September 14, 2012
Gary and Lee,
It is with a heavy heart that I email this two-week notice of my resignation. I have worked for you guys since the summer of 2008 and I can honestly say it has been everything I could have asked for and much more. When you interviewed me in your corner office in Waltham you stared me in the eyes and said, “This is where most guys end up, not where they start out of college.” And while I firmly believed in myself, you guys gave me the opportunity of a lifetime that most college graduates never get.
It is an understatement to say that I have learned an enormous amount from Surgi [Stryker Corporation] and the two of you. From sales to relationship building, product knowledge, and ultimately how to have fun with what you do for a living, I cannot thank you enough.
I hope you both feel the same way about me, and how I have produced for the company. Just as you guys presented me with an opportunity in 2008, I now have before me another opportunity that I cannot turn down. I invested in a company with my cousin. At the time, it was nothing more than that—a chance to earn another stream of revenue with no direct involvement on my part and one that did not distract me or take from my productivity at Surgi. Things have changed since then and an opportunity has arisen that I need to try for myself. It may end up being something I regret, but while I am young and do not have family obligations just yet, I think it is important to take a shot at it, just as you both did many years ago with Surgi. I can tell you this—I hope that someday I am as successful at what I create as you two have been.
You have provided me with many tools, lessons, and attributes that I believe will make me successful wherever I go. I never like to burn bridges, especially not with those who have been so good to me. You two fit that mold. Maybe someday our paths will cross again but until then I know I need to try this new venture.
There are no words to thank you for all that you have done for me, opportunities you have presented me, and skills you have taught me. Thank you for 3.5 phenomenal years. I will always be a member of team Surgi and wish you and the group continued success, prosperity, and good health.
Best,
Jimmy/Z
Meanwhile, three thousand miles away, Sabin’s bosses, Rob and Lio, wondered why the hell Sabin was still coming into the office. Not that he was coming in all that much those days after we had taped Shark Tank but before it had aired. Always our greatest cheerleaders, Rob and Lio were constantly pushing us—well, mostly Sabin—to grow the company faster than we would have ever dared. If it sounds odd that Sabin’s bosses wanted Sabin to spend less time doing the job they paid him to do, well, just keep reading.
When it came, Sabin’s departure from real estate was less dramatic than Jim’s resignation, but no less significant. By September 2012, we had committed ourselves to Cousins Maine Lobster. It was no longer a hobby. We had taken the final step of the entrepreneur; we had gone all in. The last vestiges of our old lives, the ones we had lived when we met over sushi almost a year earlier, were gone.
Well, that isn’t quite true. Rather, we should say that we had come home, we had returned to Maine, to our roots—even if we were still three thousand miles away.
THE FIRST CALL
On our first day of business, we made $6,500. It was a tidy sum, and looked especially good spread out all over the floor of Sabin’s apartment that night. We stared at it, trying to take it all in—the money and the moment. It’s not that we had never had that much money; it’s that we had never seen that much money in bills and coins (although we also had used the mobile payment app, Square). Who does anymore? It’s all digits on your bank statement these days. Which is just one reason we were in such a giddy mood that night.
We had made our first money selling authentic Maine lobster just being ourselves. Or, more accurately, we had succeeded our first day out by doing it the Maine Way.
What is the Maine way? It’s a commitment to the people and values that make Maine more than a state. The previous six months or so would have been for nothing if we had rolled onto our first location having compromised the values of our home and its people. If, for example, we had sold anything other than 100 percent Maine lobster, we would have failed, no matter how much of that lobster we might have sold. If we had been anything less than 100 percent honest with our suppliers, then we would have been no better than all those who had sought to exploit Maine and its resources over the centuries.
Staring at all that money, we felt like we were two guys who owned a lobster shack on the coast. This was our day’s haul. This would change quite soon, but we’re happy now that everything from the moment we rolled up on-site to the way we spilled the money onto Sabin’s floor had been raw and real that first day. It provided us with a goal, or, rather, an aspiration: that no matter what happened, we would always do it the Maine way.
The feeling was only momentary, but the commitment was supposed to last as long as Cousins Maine Lobster. How could we know that our pledge would be put to the test only days later? But that’s when Shark Tank called.
Food truck owners who haven’t been in business a week aren’t supposed to appear on national television. So, when the call came, we were at a loss for words. The producer explained that going on the show would be a great opportunity for us, regardless of whether we partnered with one of the sharks. We didn’t disagree. It seemed like we had been offered a golden ticket that would lead to instant business success. Why wouldn’t we immediately jump at this opportunity?
Now, we could say the right thing here: how we weren’t prepared to give up a percentage of our business; how we were committed to growing naturally before being guided by some corporate suit. Those things aren’t necessarily wrong, but they aren’t the real reasons either. This business, this hobby, this food truck—what was it?
We didn’t know. Not only that, but we didn’t know what we wanted it to be. Yes, we had some semblance of a company now, if we understand a company to be anything that sells a product or service. That box was checked. But that was about it. And if we couldn’t answer this simple question—“What do we want Cousins Maine Lobster to be?”—then how in the world did we expect to go on television and sell it to America?
However, we knew what we didn’t want to be. We didn’t want to be a joke or a flash in the pan. We didn’t want to overextend ourselves too soon and jeopardize what we had built. We understood that we had started something that was extremely fragile. Not only were we—its creators and owners—new to everything, but so was this idea of providing a delicacy like Maine lobster to the people. Our first few locations had proved successful. So? Did that mean that there was a taste for lobster rolls all over America? Absolutely not.
At least, this was the voice of reason in our heads, telling us to take it easy, to go slow. Our emotions were all over the place, fueled in no small part by our apparent runaway success and no sleep. Those first few weeks were a bit of a blur, but we were selling out at a lot of our locations. Early customer reviews on sites like Yelp drove the curious to check out this new truck selling lobster rolls. Our conversations with customers told us that the whole notion of Maine lobster was almost foreign to Southern Californians, who otherwise consider themselves quite the gourmands. Heck, even Maine was strange to them, as our first logo revealed. It showed a lobster inside an outline of the state’s borders. We stopped counting how many customers asked why the lobster was inside a misshapen box.
“Is that a lobster trap?”
“No, um, it’s Maine.”
“Oh.”
This was quite funny, particularly for Sabin, who had had a foot in both worlds, California and Maine, since he was a boy. But Jim was a stranger in a strange land. He is a Yankee through and through, with Yankee values and attitudes. The Californians loved it and ate up our Maine sensibilities just as heartily as our lobster. Being the novelty in a place like LA can pay off quite well, but not forever. Eventually, the novel becomes the ordinary. So, you better have something more to offer than your New England charm (which is a bit of an oxymoron). We wanted to believe we did, but couldn’t be certain. In any case, Shark Tank seemed like an early test for us.
In fact, it’s because Shark Tank had been so wildly successful that we were hesitant when the opportunity first arose. We weren’t ready for that limelight. We weren’t ready to answer the sharks’ questions. And we didn’t know what we would do even if, by some miracle, we inked a deal. But we were tempted. Who wouldn’t be? Looking back, were our initial concerns correct? Absolutely, even more than we realized at the time.
The night after our very first food truck service we sat there staring at the pile of money and we thought we had made it. Sure, there was a lot left to do, but most of the real hard stuff—the truck, the suppliers, the employees—those things had been done (or so we thought). Now it was all about finding the time between our busy jobs to get the truck out a few days a week.
Once again, we knew nothing.
OH, RIGHT, MONEY MATTERS
Let’s start first with that pile of money on Sabin’s floor. Even though we hadn’t paid our employees yet, even though we hadn’t paid off our bank loans yet, and even though we hadn’t considered any expenses beyond the first week, we honestly thought this was all our money. In fact, none of it was ours. All of it—all $6,500—was spoken for already. We just didn’t look at it that way.
The next day, Sabin took the pile of cash and deposited it in our business bank account. That was the sum total of our financial planning: make money, deposit money in account. At some level, we understood that we had payments to make, but it never occurred to us to that this would be any more complicated than writing checks to our employees, our suppliers, and our bank. Someone needs to get paid? Here’s a check. Loan payment comes in? Here’s a check.
That’s how children run a lemonade stand. It’s not how two reasonably intelligent guys should go about running a business. Remember in a previous chapter how we said we didn’t get into this business for money? We can reveal to you now that while those sorts of high-minded ideals are wonderful, they cannot be taken literally. You might not care about money, but your business certainly does. So, in case we have to clarify the point, take an interest in money, if only to know how it works in your business. It’s the lifeblood, constantly flowing, providing needed nutrients and oxygen to all parts of your business. Your job, particularly when just starting out, is make sure the money keeps flowing in the right way, to the right parts, in just the right amount. We failed to learn this lesson early on, mostly because neither of us had any interest in finance.
And had we gone on like that, essentially two morons who couldn’t be bothered to learn the first thing about finances, then we wouldn’t have lasted a year. Cousins Maine Lobster might have ended quietly, slowly succumbing to the inevitable drip, drip, drip of expenses. Or suddenly, as in, one day we look at our bank statement to discover we have no money left. Having been on Shark Tank, we’ve heard stories from previous contestants whose businesses collapsed not long after their episode aired. More often than not, the reason is that they neglected their finances.
They neglected them because they had been lulled to sleep by sales. One of the first things we learned as entrepreneurs is that sales don’t equal success. It’s a hard idea to wrap your head around. You mean product could be flying off the shelves—or out a truck window—and yet things are going badly? That doesn’t make sense. But sales can be an illusion, a very dangerous illusion. If you don’t know any better, sales can make you lazy.
Sales give you a false sense of progress. Like us, you might believe that that money in the cash register at the end of the day is yours. It isn’t. Most of it belongs to someone else; you are just the middleman. The only dollars that are yours are those left over after everyone else has been paid. It’s usually a very small amount. Even then, those leftovers might not be yours for very long. You might need to pump that money—the lifeblood—back into the company’s body to buy new equipment, to hire another employee, to add another product. Point is, just because your company is making money doesn’t mean you are.
In our case, we were selling $3,000 to $5,000 of product a day in those early weeks. (We quickly learned our first day’s sum was a very good day.) We were working our butts off, but doing next to nothing that resembled financial management. In our amateur heads, we didn’t need any help because we were just a single food truck. We convinced ourselves that our humble goal—just to be happy running a single food truck—would somehow excuse us from the grown-up task of learning how to use a spreadsheet.
Fortunately, Jim’s father, Steve, stepped in to save our asses. It wasn’t by design. We didn’t decide one day that we should bring someone on to help with finances. We thought we were already doing that. Steve’s involvement was far more coincidental and it couldn’t have come soon enough. It happened when both of us were back home, for one reason or another. Being a loving father, Steve had taken an interest in his son and nephew’s little venture, but as a businessman, he had his concerns. Those concerns were raised at the dinner table one evening.
The inquisition began innocently enough.
“So, what are your operating expenses?” Steve asked us. We mumbled some round numbers off the tops of our heads. Steve’s eyebrow arched ever so slightly.
“And what about your interest and tax expenses?” Oh, right, taxes … and interest. Those are important things to consider, we said. That eyebrow moved up higher.
“Tell me, boys, when’s the last time you did a P&L?”
To which Sabin blurted out, “What’s a P&L?”
That did it. We spent the next several hours taking Steve through Cousins Maine Lobster’s financial management routine, which, as you already know, amounted to depositing our sales in a bank account and writing checks. Steve’s informal involvement as Cousins Maine Lobster’s chief financial officer began that very evening. At first his work started simply, like explaining to us that “P&L” stood for “profit and loss statement.” (We’re not kidding here; we had to be told that.) Before long Steve was running us through the bare essentials of financial management, shaking his head the entire way. More importantly, he articulated the dire consequences of poor financial management. You could say that early on his consultation was along the lines of “if you teach a man to fish…” He was trying to help us understand the basics, so that when we went back to LA, we could start to put our finances in order.
We did, to a point. But we soon learned another important entrepreneurial lesson: if you stink at something, don’t do it. It’s not worth your time to do something badly. You have to wear many hats in the early days of your business. This is tiring but also a very valuable experience—like earning your MBA in the school of hard knocks. While wearing all these hats—sales, marketing, personnel management, finances—you’ll quickly learn which ones you are good at and which ones you suck at. We quickly learned that we both sucked at finances, even after Steve gave us the crash course. We were hopeless.
But we were also very lucky. Seeing the mathematical incompetence in his own flesh and blood, Steve expanded his role from consultant to financial advisor. He didn’t let us off the hook entirely, but he took over a lot of the heavy financial lifting, especially in those early days. It should go without saying that there wouldn’t have been a Shark Tank appearance without Steve all but forcing us to get our finances in order. People to this day tell us how impressed they were with our coolheaded ability to answer the sharks’ financial questions. The only reason we were able to do that is because of Steve.
In terms of affordable financial advisors, it doesn’t get any better than hiring your father. Until he starts to increase his fees, which is exactly what Steve did. Sure, his role in the company had begun to expand, which, had he been anyone other than Jim’s dad, would have necessitated a raise, but, come on! He’s family!
“Shit doesn’t come for free,” said Steve, when Jim asked about the increase in charges. Damn it, but he’s absolutely right. The reason you do so much when you first start out is because it’s cheaper. You also don’t really trust anyone to do it for you. So, if you’re going to hand over something as consequential as your financial management, then you better be prepared to pay for it. You’re not just paying for the job to get done; you’re also paying for it to get done by someone you trust.
One last note here before moving on from finances. Perhaps the best thing Steve helped us learn is how to simplify the concept of financial planning. It’s not just about knowing where the company is today, but where it will be—where you want it to be—in a month, two months, or a year. If you understand your finances, then you can map out your future to a fairly precise degree. For us, we began to project how much lobster meat we needed over a certain period, which allowed us to secure the appropriate funds from the bank to procure the meat (if we didn’t have the ready cash), then buy the inventory. Rinse and repeat.
This level of planning requires that you’ve been in business long enough to know your business at a very intimate level. We weren’t operating this way early on, but Steve helped us get there. His contribution was crucial. Buying lobster meat, the price of which can fluctuate greatly, is a hazard of our business. It’s what drives so many others out of the business, in fact. When the price of lobster suddenly skyrockets, as it does from time to time, a business owner is faced with only a few terrible options. What usually happens is that the business stops buying the lobster altogether, hanging the Maine supplier out to dry.
We can’t do that. There is no circumstance that would make us abandon our supplier or shift to anything other than 100 percent Maine lobster. But for us to do business like that requires a very careful balance of finances and inventory. If we know when the lobster prices usually skyrocket, we can put that into our planning efforts. This has allowed us to weather the storms that constantly rock the industry. It’s not always smooth sailing, but we are dead serious when we say that we wouldn’t have lasted our first season if Steve didn’t smack us upside the head.
“Shit doesn’t come free.” Ain’t that the truth?
WHEN THE BALL STARTS MOVING
Finances weren’t our only problem in those days. In fact, we hardly considered them a problem at all until Steve had to ruin the party. Bigger things were on our minds, like how to juggle a business with our day jobs. This was especially troubling to Jim, who, let’s remember, still lived in Boston. He had taken a week off for the launch, but that week was about to end. Yet the truck was doing great business, far better than we had expected. Our inventory was good but we needed more, not to mention that both of us needed to go out on the truck to each location. We were very far from letting go just yet.
So Jim made the decision to extend his time off by another week. But after that, he had exhausted his vacation time. Jim finally had to go home in early May, and it felt like he was leaving his child behind. Sabin could certainly handle the day-to-day operation of the truck. That didn’t bother him. What bothered Jim was stopping the momentum. You have to remember that we had no idea if this food truck thing was going to be a success or not. We had chosen to start a business where our presence on the premises wasn’t always necessary, because we needed the freedom to continue in our day jobs. Those jobs were a kind of anchor to our old lives. We had a very long line that allowed us to drift, but never become unmoored. The thought of cutting the anchor line was just a little too scary. So, Jim wasn’t about to jeopardize his day job more than he had already.
But when we knew that the truck wasn’t a failure, we wanted to keep going. We wanted to ride the wave. And, damn, but we had a blast those first few days! We were ready to expand our menu, book more locations, and even start the conversation about getting a second truck. But all that progress seemed to come to a halt when Jim went home. It didn’t all stop, but we couldn’t give our full attention to Cousins Maine Lobster, which was required to keep the ball rolling. That’s what hurt Jim the most, stepping on the plane for the five-hour flight home to Boston. He felt like the company was about to enter a stage of limbo from which it might never return.
In hindsight, Jim’s fears were a bit unfounded. Not everything stopped when he left. Sabin held down the fort quite well, while Jim used his time on the East Coast to maintain contact with our suppliers and ensure that they were part of Cousins Maine Lobster’s growth plans. Jim also helped keep the truck booked Tuesday through Sunday. Meanwhile, Jim maintained a full work schedule at Stryker, his days lasting anywhere from seven to twelve hours. Like Sabin’s, Jim’s job had him on the road a lot, traveling to hospitals and meeting with surgeons. The schedule afforded Jim the time to work on Cousins Maine Lobster without fear of having to step out of the office several times a day to make calls.
Which isn’t to say that never happened. Jim knew that the long hours were beginning to wear on him when, while in the operating room in full scrubs, Jim stepped out to take a phone call, answering with “Cousins Maine Lobster.” The call wasn’t for Cousins Maine Lobster, and Jim quickly had to catch himself. But as the business in LA continued to heat up, those mistakes became more common. While Jim was able to maintain the rigorous schedule—using every available free hour, which included sleep time, to work on Cousins Maine Lobster—it took its toll, physically and emotionally.
The stress was the worst part. It wasn’t in Jim’s nature to give anything less than 100 percent to his job. But when you’re going full throttle on two jobs—one being three thousand miles away—something has to give. While his bosses never reprimanded or scolded Jim during these trying months, they did ask questions—questions such as why Jim was in Maine (again), when he should have been in Boston. Jim couldn’t answer these questions. So, he lied. And those lies started to eat away at Jim’s conscience.
Yet all the guilt, stress, and exhaustion clarified one thing in Jim’s mind. Cousins Maine Lobster was no hobby. It was a full-fledged business that was on the brink of becoming something big. Jim knew that his fear of managing a company in limbo had been rather naïve. If this was limbo, then imagine what he could do if he gave his full attention to the company. It was time to give the business what it deserved.
Meanwhile, Sabin was dealing with stress of a different sort. He managed a full team of Realtors under the guidance of his bosses and mentors, Rob and Lio. Sabin had also been completely honest with these guys from the very beginning, and was surprised to see how excited Rob and Lio were for him. Every day, when Sabin would come into the Realtor office, Rob and Lio would bombard him with questions about the truck:
“How was the event last night?”
“What are your sales this month?”
“When are you going to get another truck?”
Pretty much everything Sabin learned about starting a business in those early days he learned through hands-on training and from Rob and Lio. They not only offered whatever practical knowledge they could provide—which was a lot—but they also were the company’s biggest cheerleaders. This takes a bit of explanation. As we asked earlier, why would Sabin’s bosses be so eager to have Sabin succeed at something other than his day job? Because Rob and Lio were self-made businessmen whose greatest thrill was watching someone they respected start something on his own. The way they saw it is that, if Sabin would be better off growing his own business than selling real estate, then why the hell would he sell real estate? They also were very success oriented. The idea of building something for yourself was, in their minds, the ultimate mark of the successful person. They could find another agent, but opportunities like Cousins Maine Lobster don’t come around every day.
Their message to Sabin: get after it and don’t look back.
It was the sort of motivation we needed. With Jim in Boston, and the fear of being in limbo hanging over all our efforts, we needed someone to keep pushing us. Not that we had trouble finding motivation, but to get motivation from guys like Rob and Lio—guys who knew how to do it because they had done it—that was a different sort. In Sabin’s mind, it’s like Michael Jordan telling you you’re really good at basketball and should devote your life to it. You don’t turn down that kind of advice from Michael Jordan. He has no reason to blow smoke up your ass. Neither did Rob and Lio. And their encouragement not only made Sabin’s life working two jobs so much easier; they pushed us to grow the company faster than we otherwise would have. (We still balked at buying the second truck, though.)
One story nicely captures the way Rio and Lio encouraged Sabin in those days. Before we had even an idea of the business, Sabin idly mentioned to them how he was thinking about buying a very expensive watch. But, he said, it was too much. Maybe next year, when the truck would be bringing in more money.
“Buy the watch,” they said.
“But I can’t afford it,” Sabin protested.
“You can afford it, but you think you shouldn’t,” they replied. “Buy the watch today and work harder tomorrow to earn it.”
In other words, they were showing Sabin how to motivate himself: Don’t think that “one day” you’ll be able to afford the watch. Buy the damn thing now because you want to, then work your ass off to afford it. It’s a somewhat illogical way of looking at success—and certainly something Sabin had never considered. Nor would we advise it in all situations. Buy the watch, but wait on the Ferrari, perhaps. Yet when applied prudently, “buy the watch” is just the sort of motivational philosophy we needed in those early days.
Sabin bought the watch.
But regardless of Rob and Lio’s support, Sabin was still working his ass off. To help Sabin with the truck, we made two invaluable hires in those early days: Shauna, who to this day is like the mother hen of Cousins Maine Lobster, and Paul, who eventually became our manager of operations. Be forewarned that it’s rare to have the same employees from the start-up phase to the company phase, where we are now. Often the very qualities that you need from your employees when you’re just starting out aren’t the qualities that are necessary when you’re trying to sustain and grow a business. We’ll discuss this in greater length in another chapter, but we mention it now because Shauna and Paul were there from the beginning and they helped get us through that critical first year. It’s a rare thing and a sign of how lucky we were to find them so early.
Sabin was also learning about the hazards of our chosen industry. We said earlier that we had a lot of sold-out days back then but not all our events were great. We’d usually pack between fifty to eighty pounds of lobster meat on a truck for a given location. But what happens when you sell only twenty pounds, which happened frequently? Well, you can scramble to find another location or, if that fails, eat the cost of inventory. It’s one of those built-in dilemmas we had to overcome early on. If, say, you sell a manufactured item, then selling only twenty dollars of it at an event might not be great, but you don’t lose the rest of your inventory. But with us, we had to attend only those events where we knew we could sell a certain percentage of our inventory. That took a lot of time to learn, but eventually we developed a kind of sixth sense for it. Lobster isn’t always the best accompaniment for every occasion. For example, sometimes the last thing on the mind of a concertgoer is a plate of lobster. So, while we benefited greatly from our novelty status in those early days, we also learned how to say no. It wasn’t easy, believe us. But when you might actually lose money selling your product, you learn how to say no pretty effectively.
While we had far different experiences in those first couple months, one thing did unite us: we were both exhausted. It wasn’t as if Jim, not being on the truck, was working any less than Sabin. Far from it. Nor was Sabin able to simply coast at his day job because he had supportive, encouraging bosses. He was burning the candle at both ends, too. We noticed, however, that something had changed since the launch. We were working just as hard as before the launch, but the nature of the work had changed. We weren’t trying to get the ball rolling anymore; we were trying to keep the ball from going out of control. It was like pushing it in the dark, where the only light is just a few inches in front of you. You try to keep it on the path, but sometimes you don’t know where the path is. Sometimes you need to find the path again. But you can’t stop the ball; now that it’s started, it won’t—can’t—stop.
That’s what it’s like running a business. There are no time-outs. There are no halftimes or coffee breaks. It must keep moving. Our job was to keep it moving in the right direction.
THE GOLDEN AGE
In the years after achieving statehood, Maine entered something of a golden age. Everywhere one looked, Maine industries weren’t just thriving, they were dominating the market. Indeed, today’s Mainers would look with envy upon their ancestors from the early nineteenth century. Back then, the state’s economy wasn’t tied solely to the lobster or the tourists. In fact, neither had taken off in any real way. Each would emerge later, when the state economy had all but collapsed, leaving little except for Maine’s unrivaled beauty and the tenacious lobster.
Of course, the boom started with the fishing industry. In 1800, Maine’s offshore fishing fleet made up just 11 percent of the US fleet, as Colin Woodard notes. By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Maine’s fleet made up half of the nation’s offshore fishing vessels, and Maine fishermen dominated the mackerel, cod, and herring markets. As Woodard writes, “The success of Maine’s fishing venture allowed it, in the three decades preceding the Civil War, to achieve a level of national economic importance never seen before or since.”5
But Maine’s economic boom wasn’t limited to the sea. Aside from the bounty of fish off the coast, Maine was also blessed with a vast wilderness full of valuable lumber. By 1872, nearly one thousand sawmills and woodworking businesses operated in Maine, whose rivers, mostly the Kennebec and Penobscot, were essentially lumber highways carrying the valuable logs to the ports, from which they would be sent all over the world via Maine’s merchant vessels.
Maine is also blessed with an abundance of granite, which led to another industry finding tremendous success in the antebellum era. Just how large did this industry become? Woodard notes:
The U.S. Treasury building and both the New York and Philadelphia post offices were built from [Dix Island] bedrock. Both Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the great columns of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York were built with Deer Isle granite, while the Ellis Island administration building and the U.S. House of Representatives were constructed with granite shipped from Blue Hill. The New York Stock Exchange, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Naval Academy, the Brooklyn and George Washington bridges in New York, and the interior of the Washington Monument are all built from bits of pieces of the Maine coast.6
Finally, in 1805 a Bostonian named Frederick Tudor created an industry nearly from scratch: ice. Before Tudor started shipping Maine ice all over world, humanity’s food selection was tied to seasonal harvests and the dried, smoked, or salted meat. But Tudor developed a way to cut, package, and ship ice from Maine rivers so that it would arrive still frozen as far away as Asia and India. Just before the start of the Civil War, Tudor was shipping 130,000 tons of New England ice around the world. Which is why Tudor became known as the “Ice King,” and Maine was his kingdom.7
And then came war, which drew 73,000 Mainers (the highest proportion of the population of any state in the Union) to far-off battlefields, where more than 18,000 would be killed or wounded. Some would come back heroes, like General Joshua Chamberlain, a professor at Bowdoin College before the war. In 1863, then-Colonel Chamberlain commanded the Twentieth Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, which was stationed at the extreme left flank of the Union line during the Battle of Gettysburg. During the second day of the battle, the Confederates under the command of General Robert E. Lee attacked Chamberlain’s position at the summit of a hill known as Little Round Top. Wave after wave of Confederate soldiers advanced up the hill, pushing Chamberlain and his Mainers to the brink of collapse. Then, low on ammunition and facing another assault, Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge down the hill. The brilliant and daring maneuver knocked the Confederates off the hill and saved the Union line. For his heroism, Chamberlain received the Medal of Honor and the Twentieth Maine Regiment guaranteed its place in the annals of US military history.
Heroes on the battlefield, Maine’s soldiers returned home to find a state awash in economic devastation. The Civil War had accelerated the technological innovations of the era, pushing Maine’s now-outdated industries into collapse. The railroad had opened up vast stretches of the western United States, including the forests of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest. The rise of steel destroyed the granite quarries, while the advent of refrigeration made the ice industry obsolete. Fishing was the only industry still on its feet a generation after the end of the Civil War. But, as we’ll see, its days were numbered, too.
Writes Woodard: “Virtually every industry on the coast had fallen apart during the late nineteenth century: farming, fishing, shipbuilding, lumbering, and the cutting of granite, limestone and ice. The nation’s commerce abandoned the wooden hulls of Maine-built sailing vessels plying the Atlantic seaboard, shifting instead onto steel rails connecting the great eastern cities with the vast resources of the American West. The Maine coast, once at the heart of American commerce, had become an isolated backwater.”8
Although discovered by tourists, Maine had been largely forgotten by the world of business by the turn of the twentieth century. It seemed to everyone that the state’s best days were long behind it.
LESSON
KNOW WHO YOU ARE
How a people, state, or an enterprise discovers its identity is anything but a simple process. For Maine, the road led through a period of some of the worst economic devastation ever known in the United States. That period still resonates in nearly every corner of the state; indeed, the trials faced by those Mainers helped to define the Maine people and their character. Those who had to live on despite the loss of their livelihoods only strengthened the spirit of independence and persistence that had marked those early settlers battling the great proprietors of Boston. And their legacy continues in each new generation of Mainers. The inheritance of Maine certainly isn’t wealth; it’s a fierce determination to live life the Maine way, without excuse or apology.
When we launched Cousins Maine Lobster in April 2012, we thought we knew who we were. We had wanted the product we sell, and the way we sell it, to reflect what we had known as boys growing up in Maine. But through the trials of those first few months, we discovered that our vision had been limited. We weren’t quite sure what we were yet—much like Maine itself had to go through its own period of discovery—but we knew what we didn’t want to be. Our little truck was more than a food truck because we wanted it to be more than that. And that’s our lesson from this period.
Know who you are. And know that who you are is a result of what you want to be. Aim high, even if it sounds absurd to everyone else. Have the vision to build more than a company that sells a product or service. People might laugh. They might say you’re taking yourself too seriously. We suppose you could listen, and just be another food truck on the road.
The amount of pressure on a new business can be overwhelming, almost suffocating. When we started out, we had no idea of the power of the forces that would be pulling at us constantly. From booking locations to maintaining inventory to dealing with bad days, we were amazed at how far our original idea for the business would be tested. The temptation of taking the easy route, the shortcut, is everywhere in the early days. You are faced with a constant stream of distractions that, at the time, seem like important matters. The best way to navigate these troubled waters is to know who you are. Keep the vision for yourself and your company ever present in your mind. Let it be a beacon, a lighthouse, that guides you.
By the fall of 2012, after just six months in business, we decided that Cousins Maine Lobster would be more than a hobby: it would be more than a food truck, and it would be more than a company. It would be our lives.