There’s a lovely little story in the Dayton Business Journal about Dorothy Lane Market, which the site has named its 2023 Family Business of the Year.
CEO Norman Mayne describes the company’s approach this way: “We’re gonna try more stuff than other companies. We’re going to probably fail more often because when we hear something, we engage it and try it. We don’t do a lot of due diligence — we go for it. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
Mayne tells the Journal, “My crystal ball doesn’t work very well. All I know is that the future says that we need to have great products, and we need to have great friends and great people — the folks who work at our company are really the secret sauce to what makes Dorthy Lane so wonderful.”
“We compete against ourselves,” he says. “The standard of excellence we were doing a year ago, we need to be able to at least do that good this year and hopefully better … That’s the present, and that’s the future, as far as I’m concerned.”
Todd Templin, vice president of wine and beer for the retailer, tells the Journal that “working for a family-owned company, I feel, makes the entire associate team from all of our stores feel like family, and it’s a sense of pride seen through the large number of both multi-generational associates and the great length of service found in the company … We have a sense of loyalty to our ‘family,’ and in a sense, it makes us feel much closer to each other, our customers and the food industry as a whole.”
KC’s View:
I’ve always said that Norman Mayne told me one of the most important business tenets I’ve ever learned, one that I have repeated (and attributed to him) many times here on MNB.
A reputation, he once told me, is what you had yesterday. Today and tomorrow, you have to earn it all over again.
The people at DLM that I have met over the years are some of the best that I’ve met in the almost 40 years that I have been writing about this industry. And their sense of family has been what has enabled and empowered the company to constantly innovate around the core value of great food that nourishes, inspires and aspires.
One other note. DLM recently broke ground on what will be its fourth store. There is one thing I’m sure of – that the retailer will surpass its reputation, and will offer things on day one that it never has before. And on day two, it’ll try to do even better, and be even more different.
The post For Dorothy Lane Market, The Secret Sauce Is Family appeared first on MNB.
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