Greyston CEO serves up brownies with social mission
Yonkers businessman Julius Walls Jr. took a break recently from his
office at Greyston Bakery, where he is president and CEO, for a two-day
mission in Manhattan. Between dishing out brownie samples at Whole Foods
stores, he preached (the CEO also is a preacher at the AME Zion church
in Yonkers) a gospel of good business practices in those training
sanctuaries of American capitalism, business school lecture halls.
He spoke and dished desserts in the company of Jerry Greenfield, one
backpack-toting half of the Vermont duo (Burlington by way of Long
Island and New York City) that gave its name to Ben and Jerry’s Homemade
Ice Cream Inc. Greenfield at their Whole Foods stops served up one of
their Unilever-owned company’s top-selling flavors, chocolate fudge
brownie, whose brownie pieces are made at Greyston Bakery.
Walls had a threefold mission in the city: to promote the
“super-premium” Do-Goodie Brownie that Greyston launched in retail
stores in late 2007 and the newly published book, “Mission, Inc.,” that
he co-authored and, while so promoting, to spread word of that
alternative business model, social enterprise companies, and especially
the community mission in Yonkers of the nonprofit Greyston Foundation
that is served by profits from Greyston Bakery. More brownies sold
equals more money with which to do common good: that is the simple but
not so easily worked equation that guides Greyston.
The book, which Walls wrote in a largely long-distance, online
collaboration with Kevin Lynch, president of a nonprofit T-shirt company
in St. Paul, Minn., that provides temporary jobs for recovering addicts
and alcoholics, is subtitled “The Practitioner’s Guide to Social
Enterprise.” Filled with pithy boldface tips drawn from the long
experience of the authors and other founders, owners and heads of
typically small, successful companies whose profits support a broader
social mission, the book is a beginner’s manual for entrepreneurs in
what is a growing network of business practice and studies.
On campuses, there is a “significantly higher” interest in social
entrepreneurship, said Walls. Increasingly, young business professionals
want both to make money and “to be fulfilled as well” by putting
business in the service of people rather than the reverse. “Now with
what’s occurred in the world economy, I think people are waking up to
the problem with just pursuing the dollar at all costs,” he said.
“Money is not the root of all evil,” Walls said, correcting a common
biblical misquote. “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
At New York University’s Stern School of Business, one of the
Julius-and-Jerry duo’s speaking stops in the city, Walls has been
appointed social entrepreneur in residence for 2009 and will teach a
course this fall as a professor of social entrepreneurship.
Columbia Business School, where he and Greenfield also spoke, also
offers a social enterprise program.
“It is a possibility that we can use business to do good and do well,”
Walls told his Columbia audience. “It’s not just about making money.
It’s about people, planet and profits, in that order.”
As business professionals, “We’re responsible because we are powerful
and because we are response-able.”
Walls told of his first encounter with Greyston in the early ’90s as a
salesman for a chocolate manufacturer. “I had no idea what they were
doing. They were just another bakery that I was trying to sell chocolate
to,” he said.
He joined Greyston as a marketing consultant in 1995 and two years later
was named CEO. He is also senior vice president for business at the
Greyston Foundation, a $13-million network of for-profit and nonprofit
entities that provides a range of community services focused in Yonkers,
including low-income and work force housing, health care and child care,
community gardens and jobs at the nearly 60-employee, 20,000-square-foot
Alexander Street bakery. “All of that started because of a small
bakery,” Walls said of those services.
Running Greyston Bakery, “It has changed my life,” he said. “It has
changed the way I look at what’s possible for business.”
The bakery under Wall’s leadership has grown to about $7 million in
annual revenue. About $500,000 this year will come from Do-Goodie
brownie sales, largely at Whole Foods stores in the metropolitan area,
and the company expects 50 percent growth for its gourmet brownie
product. “It’s the opportunity to grow and do this thing on a larger
scale that we’re excited about,” Walls said after his Manhattan tour.
That growth poses challenges for small social enterprise companies such
as Greyston with limited resources, Walls said at Columbia and in
“Mission, Inc.” To do that, Greyston, which now focuses its retail
distribution in the Northeast, could open a West Coast facility and go
national. “It’s years down the road, but it’s something we definitely
need to move to,” he said.
To enable that growth, Walls said Greyston officials are looking at
bringing minority equity owners into the bakery business. Unlike Ben and
Jerry’s, however, he told his business school audience it’s unlikely
that Greyston would ever sell the business to a company such as Unilever
to support the growth of its social mission.
“Our interest is definitely not to lose control at all,” he said in
Yonkers. “Our interest is in raising capital so that we can do more. It
will definitely be like-minded folk” investing in the business.
Greyston might go into business outside its bakery operation. Walls said
foundation officials are planning for its next social enterprise and
recently met with government leaders in Yonkers and nonprofits in a
“brainstorming session.”
“By the end of this year we will have a decision” on what that
enterprise will be, Walls said. He said the new business could draw upon
the bakery’s assets and resources, though that is not certain.
Walls does have a certain vision for Greyston Bakery. “We’re going to
try to be the super-premium Ben and Jerry’s of brownies,” he said in the
city.
|
