June 27, 2005
A little on the side | How five Maine entrepreneurs juggle full-time professional jobs and their own startup ventures
By Michaela Cavallaro
In Maine, having multiple occupations has never been unusual; in fact, an old downeast canard advises that you ought to be nice to that muddy man you see digging clams at the shoreline, as he may be occupying the pulpit come Sunday morning ˆ or the bank president's office on Monday.
While many people cobble together a living with multiple jobs out of economic necessity, others are driven by passion. They devote eight or 10 hours a day to their work as professionals in software or law or psychotherapy, then spend their evenings and weekends sequestered in spare rooms or basement workshops, developing beach chairs or a line of skirts or an organic apple butter. During the day, they work for someone else. At night, they work for themselves.
While statistics don't differentiate between those who hold down multiple jobs because they want to and those who feel they must, last year 3.9 million people in the United States had a primary full-time job and a secondary part-time job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (That's an increase of two percent over the year prior.) Although Maine numbers aren't readily available, anecdotal evidence ˆ that is, the number of press releases submitted to Mainebiz that announce a new business and then mention the entrepreneur's day job ˆ suggests the trend is on the rise in the Pine Tree State, too.
In the last year or so, software project manager Brian Fish launched Oh Yeah Comfy, a one-man beach chair manufacturing company. Attorney Margaret Minister O'Keefe started selling a line of skirts under her own m. minister label. Therapist Waite Maclin has begun distributing his Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter to stores across New England. Economic developer Eric Carson launched Royal River Winery. And the old hand in the group, public relations professional Dan Marois, has run his murder mystery dinner theater business, Mystery for Hire, since 1992.
In separate interviews, each of the five talked of balancing day jobs with their own endeavors, of struggling with the classic small-business issue of managing growth, of wondering if, and how, the side business might become the main attraction. Here are their stories.
Brian Fish
Age: 31
Day job: Project manager, Recruiternet, Portland
Side business: Oh Yeah Comfy
Product: Hand-built beach chairs, retailing for $149.95
Launched: April 2004
Headquarters: Fish's Portland basement
Startup costs: $12,000
Long-term plan: Open a manufacturing facility and run the business full-time
Web: www.ohyeahcomfy.com
It was the summer of 2001, and Portland resident Brian Fish was at his annual family vacation in Brigantine, N.J. Early in the week Fish's beach chair broke, and he spent an inordinate amount of time grousing about it. "I didn't like the experience," he says. "You're working hard all year, you finally get your one week of vacation on the beach and your chair breaks. There's nothing fun about that."
On the drive back to Portland, the perfect beach chair design popped into Fish's head. It would have a wood frame with a high back, so your head would be supported. It would have comfortable arms that included a cupholder. And, most importantly, it would stand up to repeated use summer after summer. He even knew what he'd call it: Oh Yeah Comfy, for what you'd say when you sat down.
Though he was interested in woodworking, he'd never built anything like this, much less designed it. Living in a one-bedroom apartment on Portland's Munjoy Hill, Fish started buying tools and wood, and tinkering with his idea. After a few years, he nailed the chair ˆ "It was exactly what I'd envisioned," he says.
Many people might have stopped there ˆ if they'd ever taken action on the idea in the first place. But Fish says he knew he could sell the chairs. Last year, he built a website ˆ ohyeahcomfy.com ˆ for direct sales, and convinced Higgins Beach Market in Scarborough and Maine Mountain Works in Portland to stock the chairs. His latest coup, which he negotiated recently, is wholesaling chairs to beachchairs.com, which as of mid-June was featuring Fish's product on its home page.
When orders come in, Fish assembles the chairs himself from parts he's cut and finished in his basement. All the time he's spent actually building more than 150 chairs, on top of the 40 hours a week he puts in at Recruiternet, means he hasn't been able to devote a lot of attention to sales and marketing, something he hopes to remedy over the next few months. "Time management is the biggest thing," he says. "Managing my personal time, my work time, my marriage ˆ and now it's the time of year when work needs to be done at my house. The grass needs to be cut. It's a big balancing game when everything's a top priority."
At work during the day, Fish keeps an eye on his Oh Yeah Comfy e-mail account. On a recent morning, for example, he got a message from a woman in London who wanted to buy six chairs, so he spent a few minutes investigating shipping options. He's aided by what he says is Recruiternet's "progressive" work environment, and by a happy coincidence: Robert Neveu, the company's president, used to be in the outdoor furniture business, so Fish was able to get some pointers on the industry from him.
Though Fish says he enjoys his day job helping clients implement recruiting software, what gives him the most satisfaction is walking down Higgins Beach and seeing someone he doesn't know sitting in an Oh Yeah Comfy chair. "It gets a little repetitive drilling thousands of holes [for assembly], but I know I need to do it before I can get someone else to do it for me," he says. "It's a really fun thing to work on and talk about. When people ask me what I do, I say, 'I own a beach chair business.'
Margaret Minister O'Keefe
Age: 38
Day job: Partner, Pierce Atwood, Portland
Side business: m. minister
Product: Skirts retailing for $95
Launched: March 2005
Headquarters: O'Keefe's Cumberland attic
Startup costs: $10,000
Long-term plan: "Develop the right formula for the number of styles and the volume of each style to bring costs downˆ and reach a broader number of customers"
Web: www.mminister.com
"I love practicing law," says Margaret Minister O'Keefe. And as it turns out, her legal career has been good preparation for running m. minister, a clothing line featuring skirts designed to go from the office to a kids' soccer game to dinner with friends. O'Keefe's practice at Pierce Atwood in Portland focuses on intellectual property, and her clients include fashion and home décor designers. And O'Keefe says all the knowledge of copyright and trademark issues she gained in law school meant she was able to avoid some rookie mistakes when she launched her company a few months ago. So, for example, the labels on her skirts comply with Federal Trade Commission regulations, and her business name hasn't been trademarked by anyone else.
The combination of the two vocations has led to other benefits, too. O'Keefe says she's gained an understanding of why clients don't always take their lawyers' advice: "Businesses have so many balls up in the air," she says. "It's given me a better appreciation of the issues that keep our clients up at night."
O'Keefe's inspiration for the business sprang from her long-time love of sewing, which she rediscovered while pregnant with her son six years ago. "I started going through the nesting period," she says with a laugh, "and I just made everything ˆ crib skirts, pillows, curtains, bed sheets." Eventually, baby bedding turned into clothing for dolls and toddlers' superhero capes.
Then, last summer, O'Keefe attended a party wearing a skirt she'd designed and made from vintage fabric with a blue-and-white daisy print. The skirt was a hit ˆ friends kept asking where she bought it ˆ so she made a few more for a charity auction last fall. Those skirts got a similar reaction, and O'Keefe realized she'd hit upon a business idea that both satisfied her creative side and could be combined relatively easy with her legal career. She focuses on fabric selection and designing new items ˆ work that can be done at night and on the weekends ˆ and outsources production of the skirts to KK Clothing & Manufacturing, a small factory on Preble Street in Portland that employs women O'Keefe calls "expert stitchers." The daisy skirt, dubbed Southwest Harbor, formed the basis for the spring 2005 line of 16 skirts, which are available in six stores from New York to Portland and on O'Keefe's website.
Recently, O'Keefe's college roommate, a neurologist who's taking some time off to be with her young son, has agreed to handle sales for m. minister (named for the label O'Keefe's mother sewed in her clothes as a kid). She's also hired a friend to do public relations and marketing work for the company. "I'm not sure I could have taken on a project that would compete too much with my work here," O'Keefe says in an interview at Pierce Atwood. "The only way this has been able to work is by automating and delegating."
C. Waite Maclin
Age: "A very young 70"
Day job: Therapist and consultant in private practice, Portland
Side business: Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter
Product: Organic apple butter, retailing for $4.50-$5.95
Launched: November 2004
Headquarters: Maclin's Deering Street office in Portland
Startup costs: $14,000
Long-term plan: Sell an expanded line of products to a national market
Web: www.pastorchuckorchards.com
Apples, C. Waite Maclin says, are a "remarkable" fruit. They can be used as a condiment, a sweetener and a side dish ˆ not to mention simply eaten alone, crisp and refreshing. They've also led Maclin, an ordained Episcopal priest who runs a private psychotherapy and organizational consulting practice, to launch a new career as a specialty food producer.
Maclin is used to juggling multiple professional commitments; as a pastor in North Carolina in the 1960s, for example, he also spent time doing community building and civil rights work. His latest passion is Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter, an organic apple butter product whose roots go back nearly two decades. Maclin, who in 1986 began planting apple trees on land he and his wife, Christine, own in Cushing, enjoyed experimenting with the fruits of his labors, making apple cider, apple sauce and, eventually, apple butter. At one point, he says, "I looked up from dunking jars in a hot water bath and said, 'I was born to can.'"
But Maclin eventually realized that if he wanted to sell the product, rather than give it away to friends and family, making apple butter in his kitchen wasn't going to work. So last July he shut his practice down for a week and hit the road, visiting small-business assistance providers, a "co-packer" (a company that would produce the apple butter to Maclin's specifications) and a graphic designer who could start working on labels for the product. Along with the moniker Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter ˆ derived from Maclin's first name, Charles ˆ Maclin had dreamed up what he thought was the perfect tag line: "Taste this and know the difference between good and evil."
After tinkering with his recipe and contracting with Maine farmers for apples ˆ his own orchard doesn't yield the volume he requires ˆ Maclin produced his first saleable batch of apple butter last November. In the meantime, he'd gotten Northeast Laboratory Services in Winslow to test the product's shelf life and analyze its nutritional content, and he'd registered for a bar code. "I don't want this to sound like a lark," Maclin says. "I wanted the label to convey that this is a serious product."
To make his commitment to the venture tangible, Maclin ˆ Pastor Chuck's sole salesman, marketer, customer service rep and product developer ˆ decided in January to devote half a week every other week to the business. Most of his counseling clients are unaware of the reason for his schedule change, and that's just fine with him. "I really want to keep these two things separate," he says. "Ethically, I have to."
Still, for Maclin the juggling act between his day job and his startup is relatively easy; since he works for himself all the time, there's no one to complain if he calls a retailer between therapy clients, or takes the long route to his office to drop some samples off at a new store. And the new business ˆ which he hopes to expand to include apple sauce ˆ has opened up what he says is a "whole new world." "Both my father and brothers were salespeople," he says. "I think I've been a closet salesperson all my life."
Eric Carson
Age: 51
Day job: Director of economic development, Westbrook
Side business: Royal River Winery
Product: Wine retailing for $11-$13; varieties include Big Woods Red, Ice Wine and Ocean Diva
Launched: August 2004
Headquarters: Carson's basement in Yarmouth
Startup costs: "A lot more than I want to know, probably close to $20,000"
Long-term plan: Move the winery into its own building and develop additional varieties
Web: www.royalriverwinery.com
The family joke, says Eric Carson, is that he got tired of the time it took to cut his one-acre lawn, so he planted grapes instead. Now that he's running his own winery, though, that acre requires far more attention than the few hours he once needed to mow it.
Though Royal River Winery's three varieties are currently made using grapes Carson and his wife, Irene Marchenay, import from Canada and California, their goal is to eventually bottle wine made from grapes grown on their own land; they're experimenting with several varieties they've found through discussions with the handful of Maine winemakers and with researchers at the University of Minnesota.
In the meantime, simply setting up the year-old winery ˆ and dealing with the maze of state and federal regulations that govern the sale of alcoholic products ˆ has been an education for Carson, who directs Westbrook's economic development department. (Marchenay teaches at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish.) While he says working with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was fairly simple, the state had a few more hoops to jump through. "In this state, you have to have your wine's labels approved by the feds and the state before you can get licensed," he says. "It's like you have to develop the ad campaign before you design the car."
However, the experience is not without its benefits: "It helps my day job that I can easily understand the struggles of a small-business person," says Carson, adding that he's otherwise careful to keep his two occupations separate. ("When I'm on the public's time, I do the public's business," he says.)
Among those struggles is managing growth. Royal River's three wines are carried by five retail stores from Kennebunk to Brunswick. The varieties, which Carson describes as "wines to be drunk" rather than invested in, sell well. But he and Marchenay are wary of adding another retailer for fear they couldn't meet the demand. "We haven't advertised yet," he says. "It would be great to do an ad, but we've been very careful to make sure to have enough supply."
In the short term, Carson and Marchenay are developing another variety, a chardonnay blend. Eventually, the couple, who met in Ithaca, N.Y. and have been married for 16 years, would like to double production, in which case the winery would have to expand beyond their basement. Carson has thought about building a barn or small cabin on their 3.5-acre lot, but he admits the idea is a little exhausting. "At the end of the day, when you work eight or 10 hours a day, to do another business is hard," he says. "It's not like I'm 20."
Still, Carson visibly brightens when explaining, for example, the trial-and-error process by which he and Marchenay developed their first vintage, an ice wine that's sold in 375-milliliter bottles and typically served with dessert. "We started just kidding around, and it was horrible," he says with a laugh. "Because we work in small batches, everything's really easy to deal with."
Dan Marois
Age: 50
Day job: Marketing director, Franklin Community Health Network, Farmington
Side business: Mystery for Hire
Service: Murder mystery dinner theater, charging $1,000-$2,000 per show
Launched: 1992, when Marois and his wife, Denise, bought and renamed the company
Headquarters: Marois' Poland home
Startup costs: $2,500
Long-term plan: "There seems to be a market for it ˆ it might still be a retirement prospect when we're old and gray"
Web: www.mysteryforhire.com
For Dan Marois, juggling his day job as a health care marketing executive and his side business running a murder mystery dinner theater troupe has become old hat. Marois and his wife, Denise, bought the company in 1992 after performing in it for 18 months.
Although Marois says they got a little carried away in the early years, booking 60 shows in their first year of ownership, 90 in their second and 120 in their third, they've scaled the business back to a manageable 30 shows annually. In addition to putting their daughter through college, the theater business provides Marois with what he says is a therapeutic outlet for the demands of everyday life. "Imagine, at the end of your work day, having the opportunity to go and entertain people and become an entirely different character," says Marois. "When you're schmoozing [with the audience] in character between scenes, you can do a lot of things you wouldn't do in real life."
Of course, in shows like Marriage Can Be a Mystery and Murder Most Medieval, where audience participation is not only welcomed but encouraged, attendees themselves often do things they otherwise might not. Marois tells the story of a show in which he plays a British policeman; the plot point hinges on his discovery of a voodoo doll planted under a chair in the crowd. One night, Marois reached for the doll only to find it missing; after some ad-libbed investigation, he discovered that an elderly woman in the crowd had taken it. "I asked her for it, and she says, 'No, I'm taking it home to my puppy,'" Marois says. "So what do you do in this situation? You arrest her, you put her in handcuffs and haul her offstage" ˆ and the audience is none the wiser.
Such festivities are sought after by corporate event planners, who often contract with Mystery for Hire for entertainment at company retreats or holiday parties. Although Marois' marketing expertise makes him the de facto booking and marketing manager for the troupe, he says they get new business largely by word of mouth, adding that "every show has the potential to book another show."
The company has a repertoire of seven murder mystery shows, plus a new offering, Politics Can Be Murder, which is the first of their shows written by Dan and Denise Marois. They use a group of about 10 actors, who've worked together for years and can jump into a new role or improvise lines for an old one with ease. That familiarity means the group doesn't have to spend much time in rehearsals, though they'll often travel to bookings together and rehearse on the way there.
Marois says he works to keep his own company from interfering with his day job (though Mystery for Hire has been hired by one or another of his employers to perform at a company event). That, too, is made easier by the theater company's long history, though Marois says he will occasionally wander outside with his cell phone to take a Mystery for Hire call during the day.
Like the other entrepreneurs interviewed for this story, Marois says he'd never take on his own business on top of a day job if it didn't provide satisfaction and enjoyment. "Yes," he says, "the actors are paid, and it's a business for us ˆ but don't think it's not fun."
While many people cobble together a living with multiple jobs out of economic necessity, others are driven by passion. They devote eight or 10 hours a day to their work as professionals in software or law or psychotherapy, then spend their evenings and weekends sequestered in spare rooms or basement workshops, developing beach chairs or a line of skirts or an organic apple butter. During the day, they work for someone else. At night, they work for themselves.
While statistics don't differentiate between those who hold down multiple jobs because they want to and those who feel they must, last year 3.9 million people in the United States had a primary full-time job and a secondary part-time job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (That's an increase of two percent over the year prior.) Although Maine numbers aren't readily available, anecdotal evidence ˆ that is, the number of press releases submitted to Mainebiz that announce a new business and then mention the entrepreneur's day job ˆ suggests the trend is on the rise in the Pine Tree State, too.
In the last year or so, software project manager Brian Fish launched Oh Yeah Comfy, a one-man beach chair manufacturing company. Attorney Margaret Minister O'Keefe started selling a line of skirts under her own m. minister label. Therapist Waite Maclin has begun distributing his Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter to stores across New England. Economic developer Eric Carson launched Royal River Winery. And the old hand in the group, public relations professional Dan Marois, has run his murder mystery dinner theater business, Mystery for Hire, since 1992.
In separate interviews, each of the five talked of balancing day jobs with their own endeavors, of struggling with the classic small-business issue of managing growth, of wondering if, and how, the side business might become the main attraction. Here are their stories.
Brian Fish
Age: 31
Day job: Project manager, Recruiternet, Portland
Side business: Oh Yeah Comfy
Product: Hand-built beach chairs, retailing for $149.95
Launched: April 2004
Headquarters: Fish's Portland basement
Startup costs: $12,000
Long-term plan: Open a manufacturing facility and run the business full-time
Web: www.ohyeahcomfy.com
It was the summer of 2001, and Portland resident Brian Fish was at his annual family vacation in Brigantine, N.J. Early in the week Fish's beach chair broke, and he spent an inordinate amount of time grousing about it. "I didn't like the experience," he says. "You're working hard all year, you finally get your one week of vacation on the beach and your chair breaks. There's nothing fun about that."
On the drive back to Portland, the perfect beach chair design popped into Fish's head. It would have a wood frame with a high back, so your head would be supported. It would have comfortable arms that included a cupholder. And, most importantly, it would stand up to repeated use summer after summer. He even knew what he'd call it: Oh Yeah Comfy, for what you'd say when you sat down.
Though he was interested in woodworking, he'd never built anything like this, much less designed it. Living in a one-bedroom apartment on Portland's Munjoy Hill, Fish started buying tools and wood, and tinkering with his idea. After a few years, he nailed the chair ˆ "It was exactly what I'd envisioned," he says.
Many people might have stopped there ˆ if they'd ever taken action on the idea in the first place. But Fish says he knew he could sell the chairs. Last year, he built a website ˆ ohyeahcomfy.com ˆ for direct sales, and convinced Higgins Beach Market in Scarborough and Maine Mountain Works in Portland to stock the chairs. His latest coup, which he negotiated recently, is wholesaling chairs to beachchairs.com, which as of mid-June was featuring Fish's product on its home page.
When orders come in, Fish assembles the chairs himself from parts he's cut and finished in his basement. All the time he's spent actually building more than 150 chairs, on top of the 40 hours a week he puts in at Recruiternet, means he hasn't been able to devote a lot of attention to sales and marketing, something he hopes to remedy over the next few months. "Time management is the biggest thing," he says. "Managing my personal time, my work time, my marriage ˆ and now it's the time of year when work needs to be done at my house. The grass needs to be cut. It's a big balancing game when everything's a top priority."
At work during the day, Fish keeps an eye on his Oh Yeah Comfy e-mail account. On a recent morning, for example, he got a message from a woman in London who wanted to buy six chairs, so he spent a few minutes investigating shipping options. He's aided by what he says is Recruiternet's "progressive" work environment, and by a happy coincidence: Robert Neveu, the company's president, used to be in the outdoor furniture business, so Fish was able to get some pointers on the industry from him.
Though Fish says he enjoys his day job helping clients implement recruiting software, what gives him the most satisfaction is walking down Higgins Beach and seeing someone he doesn't know sitting in an Oh Yeah Comfy chair. "It gets a little repetitive drilling thousands of holes [for assembly], but I know I need to do it before I can get someone else to do it for me," he says. "It's a really fun thing to work on and talk about. When people ask me what I do, I say, 'I own a beach chair business.'
Margaret Minister O'Keefe
Age: 38
Day job: Partner, Pierce Atwood, Portland
Side business: m. minister
Product: Skirts retailing for $95
Launched: March 2005
Headquarters: O'Keefe's Cumberland attic
Startup costs: $10,000
Long-term plan: "Develop the right formula for the number of styles and the volume of each style to bring costs downˆ and reach a broader number of customers"
Web: www.mminister.com
"I love practicing law," says Margaret Minister O'Keefe. And as it turns out, her legal career has been good preparation for running m. minister, a clothing line featuring skirts designed to go from the office to a kids' soccer game to dinner with friends. O'Keefe's practice at Pierce Atwood in Portland focuses on intellectual property, and her clients include fashion and home décor designers. And O'Keefe says all the knowledge of copyright and trademark issues she gained in law school meant she was able to avoid some rookie mistakes when she launched her company a few months ago. So, for example, the labels on her skirts comply with Federal Trade Commission regulations, and her business name hasn't been trademarked by anyone else.
The combination of the two vocations has led to other benefits, too. O'Keefe says she's gained an understanding of why clients don't always take their lawyers' advice: "Businesses have so many balls up in the air," she says. "It's given me a better appreciation of the issues that keep our clients up at night."
O'Keefe's inspiration for the business sprang from her long-time love of sewing, which she rediscovered while pregnant with her son six years ago. "I started going through the nesting period," she says with a laugh, "and I just made everything ˆ crib skirts, pillows, curtains, bed sheets." Eventually, baby bedding turned into clothing for dolls and toddlers' superhero capes.
Then, last summer, O'Keefe attended a party wearing a skirt she'd designed and made from vintage fabric with a blue-and-white daisy print. The skirt was a hit ˆ friends kept asking where she bought it ˆ so she made a few more for a charity auction last fall. Those skirts got a similar reaction, and O'Keefe realized she'd hit upon a business idea that both satisfied her creative side and could be combined relatively easy with her legal career. She focuses on fabric selection and designing new items ˆ work that can be done at night and on the weekends ˆ and outsources production of the skirts to KK Clothing & Manufacturing, a small factory on Preble Street in Portland that employs women O'Keefe calls "expert stitchers." The daisy skirt, dubbed Southwest Harbor, formed the basis for the spring 2005 line of 16 skirts, which are available in six stores from New York to Portland and on O'Keefe's website.
Recently, O'Keefe's college roommate, a neurologist who's taking some time off to be with her young son, has agreed to handle sales for m. minister (named for the label O'Keefe's mother sewed in her clothes as a kid). She's also hired a friend to do public relations and marketing work for the company. "I'm not sure I could have taken on a project that would compete too much with my work here," O'Keefe says in an interview at Pierce Atwood. "The only way this has been able to work is by automating and delegating."
C. Waite Maclin
Age: "A very young 70"
Day job: Therapist and consultant in private practice, Portland
Side business: Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter
Product: Organic apple butter, retailing for $4.50-$5.95
Launched: November 2004
Headquarters: Maclin's Deering Street office in Portland
Startup costs: $14,000
Long-term plan: Sell an expanded line of products to a national market
Web: www.pastorchuckorchards.com
Apples, C. Waite Maclin says, are a "remarkable" fruit. They can be used as a condiment, a sweetener and a side dish ˆ not to mention simply eaten alone, crisp and refreshing. They've also led Maclin, an ordained Episcopal priest who runs a private psychotherapy and organizational consulting practice, to launch a new career as a specialty food producer.
Maclin is used to juggling multiple professional commitments; as a pastor in North Carolina in the 1960s, for example, he also spent time doing community building and civil rights work. His latest passion is Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter, an organic apple butter product whose roots go back nearly two decades. Maclin, who in 1986 began planting apple trees on land he and his wife, Christine, own in Cushing, enjoyed experimenting with the fruits of his labors, making apple cider, apple sauce and, eventually, apple butter. At one point, he says, "I looked up from dunking jars in a hot water bath and said, 'I was born to can.'"
But Maclin eventually realized that if he wanted to sell the product, rather than give it away to friends and family, making apple butter in his kitchen wasn't going to work. So last July he shut his practice down for a week and hit the road, visiting small-business assistance providers, a "co-packer" (a company that would produce the apple butter to Maclin's specifications) and a graphic designer who could start working on labels for the product. Along with the moniker Pastor Chuck's Apple Butter ˆ derived from Maclin's first name, Charles ˆ Maclin had dreamed up what he thought was the perfect tag line: "Taste this and know the difference between good and evil."
After tinkering with his recipe and contracting with Maine farmers for apples ˆ his own orchard doesn't yield the volume he requires ˆ Maclin produced his first saleable batch of apple butter last November. In the meantime, he'd gotten Northeast Laboratory Services in Winslow to test the product's shelf life and analyze its nutritional content, and he'd registered for a bar code. "I don't want this to sound like a lark," Maclin says. "I wanted the label to convey that this is a serious product."
To make his commitment to the venture tangible, Maclin ˆ Pastor Chuck's sole salesman, marketer, customer service rep and product developer ˆ decided in January to devote half a week every other week to the business. Most of his counseling clients are unaware of the reason for his schedule change, and that's just fine with him. "I really want to keep these two things separate," he says. "Ethically, I have to."
Still, for Maclin the juggling act between his day job and his startup is relatively easy; since he works for himself all the time, there's no one to complain if he calls a retailer between therapy clients, or takes the long route to his office to drop some samples off at a new store. And the new business ˆ which he hopes to expand to include apple sauce ˆ has opened up what he says is a "whole new world." "Both my father and brothers were salespeople," he says. "I think I've been a closet salesperson all my life."
Eric Carson
Age: 51
Day job: Director of economic development, Westbrook
Side business: Royal River Winery
Product: Wine retailing for $11-$13; varieties include Big Woods Red, Ice Wine and Ocean Diva
Launched: August 2004
Headquarters: Carson's basement in Yarmouth
Startup costs: "A lot more than I want to know, probably close to $20,000"
Long-term plan: Move the winery into its own building and develop additional varieties
Web: www.royalriverwinery.com
The family joke, says Eric Carson, is that he got tired of the time it took to cut his one-acre lawn, so he planted grapes instead. Now that he's running his own winery, though, that acre requires far more attention than the few hours he once needed to mow it.
Though Royal River Winery's three varieties are currently made using grapes Carson and his wife, Irene Marchenay, import from Canada and California, their goal is to eventually bottle wine made from grapes grown on their own land; they're experimenting with several varieties they've found through discussions with the handful of Maine winemakers and with researchers at the University of Minnesota.
In the meantime, simply setting up the year-old winery ˆ and dealing with the maze of state and federal regulations that govern the sale of alcoholic products ˆ has been an education for Carson, who directs Westbrook's economic development department. (Marchenay teaches at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish.) While he says working with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was fairly simple, the state had a few more hoops to jump through. "In this state, you have to have your wine's labels approved by the feds and the state before you can get licensed," he says. "It's like you have to develop the ad campaign before you design the car."
However, the experience is not without its benefits: "It helps my day job that I can easily understand the struggles of a small-business person," says Carson, adding that he's otherwise careful to keep his two occupations separate. ("When I'm on the public's time, I do the public's business," he says.)
Among those struggles is managing growth. Royal River's three wines are carried by five retail stores from Kennebunk to Brunswick. The varieties, which Carson describes as "wines to be drunk" rather than invested in, sell well. But he and Marchenay are wary of adding another retailer for fear they couldn't meet the demand. "We haven't advertised yet," he says. "It would be great to do an ad, but we've been very careful to make sure to have enough supply."
In the short term, Carson and Marchenay are developing another variety, a chardonnay blend. Eventually, the couple, who met in Ithaca, N.Y. and have been married for 16 years, would like to double production, in which case the winery would have to expand beyond their basement. Carson has thought about building a barn or small cabin on their 3.5-acre lot, but he admits the idea is a little exhausting. "At the end of the day, when you work eight or 10 hours a day, to do another business is hard," he says. "It's not like I'm 20."
Still, Carson visibly brightens when explaining, for example, the trial-and-error process by which he and Marchenay developed their first vintage, an ice wine that's sold in 375-milliliter bottles and typically served with dessert. "We started just kidding around, and it was horrible," he says with a laugh. "Because we work in small batches, everything's really easy to deal with."
Dan Marois
Age: 50
Day job: Marketing director, Franklin Community Health Network, Farmington
Side business: Mystery for Hire
Service: Murder mystery dinner theater, charging $1,000-$2,000 per show
Launched: 1992, when Marois and his wife, Denise, bought and renamed the company
Headquarters: Marois' Poland home
Startup costs: $2,500
Long-term plan: "There seems to be a market for it ˆ it might still be a retirement prospect when we're old and gray"
Web: www.mysteryforhire.com
For Dan Marois, juggling his day job as a health care marketing executive and his side business running a murder mystery dinner theater troupe has become old hat. Marois and his wife, Denise, bought the company in 1992 after performing in it for 18 months.
Although Marois says they got a little carried away in the early years, booking 60 shows in their first year of ownership, 90 in their second and 120 in their third, they've scaled the business back to a manageable 30 shows annually. In addition to putting their daughter through college, the theater business provides Marois with what he says is a therapeutic outlet for the demands of everyday life. "Imagine, at the end of your work day, having the opportunity to go and entertain people and become an entirely different character," says Marois. "When you're schmoozing [with the audience] in character between scenes, you can do a lot of things you wouldn't do in real life."
Of course, in shows like Marriage Can Be a Mystery and Murder Most Medieval, where audience participation is not only welcomed but encouraged, attendees themselves often do things they otherwise might not. Marois tells the story of a show in which he plays a British policeman; the plot point hinges on his discovery of a voodoo doll planted under a chair in the crowd. One night, Marois reached for the doll only to find it missing; after some ad-libbed investigation, he discovered that an elderly woman in the crowd had taken it. "I asked her for it, and she says, 'No, I'm taking it home to my puppy,'" Marois says. "So what do you do in this situation? You arrest her, you put her in handcuffs and haul her offstage" ˆ and the audience is none the wiser.
Such festivities are sought after by corporate event planners, who often contract with Mystery for Hire for entertainment at company retreats or holiday parties. Although Marois' marketing expertise makes him the de facto booking and marketing manager for the troupe, he says they get new business largely by word of mouth, adding that "every show has the potential to book another show."
The company has a repertoire of seven murder mystery shows, plus a new offering, Politics Can Be Murder, which is the first of their shows written by Dan and Denise Marois. They use a group of about 10 actors, who've worked together for years and can jump into a new role or improvise lines for an old one with ease. That familiarity means the group doesn't have to spend much time in rehearsals, though they'll often travel to bookings together and rehearse on the way there.
Marois says he works to keep his own company from interfering with his day job (though Mystery for Hire has been hired by one or another of his employers to perform at a company event). That, too, is made easier by the theater company's long history, though Marois says he will occasionally wander outside with his cell phone to take a Mystery for Hire call during the day.
Like the other entrepreneurs interviewed for this story, Marois says he'd never take on his own business on top of a day job if it didn't provide satisfaction and enjoyment. "Yes," he says, "the actors are paid, and it's a business for us ˆ but don't think it's not fun."
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