In 2003, Sara Tidhar found herself on her own with two kids still at home. Without her husband she had no income, a mountain of debt and no job. She had a promise to her children that she would pay for them to go to college and her daughter was going to be graduating from high school the following year. Through the training she had received in the Landmark Education Leadership Program she was taking, she created a game to make 1 million dollars within a year.
The logical choice for her was to start a food company. She had always made candied pecans for friends and family. She managed to get a meeting with a buyer from a large national grocery chain. At the end of that meeting, she received an order for 150,000 bags of candied pecans. The only problem was that she had no manufacturing facility, no experience in mass production of food, no money and no employees. Her training at Landmark Education taught her to be undaunted in the face of all obstacles.
Sara turned to her community and began speaking to people, looking for connections among the people they knew. She continued sharing her story and her goal of creating business with everyone she met. With a few weeks, she had acquired an old machine shop space and some industrial cooking equipment. She also persuaded a contractor to help her convert the space on a promise that he would be paid after her first shipment was delivered.
She overcame countless obstacles—No electricity or running water in her kitchen, no packaging for her products, no money to pay for the raw supplies of pecans--and despite these issues and her own lack of experience, she delivered her first shipment of 150,000 bags on time. By the end of her first year in business, her company, Eat Good Foods, had surpassed 1.2 million dollars in revenue.
Today she employs over 50 highly satisfied people who in Sara's words run the company. In 2007, the company had over 7 million dollars in revenue. She provides her employees with health insurance and free food. Her company's culture and success has attracted the attention of her suppliers. She most recently has been consulting her suppliers on steps they can take to increase employee satisfaction and retention.
“My job is to take care of my employees,” she says.
On the day she handed out her first paychecks she broke down in tears, because she realized that she had not only achieved her goal and would send her kids to college, but she was also supporting her employees' families in having the same opportunities.
Her next goal was to achieve $50 million in revenue over a five year period, and she is well on her way to achieving that. Eat Good Foods is planning a new factory, which will have an on-site nursery to take care of its employees, many of whom are mothers.
“My training at Landmark Education was essential to making all of this happen,” notes Tidhar. “It was there that I got that anything is possible; that everything I need is right there for me and I never had to be a victim. There is an opportunity in everything.”
Here is the Eat Good Foods Mission Statement:
“Our mission is to indulge and promote the experience of being alive through the creation, consumption and distribution of gourmet foods to the world.”
For more information on Sara Tidhar’s extraordinary company, go to http://www.eatgoodfoods.com.
The author is a writer and world traveler who enjoys writing about people and communities coming together.