Paul Levitan knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur from the time he was collecting seashells on the New Jersey seashore as a young boy growing up on the East Coast.
“I can remember picking them up as a five- or six-year-old, painting them and going door to door to sell them as ashtrays,” Levitan says. “It was just in my DNA.”
He got his bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, then took a job as a management consultant at Bain & Co.
Stanford was the next step on his path to achieving his dream.
“I got really lucky with the professors I had,” he says. “I just remember charging out of the classroom and being so fired up. I couldn’t wait to take my idea and figure out what I was going to do.”
Levitan got his MBA at Stanford and was off and running. Today, he’s the co-founder, president and CEO at Galaxy Desserts, creating indulgent treats for some of the nation’s best restaurants, bakeries and specialty stores.
“We’ve got product in about 1,000 stores now and we’re preparing plans to build the first brioche plant in the U.S.,” Levitan says.
The ambitious goal is a product of Galaxy Desserts being bought in 2012 by the French baking company Brioche Pasquier.
“We had raised money along the way to grow our company,” says Levitan of the approach taken by him and his partner, celebrity pastry chef Jean-Yves Charon. “We always knew at some point there would be a liquidity event. The trepidation was in finding the right partner. We spent a couple years dating this company to make sure it was a good fit. The core values lined up and the people got along. I think that dating period is a big reason why they love us and we love them.”
The passion that Levitan brings to his work was with him before he arrived at Stanford, but his experience learning from such legendary minds including professor and author H. Irving Grousbeck, who founded Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies; professor and author Jim Collins, who wrote “From Good to Great;” and Apple founder Steve Jobs was powerful.
“Steve Jobs came to talk to us one night, early in his career,” Levitan says. “Irv Grousbeck was a professor of entrepreneurship and every year for the last class, he would give a speech with all these great nuggets — 50 fortune cookies for entrepreneurs. I remember and use a lot of them. One of his greatest pieces of advice was you have to find time to work on the business and not in the business.”
It’s not always easy to pull away from your passion and focus on the details of growing your company, but it’s essential to keep the growth coming.
“I remember even when we were a smaller company, forcing myself and my team to step back from, ‘Oh my God, we just got an order for 20 cheesecakes that we have to get there by tomorrow,’” he says. “You could fill 24 hours a day with things like that. You have to step back and think strategically.” ●
