I wrote a few weeks ago about my favorite entrepreneurial role model, my dad. He’s 87 now and retired. I think about his business every single day of my life because I grew up with it. We had a gourmet food store on Lexington Avenue and 73rd Street called Service Delicacies. (It’s now a restaurant and bakery that I sometimes walk into, stand in the middle of, and just breathe.) It started out as my mother’s father’s deli, then my dad took it over. He had a thing for fancy foods. He was passionate about customer service. He was always in motion. He was almost all business. The only time I would see him smile was when I looked at him and smiled at him during the busy Saturdays I spent at the store from the age of 12 until I went to college, and even after. So, some lessons from my observations of Jerry York, one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve known:

1. Have an eye for the new. When we went on rare family vacations (usually the Catskills, Poconos or somewhere driveable from Queens) we inevitably wandered into food and farmers’ markets. While my brother and I squirmed, dad pored over the merchandise. Often he would find products being test marketed out of the city. He was the first in New York to offer Maxim Freeze Dried Coffee, around 1963. He found it somewhere in East Nowheresville, PA. He asked the store manager how much he had in stock, and my dad cleaned him out. He paid something like 25 cents a jar for a few dozen jars. The following week the window display of our store featured this revolutionary product in a pyramid display, selling for something like $2.50 a jar. Sold out immediately. Another time it was a salty snack called Bugles and Whistles (same snack, different shape). Same out-of-town trial. Same bazillion percent markup. Those corn chips paid for summer camp for my brother and me for years. Jerry was the first to have sourdough bread flown into from San Francisco. The first to have pre-prepared frozen gourmet entrees and hors d’oeuvres. He could see a trend or a fad, and he didn’t care which it was. It was a thick roll of Twenties in his pocket every day.

2. Packaging, environment and attitude are everything, no matter what the business. Every day the Fink bakery truck delivered loaves of pumpernickel, rye, wheat and white bread which were left by the front door. When the clerks arrived at 7AM they would slice the pumpernickel bread into 1/4-inch stacks and wrap the slices 10 to a pack in cellophane, which they would heat-seal closed with a blow-dryer. The bread went on the counter for sale. The loaf of Fink bread cost dad 50 cents, and he sliced it into about 100 slices, or 10 packages, and sold each package for $1. A 20-bagger in each loaf! Enough to make a venture capitalist proud! How come it worked? Everything in the store was gourmet. When you picked up that package of sliced bread, which set my dad back 5 cents, it was viewed against a backdrop of gourmet foods from around the world. The store was gleaming. Everything was dusted and in order. The clerks’ aprons were gleaming white and pressed. He could have charged $2 for the bread.

3. Let your customers drive your new product development strategy. Phone rings one day and dad answers. “Yes, Mrs. Smith, tomorrow 5 o’clock. Sandwich trays for 30 people. Salmon and cream cheese canapes. Uh hmm. Yes. 900 Park, PH 1, yes, yes. … (pause)….wooden folding chairs…(pause). Of course. Good night, Mrs. Smith, see you tomorrow.” Wooden folding chairs. We don’t carry chairs. Yellow Pages….here we go. Dial. “Deliver two dozen wood folding chairs to Mrs. Smith at 900 Park, Penthouse 1, tomorrow and send me a bill.” Done. Two days later the phone rings. It is Mrs. Smith. “Jerry, you almost ruined my party. Those chairs were disgusting. Broken down and awful looking. If I didn’t know you so well….” It was that call from Mrs. Smith that got my dad into the highly profitable party equipment rental business and eventually out of the food business. The party rental business that my brother took over, grew 10-fold and sold to the largest company in the industry late last year. All because of a Park Avenue lady who needed some folding chairs. The one downside of all this: it hasn’t been possible, in all of Manhattan, to get a really great rare roast beef sandwich on wheat bread, sliced paper-thin, with just a little butter, salt and paper, since 1975.