Doing Business Like it Matters: Icing on the Cake, Bellingham, WA
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Let’s say you are a senior project coordinator for Apple in Cupertino,CA and you’re looking for that next opportunity for yourself. Isn’t the obvious choice to open a gourmet cupcake store in Bellingham, WA. ? OK, cupcakes might not be the first possibility you come up with and it wasn’t for Liz Kovacs either, she did make a few stops in between. But..Apple was where she started as a grown up and where has she ended up? With a gourmet cupcake store, Icing on the Cake in Bellingham, WA.
What I found when I entered Liz’s store at 314 Champion Street was an experience that is about a lot more than cupcakes. It feels like you are walking into a high end jewelry retailer there in the downtown Arts District. If you ask her Liz will tell you that for her it is about a lot more as well, it is about the qualities of the experience when you are a customer of ‘Icing on the Cake’, among them are the baking and presenting of a cupcake that passes the ultimate test. As it turns out she designed the ultimate test herself but when she shared it made sense to me. “You have to try the cupcakes out on kids, kids will always eat the frosting but if they eat the cake, that’s a great cupcake!” The kids I saw in the store while I was there ate every last bite. Her cupcakes were clearly passing what seemed to me to be a pretty rigorous quality test.
But as Liz said, ‘Icing on the Cake’ and the products offered there are about a lot more than just the cake in the cupcake. When she told me that since she was 5 years old she has been obsessed with out-baking the cake on the Duncan Hines box I knew this endeavor involved passion. You know which cake she is talking about too, the white cake with the gooey vanilla frosting! (Liz loved that look but thinks they probably cheated on the frosting and anyway, she is not about to serve anything that starts in a box.)
But this cupcake business is also about artistry and craftsmanship. When Liz made the commitment to bake as a profession she already knew she was creative. Baking was an avenue for the expression of her creativity. She also recognized that being creative was not enough, she needed to be skilled as well so she took the initiative to address her skill gap and enrolled in and completed the Wilton Cake Decorating Program at the Wilton School near Chicago. If you don’t know about Wilton you should take a look, pretty amazing stuff!
Passion, Creativity, Initiative , unleashing these qualities in our places of work is the challenge that people like Gary Hamel say lies in front of all organizations. And here is Liz Kovacs, without any management support exercising passion, creativity and initiative like there is no tomorrow. What gives? How do we differentiate between people like Liz Kovacs, the wonderful playful crew at Pike Place Fish Market , and the place where you work?
I write, read and think a lot about engagement. What I read often disappoints me in that it seems to be more of the old “carrot or stick” approach. Employers and managers, despite well developed definitions of employee engagement, still continue to think in terms like Hamel described in The ‘Future Of Management’.
“How do we (meaning management) get more (meaning units of production per hour) out of our people (meaning the individuals who are obliged to follow our orders)?”
The operative question for 20th century managers. Gary Hamel
And we been repeatedly told, by those who reportedly measure such things, that the current state of engagement, of the American work force at least, is dismal, apparently only about 27% of workers report being fully engaged. In my view there are a lot of maybes when it comes to engagement and there will continue to be until we begin to explore the degree to which Choice and Embracing Interdependence factor into this equation.
What gets young men in the prime of their lives to get to bed early every night to participate in a 6AM set up routine that is exactly the same day after day seven days a week? Pull the fish out of the freezer, shovel the ice, stack the fish, and sell the fish; Choice, and a group of co-workers who are counting on them and will hold them to account. They choose this experience, this work and these co-workers each day as though it was their first on the job.
So what does Choice have to do with Liz Kovacs and cupcakes? It is the backdrop against which her whole business takes place. And let’s face it, her routine is pretty much the same every day, even she’ll tell you that. On more than one occasion she has been approached by people who are inspired by her product, at least the idea of it. When she describes to them the actual process behind all the pretty jewels in the case out front, which she calls high production baking, they become almost immediately disenchanted.
And Embracing Interdependence? I would hope it would be obvious that none of us really make it alone in this world but in case the point needs to be made you can take a look at this piece about Liz and her cupcakes from the Bellingham Business Journal back in October of last year. She’s the first to tell you she could not being doing this alone.
“Her daughters, Emily and Ona, help with baking, decorating and cleaning. Emily also operates the business's booth at the Bellingham Farmers Market...
Kovacs' husband, Steve, has also been instrumental. He helped build her first commercial kitchen, which she used for a small baking business she started in 1998. He was also her guinea pig for the six months she spent refining her recipes."He's a retired taste tester now," Kovacs said
Her brother, Steve Sieler, an independent art director in Santa Cruz, does all the marketing for the business, he designed the logo as well as the retail space.."
Ultimately Liz is a business person, her focus is the customer experience, as you can readily tell when you spend time with her as I did. Those years at Apple served her well. She is a business person operating a gourmet bakery not a baker operating a business so as she sat in front of me talking she was also working on the business. As we talked she was taking pieces of silverware fresh from the dishwasher and wiping the water spots off with a towel. She does it as a matter of Choice because everything about ‘Icing on the Cake’ is done like it matters.
- So where is "what matters" not being attended to in your area?
- Can you tell if it Choice or Need that keeps your people coming back?
- Have you fully Embraced the Interdependence and do you make
sure your supporters experience appreciation?
