Aaron Harowitz and Zack Silverman started their small food company two years ago after seven months of testing and refining their recipe for a Caesar mix made with natural ingredients.
Walter Craft Caesar Mix now has six employees and sells its product to dozens of grocery stores, restaurants and bars across Canada.
Harowitz and Silverman hired their first employee, a sales director, two months after starting the business. Initially, it was difficult for them relinquish control after being responsible for every part of the business.
“You want to manage everything,” Harowitz said. “I personally had the feeling that I wanted to do it all, and frankly I couldn’t.”
But the new hire worked out well and the founders realized that delegating tasks like sales, operations and logistics would give them more time to focus on long-term planning for the business. Harowitz and Silverman have added employees slowly as the company has grown.
“When I was trying to run the business doing both day-to-day operations and longer-term planning and strategy and brand positioning, that was certainly a challenge,” Harowitz said.
The sales director focused solely on developing a market in Ontario, which now represents a major part of the business.
He also did a better job in sales than Harowitz and Silverman had when they were trying to do everything. They company quickly added two more salespeople.
“He had an amazing skill set, was passionate and driven and was solely focused on developing those relationships,” Harowitz said.
Harowitz said he and his partner are interested in exporting to the United States, but for now are focused on continuing to expand in Canada.
On focusing on just one product | “It really allows you to focus on that brand. We put all our energy into growing Walter Caesar from zero sales to where we are today. Taste is hugely important for us and we spent a long time working on recipe development. It was a lot of trial and error, using our friends and family to test many iterations of the product.
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