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By Gary Shaw
 SAN DIEGO--Oh sure, review Noah Alper’s Business Mensch, Timeless Wisdom for Today’s Entrepreneur. Just what we need, another book cheering entrepreneurs to take the biggest financial risk of their lives.
Citing the U.S. Small Business Administration, Patricia Schaefer reported that “two-thirds of new employer establishments survive at least two years and 44 percent survive at least four years.” Yea, well, the flip side is that one third failed in the first two years and 56 percent didn’t survive the first four. And that was in 2006 when we were just beginning what Alan Greenspan would eventually declare as a once-in-a-century contraction. The survival rate is worse today. You probably don’t want to risk everything to start a business today.
So we weren’t prepared to be friendly with Noah Alper, mensch or not. There are too many business cheerleader books for naïve risk-takers to find temporary comfort before jeopardizing their family’s well being.
But Mr. Alper redeems himself in Business Mensch, sharing lessons of his big failure and near-failures. “…It’s vital for an entrepreneur to know when to get out,” he writes.
“Never hire somebody you can’t fire. Never hire a close friend, a spouse, a relative…”
But mostly, Alper shares tales of his successes, including the establishment and growth of Oakland-based Noah’s Bagels, which sold to Einstein Bros. for $100 million in 1996, and how to be a mensch. “Business Mensch” is published by Wolfeboro Press and Alper is scheduled to speak at 2 p.m. Nov. 8 as part of the 15th Annual San Diego Jewish Book Fair at Temple Solel, 3575 Manchester Ave., Cardiff. Go see him. Admission is free. (The book fair, which kicked off Oct. 19 and 20 at Temple Solel, resumes Nov. 1 through 12 at the Lawrence Family JCC.)
Alper’s wise warnings to entrepreneurs can’t be over-emphasized during this most vexing economy of our lives. Among them, he says, is “knowing when it’s time to move on.
“Every business owner has a tendency to become overly focused on day-to-day details, losing sight of the big picture of the business,” he writes. “Of course, I have certainly been guilty of that. Part of staying in motion, however, is the idea that entrepreneurs should always keep an eye on the larger issues: when to start a business, when to expand, when to hire staff, and the ultimate question: When to get out?
“For me, it was only when Noah’s Bagels had grown into a large operation with dozens of stores and a burgeoning wholesale division that I heard somebody mention a term I came to realize is a key part of entrepreneurship: exit strategy. I had never paid much attention to the finer details of determining when to sell a business. I was always so caught up in just managing each day that I simply didn’t give it much thought.
“Venture capitalists and other investors take a longer and larger view: Sell a business too early, and you miss out on potential growth that could significantly add to the company’s value. Wait too long, and the business could have peaked and be on the decline, or competition could be eating into its profits, or any of a thousand factors could have made it less appealing to potential buyers.”
We take no joy in others’ misery, but we had to chuckle at Alper’s worst flop, easy enough since Alper, the mensch, has learned to laugh at himself. The story begins after his second visit to Israel in the 1970s. Upon his return to the states, he heard that 30 percent of Americans claimed to be born-again Christians. Jerry Falwell was all the rage. “Suddenly it struck me,” says the entrepreneur, “that this might be a way for me to do something for Israel. I knew that many Christians were fascinated with the Holy Land. How about selling Israeli products to them?”
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He started with Israeli crackers, jams and mineral water, but couldn’t keep the crackers fresh and discovered Israeli jams were loaded with sugar and preservatives at a time when Americans were becoming more health-conscious. He moved into gifts, such as glassware, pottery, crucifixes, mosaic plaques, holy water, Biblical puzzles “and my most popular item, a videotape about the life of Jesus.”
Churches in Berkeley were lukewarm, but he thought his market was in the Deep South anyway. “Aware that a Berkeley, California address might raise eyebrows in the Bible Belt, I rented a post office box in El Cerrito. It sounded like the name of a suburb in conservative Orange County…I used a pseudonym, Norman Charles,” which doesn’t sound as Jewish as Noah Alper.
“I was warehousing the products in an old Quonset hut adjacent to the Berkeley Jewish Community Center and had my nephew, Mike, helping me out. At moments, it felt absurd, these two Jewish guys knee deep in cartons of crucifixes and Jesus videos…. What are we doing?”
But with the help of Rabbi Ferris – “Is this really what you want to be doing?” – Alper figured it out. His enthusiasm for selling Israeli products, not clear-thinking, led to three major mistakes he made with Gifts from the Holy Land: He didn’t know his customers, he hadn’t invested enough to succeed, and “I let my emotions cloud my business judgment.”
He didn’t get to know his customers, never traveled to South Carolina or Texas to market his products, “because deep down, I simply didn’t want to…
“As a result of my hands-off approach, I missed the mark. I was trying to sell to Christians as a whole without understanding something basic: That different denominations had very different needs. What appealed to one might offend another. I didn’t know that Mormons don’t use crosses, or that holy water holds no appeal for anybody but Catholics. I didn’t bother to research, to assess the demand and to attune myself to my customers’ varied needs and perspectives.
“That was a superb lesson in how not to run a business.”
He lost about $50,000 before finally shutting it down.
“I learned lessons that continue to serve me – not just about market research and customer service, but that it is important to create companies that truly resonate with your soul. … I learned that I could fail and survive. Like the generations of Jews, each certain it might be the last, I rebounded and used adversity and disappointment to adapt and grow, staying ever truer to myself.”
Alper offers plenty of Yiddish, Hebrew and spiritual touchstones. God tells Abraham, “Lech lecha,” not just go forth, but go to yourself.
“God is commanding Abraham not just to depart from his birthplace, but to find the truest version of himself…
“When you choose to be an entrepreneur, you are choosing a highly independent path… simultaneously going out into the world and going ‘to yourself,’ creating yourself and your career.”
Alper devotes an entire chapter to the Sabbath, even shares a trick of the trade. How do you close a bagel shop on Saturdays to a predominantly non-Jewish world? You don’t. So he practiced shtar mechira, which seems like legal fiction, but attests to the flexibility of halacha, Jewish law. Really what the chapter about is rest, the importance of Sabbath to unplug from the world and recharge one’s batteries and spirit. “It has been so important to my life and success that I cannot imagine my life with out it. The point, though, isn’t that every entrepreneur needs Shabbat per se. It’s that you need to build pauses – in months, day or even minutes—into your life and even into your business.”
Kudos to Noah Alper for sharing how to succeed, how to fail and how to conduct yourself as a mensch. It’s a breezy, fun-read for the budding entrepreneur and balanced enough to scare away some people who shouldn’t be in business. Thanks, too, to Thomas Fields-Meyer, the veteran People Magazine and Dallas Morning News writer and editor, who helps Alper sound smarter still.
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