Surviving Prosperity
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition
in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we
have little experience: the task of surviving prosperity.
—ALAN GREGG
During the early days of the company, from the opening of our second location through 1993 and 1994, my life, along with the lives of my girls, seemed completely out of control. My own anger and frustration, for one, filled me to the point where grace could not find a niche, not even the smallest little cranny. My inward struggles formed the core of my difficulties, whether it be my insecurity as a business leader or my feelings of inadequacy as a mother and wife. Eventually I could see that these internal battles led me into a time of personal growth like nothing I had ever experienced before. At these times I felt God testing me, pushing me, stretching me, and while at many points I could not deal emotionally with the stress that came from this intense molding, it had to happen. The adversity had to take place or I would not become the person I needed to be in order to fulfill my calling.
Most of the time, even during those rare moments when I recognized how necessary these trials were, I still didn’t like going through them.
During those years in the company we brought on many good people from outside the family, people who filled specific roles, people who strengthened our position as a company. But I still felt the heavy weight of responsibility for the success of the company, the employees, and the franchisees, no matter how many specialists we brought in. I knew that I needed to be a good steward of our resources, and in that area I felt most tested.
Seeing my name everywhere, having people recognize our accomplishments, always being in the spotlight: these things started to challenge my integrity. In those early days of success, when it started to look as though we could take the company far, my pride and vanity became the testing ground. I didn’t want to get some kind of elevated view of myself—I still wanted to see myself as little Anne Smucker running barefoot down our dirt lane, or baking pies in the basement, or ice skating on a cold winter’s night. But sometimes it was difficult. At times I got caught up in the whole illusion of Auntie Anne, the illusion that everyone knew me and my company. Everywhere I turned I found people focused only on my success, giving me a false sense of who I was.
Yet I constantly tried to remind myself that this company was not about me. It was about God and his plan. It became a difficult road to walk, and, ironically enough, it wasn’t until I conquered myself in 1998 or 1999 that the path became straighter and I began to find a peace that wasn’t twisted and bashed around by every little circumstance. In that year of 1999, I came out of something that is more embarrassing to me than anything else I’ve done in my life, yet through it I came to understand myself better. The anger I held inside of me had to be diffused. My incessant need to be in complete control had to be tamed. And after I surrendered in 1999, I finally stopped fighting.
In God Calling, A. J. Russell writes that “in order to conquer adverse circumstances, one must conquer themselves.” This amazes me, because whenever I felt most vulnerable, I would blame it on the circumstances around me: my girls getting into trouble, Jonas and I not connecting, my business stressing me out. But the whole time it was me! It was my self that needed conquering, my pride and self-reliance and need to be in control. Those were the real problems. But I didn’t see that. The only thing I could see were the various areas of my life that seemed to be crumbling around me.
During the spring of 1991, I encountered a serious problem: LaVale refused to go to school. She was fourteen, turning fifteen in the fall, and I physically could not make her go to school. I would wake her up in the morning and she would go back to sleep. I would literally help her out of bed, but she would just sit there. If I managed to get her in the car and to the front of the school, I would later discover that she never went inside. The absent days began mounting up, and I doubted that she would even pass the ninth grade.
She wouldn’t come home until late, well after midnight. We set curfews, but they were useless. I didn’t know it at the time, but she began drinking heavily and even dabbling in drugs. Finally I got to the point where I had absolutely no control over her. She was in ninth grade! Devastated, I didn’t know what to do.
Finally I decided that if she would not go to school, I would bring the school to her. I decided to homeschool LaVale, which we did for her tenth-grade year. We hired a tutor to help her with her classes—I was entirely unequipped to teach tenth grade (I didn’t go to school beyond eighth grade), and besides that I had no spare time. I did drive her to a local college once a week to see another tutor, and as the year passed she got good grades. But LaVale has always been an intelligent girl: the home-schooling thing was too easy for her, and it accommodated her lifestyle of staying out late, partying, and sleeping until noon. I knew homeschooling couldn’t last because eventually she would lose interest. But I didn’t know what else to do.
Meanwhile, the company continued growing. By May 1992 we were receiving calls from all over the country, nearly daily, from people who wanted to open a store in their shopping mall. California, Washington, Texas, Florida: you name the place, we had potential franchisees. But we wanted to grow strategically, and soon we found ourselves saying over and over again: “I’m sorry, but we’re not opening in that area. Please give us your details and we will contact you when we are ready.”
It got frustrating, but we just couldn’t line up enough locations for the crazy number of potential franchisees. Then one day a franchisee came to us.
“You guys have to go to the ICSC in Vegas. Honestly, if you would go there, you would get so many locations you wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
The whole idea of having enough locations everywhere in the country to meet the growing list of potential franchisees sounded very appealing.
“What’s the ICSC?”
“The International Council of Shopping Centers. Every major developer goes there to check out new concepts. You should do an Auntie Anne’s information booth there. I’m telling you, at least look into it. It is a huge show and can be very difficult to get into, but at least give them a call.”
So Carl called, and once again his persistence and determination made a difference in the path our company was about to take. Initially the response of the people at ICSC seemed positive. They had one location left, and they sent us a packet of information.
“This is ridiculous,” Carl said after looking it over. “Do you see where they are putting us? That is the far back corner of the convention hall. No one will see us. We need a better location.”
So he called the woman back from the ICSC registration office and told her we needed a better place in the hall.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Those central locations are reserved for years in advance. That’s the only remaining place we have for this year’s convention.”
“Well,” Carl said, “call me back if a better location opens up.”
Oh well, we thought to ourselves, that year’s ICSC was less than six weeks away, and we would have been pushing it to have everything ready in time. But in a few days, the ICSC called back.
“I can’t believe this,” the same woman said. “But a location opened up right in the middle of the convention center. It’s one of the best locations we have.”
They sent us another packet of information, and it was true. In fact, the location that they wanted to give us was only a few locations away from Carl’s ideal spot. But Carl wasn’t through.
He called that poor woman back.
“Ma’am, we really can’t take a spot unless we are able to give away pretzels. No one knows what a pretzel tastes like, and if we can’t give them away, there’s no point in us being there.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said firmly. “No one gives product out. I don’t even think you can get connected to water or the amount of electricity you would need.”
“Okay,” Carl said. “Then I guess we can’t take the spot.”
“Fine, fine,” the woman replied. “Let me make some calls. I’ll see what I can do. You guys sure are persistent!”
Within a few days we had an entirely new problem on our hands: building a store in four weeks that we could ship out to Vegas for the show. We needed all of the equipment and a team of motivated people. They said we could make soft pretzels right there in the convention hall. We were on top of the world.
We arrived in Vegas ready to take on the world and became the hit of the show that year. We gave away ten thousand free soft pretzels to developers and potential franchisees, working that small store with ten people, all of us moving as fast as we could. The ovens cranked, the rollers rolled pretzels, and that team proved to be one of the best ever assembled.
I say we, but actually I spent most of my time in the meeting room, telling our story over and over again to people who had never even heard of a soft pretzel before, let alone Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels. Many of the people I met with started out with a lot of skepticism, much like the first mall manager we ran into at Park City Mall in Pennsylvania. But we just kept giving them product, and with one taste of the cinnamon-sugar soft pretzel, they were hooked. Once again, that incredible product just sold itself, but this time it was selling locations.
I remember walking through the aisles of that convention hall between meetings, feeling very nervous about how I looked. I didn’t want to look like a country girl—I wanted to look credible, professional, businesslike. I even bought two new suits for myself before the meeting. But in many ways I still felt very out of place: as I walked those long corridors, it seemed that I encountered only men.
“What does it feel like to be a woman in a man’s world?” some people have asked me throughout the years.
“It feels very much like the world I grew up in,” I’ve always said. “I had five brothers.” And it’s true: I grew up comfortable around guys—in my family they made up the majority. But I think it also instilled in me a very competitive spirit. I always wanted to do things just as well as they did, and I always wanted to make the main man in my life, my dad, happy with whatever I did.
And so the week went. Meeting after meeting after meeting. More and more people totally impressed by what we did. Offers of locations began pouring in even before we left, and it took us weeks to organize all of the potential spots, as well as field all of the questions that flooded us after our first appearance at the ICSC. Seventy-five locations per year suddenly seemed very attainable.
After the ICSC I returned home to find things generally un-changed: LaWonna still involved with people I didn’t approve of; LaVale scraping by in her homeschool classes, getting good grades but still getting into trouble; and Jonas and me in a relationship that just couldn’t quite get off the ground. Returning to the same old circumstances always seemed to disappoint me somehow: I guess I hoped that when I went away everyone would have profound revelations and change their lives to fit exactly what I wanted, but it never happened. Surprise, surprise. It just meant that whenever I got home I became more and more disillusioned with home life and tried to stay busier and busier with other things.
But ignoring the facts didn’t make things much easier. Going into that summer of 1992, I knew that LaVale needed to go back to school. Homeschooling was beginning to wear on her, and while at first it may have carried some kind of novelty factor, by that summer I could tell she was through with it. I began dreading the fall, trying to get her to come back from the shore where she spent a lot of time with her sister, knowing I would have to convince her to start school again.
Jonas and I prayed a lot together about LaVale, asked God for some kind of wisdom, some idea. But nothing materialized. The weeks passed, and soon I found myself at the end of another busy summer. I knew LaVale should be getting ready for school, but she wasn’t having any of it. The rather straightforward hints I dropped only brought old conflicts to the surface.
Finally I did something I’d never done before: I called one of those Christian Broadcasting Network prayer lines.
“Hello,” a kind voice answered. “What can I pray with you about?”
“Hi, I’m having trouble with my daughter,” I said, my voice trembling. “I don’t know what to do. We can’t discipline her in any way, and she’s totally out of control.”
I paused, not sure what to pray for, almost as if a solid mental wall separated me from any kind of understanding as to exactly what it was that LaVale needed.
“We need a miracle,” I concluded.
That kind woman prayed with me for a little while over the phone, and I cried. Funny how when we pray for miracles, it doesn’t take us long to start putting God into a box: fairly soon I formed an idea of exactly what God was going to do for us. LaVale’s attitude would completely change, we would be at peace, and she would miraculously decide to respect us and go to bed at 9:00 and do all of her homework and stop hanging out with the wrong crowd. I guess God had other ideas. Two weeks later my miracle arrived.
During the same time that I prayed for a miracle in LaVale’s life, God accomplished a miracle in the life of my company: we opened our 100th location. The date was August 14, 1992, and the place was Granite Run Mall in Media, Pennsylvania.
I could hardly believe what that opening represented: our 100th store. If someone would have told me only three years earlier that I would open one hundred Auntie Anne’s locations, I would have laughed in their face and told them, “Impossible.” How can you accomplish something so remarkable without even having it as a goal? But God was in control and always had larger goals for the company than I did.
But by the time that store in Media opened, we felt we could do just about anything, open as many stores as we wanted, pretty much everywhere. The ICSC lay just behind us, and mall developers seemed desperate to have us. I won the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Inc. Magazine, yet another thing about which to feel completely amazed. So much came together that year.
When I cut the blue ribbon hanging across the front of the store, I found myself whooping and hollering, I was so excited. Carl and Beck and many of our key employees were there, and I floated on this air of accomplishment and happiness. Many times successes such as that were the only things keeping me going.
There’s another franchisee from that time that I want to tell you about: Janelle Byler. A beautiful young girl with brown hair and brown eyes as well as a friend of LaWonna’s, she was one of our very first employees outside of family at Downingtown. For the first few years that she worked with us, even though she was only eighteen, all she could talk about was owning her own Auntie Anne’s franchise. Did I mention her determination? By the way she used to fly around that Downingtown store, you would have thought she already owned it.
We couldn’t stop her, even if we wanted to, and by the age of twenty-one she owned her own location in Echelon, New Jersey. Her happiness knew no bounds, and she was so bubbly and enthusiastic that the customers couldn’t help but fall in love with her. Our youngest franchisee, and definitely one of our best, she had a presence about her that made her extremely lovable as well as successful.
LaWonna and Janelle formed a tight bond during those years, opening stores together and training people before Janelle had her own store. But even after Janelle became a franchisee, she would drop anything for LaWonna, for any of us really, if we needed her help or encouragement. Even after LaWonna opened a store of her own, the two of them managed to find time to be together. They were always helping each other out.
One Saturday night Jonas and I sat in our bed. I was reading and Jonas was studying when the phone rang. It was Janelle’s parents.
Janelle was driving down to LaWonna’s store in Ocean City, Maryland, to help her out—LaWonna was in New York training a new franchisee—when Janelle’s car crossed the median and hit a truck head-on. Janelle was gone. Her parents called us to say they were heading down to identify her.
Would we please break the news to LaWonna?
I hung up the phone, then picked it up to call LaWonna. I held the phone in my hand for nearly an hour, just hurting for Janelle’s parents, not wanting LaWonna to know. I knew I had to tell her, but I also knew the news would devastate her. So I sat there holding the phone, not knowing what to do. I would dial her number, then push down the button and hang up. Finally Jonas took the phone from my hand.
“We’ll fly up in the morning,” he said. “We’ll fly up and tell her ourselves.”
Early the next morning Jonas found someone to fly him and LaVale up to Messina, New York, in a private plane. They walked slowly into the shopping mall and found the Auntie Anne’s store, all new and shiny and sparkling. LaWonna came out of the back room, already working hard, already starting her day. She buzzed around the store, motivating the employees and making the coffee. Then she looked up and saw her daddy, and at first her eyes lit up.
“Daddy!” she said.
But it only took her a fraction of a second to see the sadness in his eyes.
“Daddy. Who died? Daddy, who died?” and she nearly collapsed.
Jonas ran into the store and held her.
That was a tough moment in many ways. LaWonna lost a best friend. Janelle’s parents lost their daughter. For our young company, it was like a punch in the stomach: so many exciting things had been happening, and we felt so invincible. After all, we were going to the top and no one could stop us. Janelle was the young franchisee bucking the odds to start her own successful business in the same way that we as a company were defying the odds. In some way, Janelle was us. Then Janelle died. We felt so broken. For months our spark was gone and sadness hung around the office.
Janelle was only twenty-two.
It was a summer of highs and lows: attending the ICSC, opening our 100th location, and winning Entrepreneur of the Year were like mountaintops; losing Janelle led us back to rock bottom. By the end of that summer, the last thing I wanted to deal with was LaVale and her schooling. But I had to do something, so I called that prayer line.
One day I got home from work, and LaVale came into the kitchen.
“Mom,” she said, “I’m going to finish school, but I’m moving away.”
I was so surprised I couldn’t say a thing. Going back to school? Moving away?
“I also know that you and Dad were going to make me go to a Christian school, so I chose Eastern Mennonite High School in Virginia.”
I didn’t know what to say. Even though I didn’t recognize it right away, this was the miracle I’d prayed for.
“We don’t have enough time,” I finally sputtered out. “It’s the end of August. School starts any day.”
“It’s okay,” LaVale said matter-of-factly. “I talked to the administrators today. They said there’s an opening, and I just need my mom or dad to call in and make it official.”
I must have looked pretty silly, trying to come up with various reasons why it wouldn’t work for her to go to boarding school. She had thought through everything and there were no holes in her plan.
“Well, LaVale,” I stammered, “what if I don’t want you to move away? That’s a good four-hour drive from here.”
Suddenly her businesslike demeanor softened, and I could see a vulnerability creep into her eyes.
“Mom, I can’t go back to the same old school. The same old friends. I have to get out of here.”
I made the call, and in less than two weeks, we were driving her to her new school. On the way home, I cried my eyes out as Jonas drove. I never thought she would leave home so early, and I was scared she would attract the same old crowd. She did, and in some ways the same old troubles continued, but there was something about that school that kept her goodness very close to the surface.
Years later I went back to thank the principal for watching out for my daughter. LaVale once told me that he had kept her on the straight and narrow at times just because of the way he treated her with respect—every time he saw her in the hallway, he said hello and greeted her by name.
Her first year went fast, and in 1993 she enrolled again, this time for her senior year. Would she actually graduate? Would she pull herself out of the mess she had created? I could only watch and wait.