Q&A With John And Susan Lawrence Of Peppers Fine Catering
John and Susan Lawrence, Co-owners, Peppers Fine Catering, Northborough
Just a little more than 25 years ago, Susan Lawrence fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening her own food business, which is now Peppers Fine Catering. Just four months later, seasoned chef John Lawrence entered the picture. With that as the foundation, they married a few years later. They sat down with the WBJ to talk about the business and life together.
Your company just marked its silver anniversary. But how long have you been married?
SUSAN: Nineteen years. Best hire I ever made.
Many married couples shudder at the thought of working alongside one another. Is it difficult to separate work life from home life?
JOHN: We're both crazy about food, so even when we're not working, we're either cooking or talking about food.
SUSAN: When we leave the building and we enter our personal life, we kind of stop talking shop and just talk about the passion of food and catering and events, and not the nitty-gritty of the business.
And how do you separate the roles of leadership and management between yourselves?
SUSAN: We kind of do a lot of that together. That's when we discuss, together, the big picture of how we want our company to be and how we want our customers to understand us, how we want our staff to understand our mission so that we're all working together and as John likes to say, 'rowing in the same direction.' So we need to be rowing in the same direction for that to happen. We kind of like, divide and conquer.
Your business employs an army — so to speak — of part-time employees, and there's really no set schedule for many of them. How do you manage that?
JOHN: It's a unique juggling act, but we've got it down pretty well. About 12 or 14 years ago, we hired a web designer to put together a website that was just dedicated toward the staffing. We used to have three or four people working (the phones) constantly, leaving messages, calling back, working all hours of the day and night, what have you. And we now have one person who does it part time, and it's beautiful because when an inquiry comes in and a client asks for our services, an email goes out to all the people who are qualified that this is a job that has just opened up. That whole website just changed our world when it came to staffing.
SUSAN: I think the other aspect of that is that is we just had a training class for all of our part-time wait staff. We do this once or twice a year, and we also do it for the per-diem chefs, we do it for the bartenders so that they understand our mission, safety, courtesy, all those kinds of things as well. It's just the other important part of being successful at what you do.
There's a lot of emphasis today on food, and people who make their living around food. Many years ago, there wasn't this type of attention. What do you think happened along the way?
JOHN: It was an evolution. It started with Julia Child but it really ramped up when Martha Stewart came on the scene. Shops in New York City started addressing all those dual-income families and then the Food Network changed everyone's world.
SUSAN: I think the world got smaller. People travel and people are out and about in an everyday manner versus just a special occasion. So with that comes exposure to fine dining or great food at every different level. I mean, you could have food trucks that serve awesome food.
What are the three biggest lessons for anyone who wants to start his or her own business?
JOHN: It better be your dream, because you really have to have an awful lot of passion and diligence and wherewithal to really suit up every day to stay in business. It's a full-time sport.
SUSAN: You just can't do it all, because you may love food (for example), but you have to be a businessperson; you have no choice in that. You have to be an accountant; you have no choice in that. You have to manage people. So it may be all about food in your mind, but you have to bring in all the right players to make yourself successful.
JOHN: (And) you have to listen to the customer. Our business has evolved by listening to the customer.
Video
John and Susan Lawrence of Pepper's Fine Catering In Northborough
Read more
The Experts Behind The Stretchers: Q&A With Steve DiOrio Of Vital EMS
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments