Entrepreneurs – Be Sweet

If you turn to various business reality TV shows every week, you’ll soon see that their secret to success is being cutthroat, ruthless, endlessly ambitious and ultimately backstabbing; my success story didn’t start out quite that way and, even when times get tight and I’m tempted to “fight fire with fire,” I don’t see my last chapter being any different from my first.

Maybe I’m able to be a different kind of businessperson because this is a different kind of business; specifically, a family business. Maybe I run MY business differently because I took a detour to work for the government for nearly a dozen years before starting McRae’s Foods. Maybe it’s just my nature, maybe it’s my faith in the Lord and His hand on my life or maybe, just maybe, it’s that all of this started in the kitchen; just about the “sweetest” place on the planet!

After all, McRae’s Foods is a family-owned and operated business. The company didn’t come from an overwhelming desire to make millions of dollars, to dominate the marketplace or destroy our competition. The company was built, first and foremost, on a family secret recipe handed down from my mother, Edna McRae.

Thus, family came first; family still comes first.

But I had a vision that surpassed having a secret family recipe. I had a vision that surpassed even what I’d been told I could achieve in life, where I’d been, what I’d learned or my experience up to that point. Nothing in my prior experience told me I could be a successful businessperson; I told myself – and that’s just about the sweetest success of all.

That’s the thing about success; no one is going to hand it to you or, for that matter, offer you a roadmap straight to your final destination. Success starts with you believing in yourself, thrives on you believing in a product or service you were meant to create and ends when you get to share that belief in yourself with the world.

So if you’re waiting around for someone to tell you to be successful, don’t; if you’re waiting for just the right time, stop. You can be successful; I know it – you know it. Oftentimes the only thing stopping us from success is our own fear, inexperience and self-doubt. So the minute you say to yourself, “Yes, I can do this” you’re already one step closer to success.

And time? Time is what we make it. I came late to the game but I’m absolutely convinced that the maturity, faith, life lessons, mentors and relationships I had on the way to my success ultimately helped create my success in the first place.

Much time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, trial and error went into perfecting the taste of our barbecue sauce; even more of all of the above went into creating a successful company out of a single jar of sauce! But we succeeded, as a family, and today people from around the world have experienced the thrill of these sauces. Almost daily we hear from people that they’ve never “tasted anything quite like it.”

My mother states, “And they never will, because I always season my food with love.”
I suppose that’s my philosophy as well; only I season my business with love. This company is a labor of love, and everyone who works here has the same general feeling about life, love, happiness and what success truly means.

www.mcraesfoods.com