A Recipe for Accomplishment

David Thompson, founder and president of Home Bistro catalog, took a chance on a good idea and wasn’t afraid to knock down a few doors to make it happen. His persistence was well rewarded in 2002, three years after starting his gourmet food delivery company, when an infusion of venture capital allowed him to build a new manufacturing facility and expand his catalog circulation from 100,000 in 1999 to nearly 5 million last year.

Working in the food industry for more than 20 years, Thompson devised an idea for a business that cooks, freezes and ships fully prepared meals. At the time, he was working for another company that was testing a similar product. When the concept was shelved due to poor test results, he approached the top brass with another take on the food delivery catalog. After he was turned down, Thompson took four months to get up the nerve to quit his job and do it on his own.

Greatest Business Challenges

Finding investors in the midst of the dot-com explosion turned into one of the biggest challenges he’d ever faced. He fought pressure from potential investors to call his new company HomeBistro.

com, because he saw it as a catalog-driven business.

“It was very difficult to raise money when I was the only employee, and the business was pretty much a three-ring binder with some debt,” says Thompson.

Sheer persistence enabled him to get that first investment. He talked to everyone he could and never backed down, he recalls. As Thompson sees it, one of the biggest problems was that most investors weren’t in his target demographic. When he finally found an investor willing to take a chance, she fell very neatly within Home Bistro’s target audience — an affluent woman between the ages of 35 and 54.

At the moment, managing the catalog’s recent growth is Thompson’s biggest concern. “We’ve been doubling in size every year since we got that first investment,” he says. With sales climbing, the catalog’s infrastructure has grown as well. One of the biggest concerns Thompson says, is figuring out when to fill that next empty spot on the organizational chart or buy that new freezer.

One of the things that sets Home Bistro apart is that all of the food is prepared at its facilities. “A lot of food catalogs get merchandise from other vendors,” says Thompson. “They might make some of it, but they round it out with products from outside vendors.”

Focused on growing the business, Thompson envisions Home Bistro becoming a well-known brand across the country. To him, the catalog is a restaurant, and while patrons may not dine with him every night, he wants them to keep coming back to see what’s new on the menu. Increasing circulation certainly will be a factor in attaining this goal, says Thompson, but he knows he’ll need to find ways of reaching customers outside the catalog realm.

His advice for new catalogers: “You need some unique reason for being,” he says. “Don’t be just another swimsuit or food catalog. Bring something new to the table.”

Citing his own inexperience when he founded the Home Bistro catalog, Thompson notes that you also need to surround yourself with people who know more than you do and are willing to disagree with you. Says Thompson, “If everyone only gives you good news, something’s wrong.”