Food & Beverage

Tom Sirna

By Matt McClellan

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About 15 years ago, the Sirna family noticed a shift in its industry. More families had both parents working, and as a result, more families were going out to eat. The 68-year-old family-run produce business had depended on families cooking meals at home — but that was its past, not its future. So the company diversified. Now, Sirna & Sons Produce delivers fresh fruits and vegetables to restaurants, hotels, country clubs and other institutions throughout Ohio and Pennsylvania. The 200-employee company, which opened a new corporate headquarters last January, had 2006 revenue of more than $35 million. Smart Business spoke with Tom Sirna, president of Sirna & Sons Produce, about how to adjust to changes in your industry and why you should sweat the details.

Be ready to change. One of the biggest problems that can prevent growth is just doing things the same way you always did them. People say to you, ‘Should we change?’ and you say, ‘No, let’s do it way we’ve always done it.’

If you have that mentality, somebody’s going to pass you up because they are going to have a better way. So we’ve always taught our people in our company, ‘Let’s look down the road, even if it’s not the way we’ve always done it; let’s look for a better way.’

You’ve got to constantly be looking into the future. You need a vision of where the industry is going. So many times, people stay the way they are, and somebody ends up catching up to them.

Also, you have to reinvest in your business. So many times, people have a business and they’re making a profit, so they keep running it and running it and running it. They’re making profit, but at some point, if you don’t reinvest in it, the whole system will pass you.

Sweat the small stuff. You can never be too detail-oriented. If you have that kind of demeanor where your employees and management know you’re always going to be meticulous on the little things, that’s good, because the big things are easy to recognize.

Everybody does the big things right; it’s the little things that separate you from your competition. By being meticulous, you pick those things up. If not, you miss those things.

Delegate, and your employees will know you trust them. As any company gets bigger, there’s no way you can do everything yourself. When your key people see you have trust in them and they feel like they are part of the company, it makes them want to do a good job. It makes them want to care.

If they feel like that, they’re going to do a good job for you. If they think that every time they make a decision, you’re going to tell them it’s not right or let’s change it, it doesn’t promote good will at all.

Always go beyond the expected. We are very competitive. Me and my brother grew up being athletes. As you get older, you can’t play sports anymore, but in our business, we’ve always wanted to be better than the competition. We always wanted to be the best.

One line we tell our people is, ‘Underpromise, but overdeliver.’ Tell people what you’re going to do, but give them more than that. Also, be consistent every day. Always win your customers’ business daily. If you’re consistent every day in what you do, if you’re going 100 percent and you want to show your customer that you are winning their business daily, that’s one way you can continue to achieve growth.

Get your name out there. The first five or 10 years we were in the food service market, no one knew who we were. So the biggest challenge was developing our name and reputation. People didn’t know what kind of product we were going to sell. So we picked up a few key accounts with places people in the area knew about.

All of a sudden, people started seeing our trucks at those stops, and from there, it was word of mouth. They said, ‘They must be doing a good job, they must have a good product, and their prices must be right.’ That was a big thing for us, developing name and reputation. If there were a second thing, it’s cash flow. You start to grow and you need trucks, you need warehouses, you need inventory. But where’s the cash flow? You’ve got money to start the business, but you’ve got to really run a tight ship those first five to 10 years. You’ve really got to make sure you’re careful on your spending. You’ve got to take multiple bids on your purchasing and manage your cash flow.

Plan for growth. When we were starting out, we were running five or six trucks. We run 55 routes now. As you start to grow, you better have systems in place in every department to oversee it. If you don’t, things are going to get out of hand. You have to always have a grasp on your budget.

As you’re growing, your people will let you know when they can’t handle any more. Mother’s Day is a huge restaurant day. When we were in our first warehouse, we went through a Mother’s Day when it was hard to load, receive all the shipments. We had outgrown the facility.

We had some of our key people come to us and say, ‘We can’t go through another Mother’s Day like this.’ And when you get to that point, when they tell you they need more space and more help, that’s something you listen to.

Turn a failure into a motivating factor. React to problems quickly. If you’ve got a problem, react to it quickly.

We’ve always been able to do that, whether it was an account that wasn’t happy or a product that wasn’t up to par, react to it quickly.

Don’t just say, ‘We’ll take a look in a month or two.’

Usually your customers tell you about a problem. If they are, react to it, make sure you do something to keep that customer. We’ve always tried to turn a failure into a motivation to achieve better results.

If we lose an account, or something doesn’t go right, it motivates us to go out and do better. Anybody can do that at their company. Don’t let it bring you down. Motivate yourself.

HOW TO REACH: Sirna & Sons Produce, (330) 298-2222 or www.sirnaandsonsproduce.com