Jamie Erickson:
Just getting that chocolate chip cookie and iced coffee from your favorite place is something that can just light up your day and keep you going, and so I need to continue to give that to people and to myself.
Sam Saperstein:
Welcome to season three of the Women on the Move podcast. I'm your host, Sam Saperstein. Women on the Move is a global initiative at JPMorgan Chase designed to help women grow their businesses, improve their financial health, and build their careers.
Sam Saperstein:
In the first two seasons, we spoke with a range of business leaders about gender equality and the leadership lessons they've learned along the way. I highly recommend you go back and listen to those episodes if you haven't already.
Sam Saperstein:
In season three, we're focused on female business owners. While many business owners are struggling during this pandemic women and people of color have additional challenges. We wanted to tell their stories of resilience and grit and how they're meeting the needs of their customers and communities.
Sam Saperstein:
When Jamie Erickson opened Poppy's Catering in Brooklyn, New York, eight years ago, she had a vision to create simple, seasonal and approachable food, and she did that exceptionally well. Then COVID-19 hit and turned her business upside down. In this episode, I spoke with Jamie and Chase business banker, Jacintha Tucker, on how they worked together to address the challenges that she's now facing
Sam Saperstein:
So Jamie and Jacintha, thank you so much for joining us today on the Women on the Move podcast. It's great to have you here.
Jamie Erickson:
Thank you for having me.
Jacintha Tucker:
Yeah, I'm excited. Thank you as well for having me.
Sam Saperstein:
Jamie, tell us about how you started Poppy's. What was the inspiration behind it and who is Poppy?
Jamie Erickson:
Well, Poppy is my grandfather, was my grandfather. That's what I called him. His name was Leo and he was a counterman at the famous B&H Dairy on 2nd Avenue in the East Village for 40 years. And so I grew up with hospitality and food just kind of being in my DNA. And so, when I wanted to start my own food business, I felt it was only appropriate to name it after him.
Sam Saperstein:
And the vision that you had early on for Poppy's, what was that?
Jamie Erickson:
So I had come from working for a few different catering companies previously and felt like I had a really good grasp of the corporate clientele that I was going after. But one thing that remained clear was that I had just gotten married myself, understood what it was like to hire a caterer now and thought, you know what? There's a missing niche in New York City for really simple, beautifully done food that doesn't need to be fussy or in kind of the chaffing dishes or anything that feels kind of stale.
Jamie Erickson:
I felt as though I could bring a fresh new take on it and was inspired a lot by my honeymoon actually that happened the same month that I started the business and went to Tuscany, and was inspired by the simplicity of the food of Italy and how you can take something that just was the highest quality in an ingredient, but prepare it so simply and present it so beautifully. And just herbs are a huge part of how we aesthetically stand out at Poppy's. And everybody jokes that we Poppify our platters through herb bundles, and they go on everything, and herbs just brightened every dish. And so, it's been a huge inspiration of how we stand out aesthetically.
Sam Saperstein:
How's the business doing right now?
Jamie Erickson:
It is an absolute crisis mode. I mean, in early March, we lost... Everything was shut down and we are just not a business that operates during a pandemic. All events ceased, and we just shut down completely. So our loss of business is immense. And we mostly cater in the corporate world, so we lost some weddings and things like that, but really, it's a lot of corporate business, corporate events that completely disappeared that are not postponing. It's not somebody's personal party that they can't wait to have now in 2021 or beyond, it's just vanished into thin air.
Jamie Erickson:
And so there's a lot of question as to when those will ever come back, if they will come back, and the timing around all of that. So it's been a very, very tough time and it's been a weekly pivot basically in our business model. Every week looks different. It's impossible to plan right now.
Sam Saperstein:
Let me ask you how you were doing personally through this time. So Jamie, with two young children and having to manage having them at home with you, how did you accomplish that? How did you meet your family's needs while also meeting the needs of the business?
Jamie Erickson:
I'm very fortunate to have a husband who's amazing with the kids and is actually a stay at home dad. So he naturally took the majority of childcare and child rearing off of my plate. But I would say that the balance of how much children need their mom, especially a young baby, is still... I can't step away. I don't step away. I'm not on Zoom calls. I'm not on my computer for eight hours of the day. So for the last month, it was definitely a balancing act, but having his support, having family support has been the only way I've gotten through this.
Jamie Erickson:
And now that things are picking up this past week, it's just a matter of like speaking more realistically. Like yesterday I was at work since 5:00 in the morning and didn't get home until 5:30 at night. And I started this business doing days like that and I loved it, and I still love it, but it's completely unsustainable in the place that I'm at right now.
Sam Saperstein:
Yeah.
Jamie Erickson:
I'll just burnout.
Sam Saperstein:
Right. With young children, that is a very long day. Jacintha, tell us how you met Jamie and started working with her?
Jacintha Tucker:
Sure. So three and a half years ago, I was assigned to be her business relationship manager. I went to the coffee shop and I met Jamie. I was very impressed with Jamie, first of all. There was an instance synergy that I felt just knowing Jamie, being a woman, first of all, in corporate America, having a catering business. And I know she was very successful. Jamie was very strategic in the way she ran her business model. I was very impressed at the fact that Jamie employed all women, and she really had a respect for her craft and she took her livelihood seriously. And that made me feel very honored first of all, and proud to have Jamie as one of my business clients.
Jamie Erickson:
Thank you, Jacintha. I would say I ran my business in a different way and I hope to be able to go back to that model. And this pandemic is proving to be extremely difficult in supporting young women and supporting the benefits and the packages. And I'm part of an industry that is in an uproar right now. And there's a lot of things that are just not fair within the food industry and the discrepancies of pay. And I've always tried to run my business where we could have been doing more and more and more, but I believe that lifestyle and family time and personal time is also just as important. And so, I truly grew the business because I let go and kept employing, and putting more and more pressure on managers as they grew into their roles.
Jamie Erickson:
And the really big struggle I have right now is all of those managers are gone and they're all now with their own families and taking care of families. And so, the pandemic's definitely brought up a very big struggle for women specifically, I believe.
Sam Saperstein:
I think it's exacerbated a lot of things that have been there for a long time, the difficulties women have in the workforce, but also the balancing act and the fact that they tend to do most of the child care. Jamie, you're maybe an exception with your husband being a stay at home dad and very supportive, but I think this has just proved very challenging for many women trying to balance it.
Sam Saperstein:
You mentioned doing things differently, and so I'm intrigued by that. Is it a different strategy? Is it a different way you manage people? You mentioned a bit about fair compensation. When you think of doing things differently in your business, what are you referring to?
Jamie Erickson:
I would just say that you look to financial advisors, you look to accountants. When they look on paper at how much I compensate or was giving away benefits within the model of our industry, in the food industry, it was unheard of to give the types of benefit packages we did. And I said I don't care, this is what's important to me. If I can go home at the end of every day and be with my family and know that my company's in good hands, why can't they be compensated as well?
Jamie Erickson:
It was something that was extremely important to me. And so I'd say that this pandemic has literally been so heartwrenching for me to pull all of that and to not be able to offer that, and to know that the only thing, the only money I'm even able to take home was the small percentage of the PPP right now and not know when I'll have another paycheck for my own family. And yet, I need to keep supporting these guys if they're going to come back to work, it's just, it's heartwrenching the whole thing.
Jamie Erickson:
So what I want to do and what I want to get back to doing versus what I think is fair and what happens within the industry, it's goals. It's goals to get back to. As long as we can get back on our feet and can become a profitable business again, that will always be something I strive to achieve, to take care of my employees. But right now, it's just a really difficult time to be able to do that.
Sam Saperstein:
It's really wonderful to hear you describe that and I hope you do get back there. That's a very special model.
Jamie Erickson:
Thank you.
Sam Saperstein:
So tell us about some of those pivots. Have there been new areas you've gone into, consumers, or other audiences are other segments now of customers?
Jamie Erickson:
Yeah. I mean, when we were shut down at first, we closed completely. I was able to pay employees for a while and kind of held on because I truly didn't understand the depth of how bad this was going to be, which also, financially, put us in a harder position quite honestly, because I wasn't like one of those restaurants that just closed down and furloughed everybody automatically.
Jamie Erickson:
But once we were almost two months in having done nothing, I was just trying to figure out ways that I could reconnect with the community. So basically, being a business owner in that we do catering and run a cafe, the cafe speaks to a very different piece of the business. It's much more a community piece. It's a place where we give back, where people are making memories on a daily and weekly basis with their family and coming to their favorite coffee shop and getting their favorite pastry week after week. And it's a very different experience than the business model of catering and events, which is truly what holds us up financially as a business.
Jamie Erickson:
This other piece, and the cafe piece, speaks more to my soul. And in the moment of time in the pandemic, it was just like, when everything stopped, I was trying to figure out a way that I could serve a community and get food to them in some way safely. And so the concept that I had come up with while keeping my whole team safe and not wanting to reopen our kitchen was that we spoke to one of the farms' co-op, they basically run a co-op of a hundred organic farms in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I said, "I know you normally do CSA models," which is that they box up seasonal vegetables basically, and normally sell subscriptions for the season to customers. I said, "What if I have a whole customer base in the neighborhood, could you sell me a wholesale model of that? And week to week, I'll be able to hand out and distribute organic vegetables to people in the neighborhood.
Jamie Erickson:
And so that began, and week after week, I would come into work one day a week and people would line up and pick up their boxes of vegetables, masks on. I mean, it's such a surreal time looking back on that. And slowly, but surely, as the city was starting to reopen, we opened our cafe as a curbside cafe, and slowly but surely some business is coming back. But I mean, it's an upward battle kind of daily and weekly right now.
Sam Saperstein:
As you think about how to redefine catering when things open back up, buffets have long been a staple of what it is that you do, do you think that has to be either taken away completely, or maybe there's more servers instead of help yourself? What does the buffet of the future look like?
Jamie Erickson:
I think the buffet of the future is we don't know what the future future is because what's it's interesting is that people are asking for the same thing. I think that, again, if we go back to brides, they're just praying that that wedding of their dreams does not include masks and does not include glass partitions, and it doesn't include all these things that we're kind of seeing within the events world right now.
Jamie Erickson:
And some of it might come back completely, but I do think especially for all my corporate clients, and in a time that we're all still being extremely cautious, it would all move to being individually portioned. So instead of a crudites platter being a huge crudites platter, it's going to be little cute cups of crudites that you take your own individual. It's a lot of that. It's making big things small and cute now and just taking it for yourself, and no dips, and all of that kind of stuff has gone.
Jamie Erickson:
But it's so hard to say, because again, it's just changing constantly that I can't tell if it makes the most sense to adapt to that for kind of a more drop-off model, but the larger scale events, we're just kind of waiting and holding off until a time where it's safe to kind of go back to what we all know. And every caterer is different and everybody who's throwing parties is different. Some people don't mind the plexiglass screens and their servers having face coverings and all of that kind of stuff, but other people dream of what was. And I don't think it's an aesthetic of past, I think it would still be very much desired if it could come back safely one day.
Sam Saperstein:
Hopefully one day we will.
Jamie Erickson:
Yeah.
Sam Saperstein:
Jamie, I understand you were about to renovate the cafe when the pandemic hit, so you didn't go through with a full renovation, but how are you thinking about those plans now and what do you think might be different?
Jamie Erickson:
Sure. Yeah. We were about to renovate on March 20th this year. So we pulled the plug on that just days before. And it's a very small space, and so it's a little bit scary to think about people sitting inside that cafe now moving forward. I'm definitely thinking about the consideration of not having a seated model anymore and using that space instead for more grocery and pantry and to go items for the future, even at the other end of this pandemic.
Sam Saperstein:
When did you hear about the Paycheck Protection Program and when did you apply for that?
Jamie Erickson:
I mean, I heard about it as soon as it was launched. I feel like in those early days of the pandemic, it was all business owners communicating on a daily basis, "What did you learn?" I was very much in tune with what was happening and reading the news on a daily basis, just kind of doing that refresh. So I felt like I was at the front lines of what I needed to do to apply for the PPP when it first was launched.
Sam Saperstein:
And Jacintha, as you're on the other end of this too trying to work through this process with Jamie and other clients, what's going through your mind? What is your day-to-day looking like at that time?
Jacintha Tucker:
Well, for me, it was, like Jamie said, it was really stressful because I can put myself not only in Jamie's shoes, but so many other business owners that rely on this money for payroll to keep bread on the table, to support their families. We were doing the best we could. We didn't have control as far as how the funds were allocated or how fast the funds got depleted. So it was really more of a hand holding. Like she had my cell number. I had so many of the customers with my cell number. It was just really having that moral and just comfort and support knowing that you have a banker that you could talk to. So it was really difficult because I could put myself in her shoes as a woman, as the breadwinner of her, family and having two kids at home. It was really difficult times for all of us.
Sam Saperstein:
So Jamie, you mentioned before relying on other business owners for support right now, either to help with certain questions, or is there other types of support, is there emotional support that you lean on your network for?
Jamie Erickson:
So I'm in a group of women. We formed a group called the New York Creative Collaborative, and it's a lot of business owners. Nobody else within my industry, but I was lucky enough to kind of join them. It's fairly casual, but it is all women business owners within kind of creative industries of fashion and jewelry and wellness,
Jamie Erickson:
and I'm the only one in food and beverage. And so in the very beginning, the constant emails going around the PPP and all supporting each other through that, and feeling as though we were all going through this together was extremely important. And then the emails kind of stopped and everyone stopped. And now I would say the business owners who I reach out to the most are within my industry specifically because we, in hospitality, are getting decimated and there's so much fear that we are not going to come out of this on the other side if we don't have additional funding and support that's specific to our industry.
Jamie Erickson:
The one thing about the PPP and everything that's been going on was it was straight across the board. You can be a law firm taking one small little hit, and then you can be an event industry where we're not even allowed to cater to exactly what we do. I mean, we're just done. And I'm lucky, again, that I'm in food and catering and have a cafe. I speak to a lot of other business owners within my industry that really all they do is large scale catering. So they're just shut down. And then there's the restaurants.
Jamie Erickson:
And I basically, I speak to business owners within food and beverage, and I kind of straddle a lot of different worlds within that umbrella. So I'm still trying to figure out what... There's the Save Restaurants Act, and now there's one that's coming from live events organization. So we're all waiting to hear what the government can do to help support us, but now I feel like I'm really speaking more to business owners within the industry that speaks to what we do specifically.
Sam Saperstein:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. If you're trying to get more specific answers about your issues and the things that you're going through, that might have been very different from the earlier group of women that you were talking to.
Jamie Erickson:
Yeah. It's hard because so many people who have e-commerce or something like that, they're like, "Okay, we're taking a hit, we're down, but we're totally moving things along and we're back in business, and we're able to work remotely." A lot of industries are very fortunate that they were able to pivot to remote work and continue on their way, and it just hasn't been the same for those of us who feed and nourish people in person.
Sam Saperstein:
Yeah. What are you optimistic about for the future of the business? What keeps you going and where does it feel like there might be a light at the end of the tunnel?
Jamie Erickson:
I mean, look, this week, I feel optimistic in that business came back much stronger in the start of August, which was to the industry of photo shoots, commercial shoots and productions are starting to be back in motion in New York City, and with that, they get catering during the day. And so it's been a busy week and it's been a much more optimistic week of, "Okay, if this keeps going in this direction, we can maybe get to the other side. We don't look like we did before with events, but this can get us to the other side."
Jamie Erickson:
So it feels good to be optimistic in that way, but again, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm more of a realist than an optimist. And right now, I think we're just still too far, too deep in it to really see the other side.
Sam Saperstein:
Jacintha, tell us about some of the other clients you've been working with during this time and how they've had to pivot their businesses as well?
Jacintha Tucker:
It's really interesting because when a pandemic or a natural disaster happens that you're not prepared for, you really have to, like Jamie said, you really have to sit back and look at things differently. And I think for a lot of customers, now is the time that they're thinking, "How do I reinvent myself? What do I do differently? How do I support my team? What can I do to see the longevity of my business?" So it's really putting the wheels in motion as to what can I do differently.
Jacintha Tucker:
In Jamie's case, she has a cafe, and that's probably what the focus is going to be for now until we can figure out [inaudible 00:21:50] social distancing, but for a lot of customers, it's either doing PPEs, making sure that they're in production for gloves and mask and things they never did before, or it might just be other services that they never realized that that's something that they're good at or something that they could even tap into.
Jacintha Tucker:
So I think this pandemic has really given all of us, not just Jamie, but me, as an individual too, an insight to what does the future look like, or do we even know what the future looks like? And how could we just reinvent ourselves to make sure that we stay afloat in this really pandemic situation and how do we make the most of it?
Sam Saperstein:
So Jamie, given things are so difficult right now with the business, what keeps you going? What is your why when it comes to running this business?
Jamie Erickson:
I mean, ever since I started Poppy's, and probably even as an employee for other people before, food and hospitality and Poppy's specifically now is absolutely my baby. I mean, this company is a huge part of who I am and there's just nowhere else I'd rather be than working and keeping it going. This has been an extremely difficult time for me, but there's no choice that I have other than to keep going every single day and keep pivoting and keep finding new ways to reinvent ourselves to get us on the other side. I mean, Poppy's is my livelihood and it's the livelihood for so many families of people I employ and I'm just extremely passionate about it. So you've got to keep going.
Sam Saperstein:
And when you think about the people you're able to serve, whether it's your catering clients or those who come to the cafe, what brings you the most satisfaction about serving clients?
Jamie Erickson:
I mean, the feedback that I get specifically from the cafe and the community is a huge part of what feeds my soul and keeps me going. It's an interesting thing where, catering sometimes, people don't actually know where the food comes from and who's the force behind it, but when you walk into a cafe and you go to a neighborhood spot, you can really feel the love, and you're almost coming into my home basically. These days, you're just coming to the door of my home, the curbside cafe, but there's still something that speaks to who we are and our brand and the love that goes into the food and the service that we provide.
Jamie Erickson:
And I think the feedback that I get from people in the community and how they made this kind of their weekly ritual, I just, I understand what that's like as somebody who grew up in New York City and had those places myself with my own family and I just don't want them to lose that in their neighborhood. I mean, throughout this pandemic, just getting that chocolate chip cookie and iced coffee from your favorite place is something that can just light up your day and keep you going. And so I need to continue to give that to people and to myself.
Sam Saperstein:
That is such a highlight. I think you're totally right about that. Jamie and Jacintha, thank you so much for joining us today and our Women on the Move podcast. It's great to have you here.
Jamie Erickson:
Thank you for having me.
Jacintha Tucker:
And thank you for having me as well.
Sam Saperstein:
Many thanks to Jamie for sharing with us the impact that COVID-19 has had on her business and employees, and thanks to Jacintha for putting herself in her customers' shoes and helping them tap into the resources they need to keep their businesses afloat.
Sam Saperstein:
The mission of Women on the Move is to help women in their professional and personal lives. Our goal is to introduce you to people with great ideas, inspiring stories, and a passion to make a difference. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe so you won't miss any others. For JPMorgan Chase's Women on the Move, I'm Sam Saperstein.
Sam Saperstein:
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. is a member of the FDIC.