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“Not Just Baking Cookies” – Mrs. Fields Cookies
Goes Prime Time
 You
know what it’s like when you’re feeling terribly scared,
knowing there are forces out there trying to “do you (and
your company) in” – and you don’t know how to
avert almost certain disaster?
When I first met Randy, he was in this exact situation.
Randy Fields – husband of the famous Mrs. Fields, and president
of the Mrs. Fields corporation – had a nice little business
going. 40 stores. A comfortable growth rate. Fantastic profits.
Everything was under control…until…Otis Spunkmeyer.
Almost overnight, Randy’s life got a whole lot less secure.
Despite the fact that the Mrs. Fields’ cookie was always baked
fresh and tasted better, the problem was that Otis Spunkmeyer had
economies of scale: bulk central manufacturing, simple distribution
models, and no need for a retail organization. Meanwhile, the Mrs.
Fields organization was locked into a retail model that ensured
costs would track upward almost perfectly against revenues. There
was no solution there.
In our first meeting, Randy was noticeably troubled. He knew he
somehow had to convert his nice, little 40-store operation into
a minimum of 400 retail outlets…but how? Better yet, how could
he do this and remain profitable? The management payroll would absolutely
destroy him.
Randy and I argued back and forth, but I knew there had to be an
answer. I told him I needed to think about it. I pondered for days,
thinking back over my experiences in IT, retail, in distribution,
and even in manufacturing. Suddenly, I realized that his dilemma
was exactly that of the retail clothing industry!
When I figured this out, I instantly knew that the Mrs. Fields organization
could succeed by pushing inventory replenishment decisions down
to the individual store level and by automating the entire “reorder
point” process. I developed store-level cookie baking schedules
based on the same stock replenishment algorithms that enabled the
company to expand with little to no real “management”
staff at the store level. The retail clerks were now given the bakery
orders in advance, right at their own local computers!
Randy was ecstatic and the company was unbelievably successful;
in fact, SO successful that they sold the company to PepsiCo a few
years later and both Mr. and Mrs. Fields became multimillionaires.
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