lunch time.   We generally have cheese sandwiches together at noon.   After lunch Emily goes back to web traffic and Michael moves fences for the next pasture rotation or some other regular farm chore.   Michael sets up milk around 3:30 and is done with afternoon milking and clean up around 5:45.  Emily goes to pick up Carter from daycare at 5 and is back around 5:45 and we cook dinner and play at being pirates or firefighters.  After dinner the cheese is usually ready to move to the brining process in our walk-in cooler, so Michael moves the process along.  We take turns putting Carter to bed, and then read the New Yorker and do email before turning in for the night.

Has the larger economy (oil prices, feed prices etc) affected your business and if so how have you adjusted your strategy?

Yes–feed has doubled in price since we started four years ago.   We’ve raised our prices a little and are now buying milk from other farms as well so we can make bigger batches of cheese.

What do you love most about your business?

No boss!

What do you like least about your business, or hate most, if you feel that way?

It is no fun when an animal gets sick and neither we nor the vet can make them better.

Michael does cheese-making, Emily does marketing and web support. Who does everything else? Do you two do it all?

Emily looks after the bookkeeping and marketing.  We have a high school student that helps us on Sunday mornings with packaging cheese for shipment.  We also have help with milking on Saturday mornings when Michael sells cheese at farmer’s market and on Sunday afternoons so we can have family time.   Michael takes care of the animals and makes and ages the cheese, and everything else.

I live on Long Island. How can I buy your cheese?

You can buy our cheese sometimes at Lucy’s Whey in East Hampton, or at Saxelby’s Cheese in the Essex Street Market in New York City, or at Bedford Cheese in Brooklyn. Murray’s in New York City usually has our cheese too.

Tags: Entrepreneur, small business, success, Twig Farm

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I had lunch the other day with a franchise consultant who helps people find a franchise that’s right for them. He is a franchise veteran in addition to being a consultant.  We agreed that for the past half-decade or more, franchising has been driven to some degree (I think a large one) by middle-aged Baby Boomers who grew tired of their jobs in corporate America and found an easy way to buy themselves a job through the equity in their homes. They bought an unprecedented number of franchises, writing checks from easy-to-get equity lines of credit.

I knew some of those people personally–the ones who would have been better off spending $10,000 on a Club Med vacation, rather than $200,000 on a franchise, because all they really needed was a change of scenery for a while. Now, many of those people have closed their businesses because they did not find the success that their franchisor and their own fond wishes had promised them. Along with shuttered businesses, many have lost homes and/or their kids’ college savings.

I’m not one to look for silver linings in bad news. The stories I have heard are  harrowing. There’s no “Oh, well, it’s a learning experience” to be said when someone loses their house.

The future landscape, which became a reality in the last month but has been taking shape all year, looks very different. My friend the franchise consultant is already seeing it in the people who come to him looking for a business to buy. The people who were going to buy a franchise out of boredom, or because they couldn’t find a job after a layoff, are gone. They are being replaced by people with maturity, management experience and cash.

It turns out that not everyone can or should own their own business. Entrepreneurship is not something everyone can do. That’s why, when I’m asked by prospective franchisees about whether the particular franchise I own might be good for them, I do everything I can to get them to run for the hills. If they’re crazy enough to be entrepreneurs, they don’t need encouragement from me. They’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

Tags: franchise, small business, success

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For many entrepreneurs and executives, emotions don’t have a place at work. I have met and worked for many senior managers who expect employees to show up in uniform, ready to play, with their game face on. I have also been that manager at times—the one with his own problems who just wishes everyone would do their jobs without complaint and let me do mine.

If only people-management were that simple! In fact, emotions rule in the workplace, whether you want to admit it or not. You think the fight your controller had last night with her husband doesn’t affect you? That you can turn your back when one of your salespeople tells you he’s being ridden so hard by his sales manager that he can’t focus? That it’s not your problem when a customer made your customer service manager break into tears?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the impact of emotions at work as I go through the process of becoming certified as an Emotional Intelligence coach. There are a variety of emotional intelligence skills noted by Genos America, an expert in the field. They are emotional self-awareness, emotional expression, emotional awareness of others, emotional reasoning, emotional self-management, emotional management of others, and emotional self-control.

The other day I was working with a client on emotional awareness of others–the skill of perceiving and understanding others’ emotions. After taking a self-assessment and having several people from her organization take the assessment to score her, she found that while her self-score was high, the score given to her by her raters was quite low. The ratings were based on how frequently she identifies the way people feel about issues at work, understands what causes people to feel specific emotions, and demonstrates an understanding of others’ feelings at work.

She said something interesting when reflecting on her results. “I care really deeply about my people, but I guess I don’t always show it.”  Wow, you don’t hear management types show that degree of self-assessment very often! She’s now doing a fieldwork assignment to think about a situation where emotional awareness was important to a business outcome, what she could have done better, actions she can take to develop her skill and how she’ll be able to measure her progress.

Have you had an interesting Emotional Intelligence experience in the workplace? Let me know.

Tags: emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, human resources, sales management, success

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