Small Business Summit Center

“The secrets of real entrepreneurial success: that is what our panelists will share,” said moderator and small-business expert Jane Applegate in introducing the all-stars on the New York Times Small Business Summit’s opening panel. They came from diverse backgrounds: restaurateur Wally Ganzi; Manhattan Portage CEO, founder and trendy handbag retailer Su-hwei Lin; Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg — whose company is reinventing the job-search process — and Jason Ackerman, CFO and cofounder of FreshDirect.com, a Queens-based business with the goal of revolutionizing how food moves from farms to consumers’ tables. Yet, however diverse, the four share a key ingredient: they have surfed the entrepreneurial wave and come out on top.

Dive into the gap. That is what Jason Goldberg did in building Jobster.com, a 2004 start-up. “We saw a marketplace gap and we filled it. Employers wanted better ways to connect with possible employees. What we are about is helping employers and employees build social networks.” Goldberg recognized that of course there already were lots of Internet job sites, but the aim of Jobster was to allow companies and people to build relationships that may (or may not) lead somewhere, maybe even before the company has a hiring need. That simple idea birthed Jobster, said Goldberg.

Love retail. That is the message of Su-hwei Lin, who grew up in Taiwan and who, in 1991, came to New York and found herself in a handbag business, where she said she soon learned a key lesson. “A lot of designers don’t like retail. They don’t think it is elegant. They are so wrong. Retail helped me succeed.” Yes, she confessed, “retail was scary for me. My English isn’t very good.” But she logged thousands of hours in a Manhattan storefront as she built her business. “If I deal with 1,000 customers, I get 1,000 ideas about what customers really want. Retail is where you get true information.”

Consistency. “That is what customers want,” said Wally Ganzi, CEO and co-owner of the Palm steak houses. Over the last 40-plus years, Ganzi has led the expansion of the family-owned Palm from a lone New York restaurant into a chain with 25 outposts, from Washington DC to Los Angeles. However, the more the business expanded at the Palm, the more Ganzi wanted to keep things the same. “Consistency is what customers want; they don’t want surprises.” Go into a Palm and there will be big sizzling steaks, massive lobsters, immense martinis and, Ganzi says with pride, there really has been little change in the Palms in the more than four decades he has worked at the restaurants — and where his father and grandfather before him also worked. “Our restaurants are loud, they are busy, they are consistent,” he emphasized. “That is so important in building a business.”

Better matters. “We started FreshDirect.com because we saw a lot of waste in the traditional grocery business,” said Jason Ackerman. But didn’t Webvan dissolve into bankruptcy in 2001 attempting to do exactly what FreshDirect does, which is to deliver groceries directly to consumer, eliminating storefronts? Ackerman sighs when he hears that and he has heard it often. “I think everybody is skeptical about what we are doing.” Yet he is optimistic, because, he said, FreshDirect is an entirely different kind of company. “We are about bringing ‘just-in-time’ supply-chain thinking to groceries. We don’t cut a steak off the cow until you order it.” That creates a fresher product, Ackerman explained, but — crucially — the company’s focus on meeting customer needs only as they emerge “lets us wring out layers of cost compared to traditional grocers. We are rethinking the whole business.”