Loyalty to QVC part of gourmet's recipe for success

The telephone lines light up when Carol Allen takes her Perfect Gourmet pot stickers to QVC, the shopping network on cable television.

She once sold 29,000 orders - for 135 pot stickers each - in 18 minutes.

"That's a crazy amount of food, enough to fill five tractor-trailers," said the 55-year-old entrepreneur.

She sold a total of about 250,000 flash-frozen dinners last year. Everything from Southwest tilapia to beef Provençal to shrimp scampi. Her five-person company earned revenue of $11.5 million and a net profit in the neighborhood of 25 percent.

So what's the next step? Amazon? Wal-Mart? Peapod? Safeway?

Not a chance, she said. Allen is sticking with QVC.

"You take my biggest retailer, who has embraced my brand for 10 years, and then you want to go ahead and go to somebody else ...? No way.

"There should be loyalty in business."

That's a refreshing and noble attitude.

But after I talked to Allen at length last week, I began to understand why this savvy, self-sufficient businesswoman feels so strongly about loyalty.

For one thing, she sacrificed a lot to get where she is. She sold her four horses, drove a beat-up car and lived without a paycheck, vacations and all the other good stuff that goes with the six-figure income she surrendered to chase an idea.

The Baltimore native - her dad worked for a cement company and her mom was a teacher - was born with ambition.

"I really wanted to succeed and do something big," said Allen, who said life is a series of changes, which she calls morphs.

After getting a real estate license at 25, she targeted an Ocean City developer for whom she wanted to work. She got the job and eventually became head of marketing, working for him for more than eight years and learning the single-family-home business.

She moved back to Baltimore in 1995 and worked part time for her brother-in-law, who was in the food-brokerage business.

That led to a job with a Massachusetts seafood company, for which she spent most of her time jetting to client territories and getting facetime. She learned a lot about the food-supply business, eventually taking a job selling prepared food to restaurants and other retailers - what she called "value added" products. (I like her terminology.)

"You tell the restaurant owner, 'You don't have to make the crabcakes in the back of the house. We can sell them to you ready-to-cook.' "

Allen's years selling prepared foods taught her the economics of the business, from labor costs to indirect costs to direct costs to profit margins.

Allen made a six-figure salary. But she tired of the travel and putting her dogs, Suzy Q and Mr. Hope, in the kennel.

Around 2005, she decided to take the lessons she learned and start her own company.

Allen enjoyed cooking, and she understood the trends that were changing the prepared-food business.

"Society is overscheduled. Women who have cooked their entire lives say, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' "

She followed the evolution in restaurants, where curbside pickup was proliferating outside the Applebee's and Outback Steakhouse chains. She knew that big grocery stores like Wegmans and boutiques like Balducci's were expanding high-margin prepared-food sections.

"I said, 'I am going to go for it.' The worst case is I fail."

She did fail, at first.

"I decided I was going to be the Mary Kay of food," she said, referring to the Mary Kay Cosmetics multilevel business model that makes money by both selling directly to consumers and collecting a share of the sales from representatives who sell the products.

After a few tasting parties, "everybody loved the food, but nobody would sign on to sell the lipstick."

She saw another path: She targeted QVC, the shopping network based near Philadelphia. Allen spent hours crafting a one-page introductory letter on why her food would be a good fit for a televised sale-a-thon.

She got an interview, and QVC liked her.

"I was always good at the corporate call," Allen said. "I'm not boring." Her advice on pitch meetings is to know ahead of time that the interviewer is looking for a reason why your idea won't work. You have to be ready with answers on why it will.

About 15,000 businesses a year approach QVC. Only 2 percent get a purchase order from them.

"If I knew that, I would have been more nervous," Allen said.

She took a television class, put on a suit and a smile, and went on the air Aug. 6, 2006. She sold 900 orders of salmon en croûte (that's fish in pastry, to pilgrims like me) in nine minutes.

QVC asked her back.

The next few years were lean ones as the Perfect Gourmet revved up production. She used her food-brokerage experience to find food-production plants that would cook, flash-freeze and package her meals to strict specifications. She found the perfect pot sticker producer in California. Her appetizers, which range from lobster Rangoon to buttermilk shrimp, come mostly from Long Island. Her seafood dishes hail from Florida's west coast.

In 2007, she brought on a 50 percent partner to fund expansion.

Allen has a contract with QVC, the details of which she declined to disclose. She said the meals she sells on QVC are marked up by the shopping show for its share of the sale.

When I referred to her meals as TV dinners, she told me to "go to" you-know-where.

"It's all high-end food," she noted.

Her entrees average between $5 and $6 apiece and are sold in packages with multiple servings. A dozen 3.25-ounce filets of pesto tilapia costs $42.95. Two 2-pound trays of blackberry cobbler are $32.95. Sixteen pieces of lobster Rangoon cost $19.95.

"My core demographic is the empty nester."

Last week, she was driving to the network's West Chester, Pennsylvania, studio for an eight-minute appearance at 3:08 p.m. to pitch her shrimp scampi. She has a stylist who helps make the dishes look yummy on television.

Allen usually appears six to eight times a month but sometimes as often as three times a week.

I asked her what magic words she uses to make the phone lines light up.

"It depends on what the item is," she said. The words "calorie count" boosts pot sticker sales. Ingredients such as "Parmesan, wine, garlic" sell the shrimp scampi.

The Perfect Gourmet business is lean. Allen has five full-time employees. A group of graduate students at Catholic University pursuing MS degrees in business analysis is helping her upgrade the Perfect Gourmet's website.

She has two bricks-and-mortar stores, both in Baltimore, where she sells 40 or so items. Allen hopes to expand to 20 stores and get to $100 million in sales, but not without QVC.

She's not going to jeopardize that relationship.

Besides, the loyalty thing is working for her. She traded in her 13-year-old Toyota for a snazzy Mini Cooper. And she has horses again: Pumpkin and Tanna.

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