HoneyBaked Ham - A Growing Company that Just Won't Quit

It’s a simple thing, the number 3. But it keeps Craig Kurz tossing and turning.

Kurz is CEO of The HoneyBaked Ham Company, an enterprise his grandfather, Harry Hoenselaar launched half a century ago when he invented the spiral slicer, a contraption that made it easy for post-War moms to serve ham. Harry could not have realized it at the time, but his machine would change the world.

Others didn’t quite see it, either. When Harry was unable to sell his invention to the big meatpacking companies, he decided to sell ham instead. So he developed a curing, smoking and baking process for his ham, and to top it off, he created the signature sweet glaze that had people lining up around the block to buy his ham from his first store in Michigan.

Harry’s legacy rests now with his third generation – maternal grandsons Kurz and his brothers, Keith, Chief Operating Officer, and George, the company’s President and Chief Financial Officer. Their parents, Jo Ann and S. George, along with Jo Ann’s sister’s and brother-in-laws, built The HoneyBaked Ham into a 400-plus-store business. Now in their 40s, the brothers are looking not just to keep the dream alive, but to transform it for the next generation.

Statistically, their chances are barely slim.

“The odds of a family business succeeding from the third to fourth generation are three percent,” says HBH’s Chief Executive Officer.

“That’s what keeps me up at night. We don’t want to be the generation that fails.”

So one day in August, the Kurz brothers brought their top management team to the Eureka! Ranch for a day and a half of crystal ball gazing. Their goal: To come away with a pipeline filled with ideas to accelerate growth and enable the next Kurz generation to hit the ground at a gallop.

Their host, Eureka! Ranch founder Doug Hall, set the bar the first day: “You’re blessed to have the founders still involved, but you can’t depend on them. What you need now is to create a culture where innovation is a constant flow, not just something that happens every now and then.”

George Kurz agreed: “Our people are smart enough, creative enough. We understand the need for innovation. We just don’t know how to do it.”

Hall set the stage for the first day, explaining how it would be spent developing ideas. He described the Eureka! Winning Ways process for developing measurably smarter choices for growth.

As with any Winning Ways project, the goal would be to crank out 50+ choices for growth exploring more effective marketing, new customers/markets and new or improved products. Following the Eureka! session the top ideas would be boiled down to a dozen written ideas and, finally, four ideas would be selected for testing using the Eureka! Ranch’s Merwyn research system.

Each of the 21 exercises during the Eureka! session are designed to help the HoneyBaked team find ideas by looking through different lenses, considering different questions, thinking about the task from this angle and that. Each question is meant to provoke a close look at a specific aspect of what is or what could be.

Some examples: Where could the company look for new customers? What unexpected product would most excite these customers? What are potential death threats to the business? What trends could have an impact? What could they do that the competition couldn’t?

The question about finding new customers provokes a discussion at Craig Kurz’ table. He’s noticed that his daughter’s favorite place to eat is Panera Bread. Could Panera sell HoneyBaked sandwiches? Someone else mentions Cracker Barrel and the traffic that chain attracts when everyone is traveling home for the holidays.

“I like that as a distribution point,” Kurz said.

Someone said, hey, what about HoneyBaked and tailgate parties? Someone else said, yeah, or those long weekend soccer tournaments where moms are looking for something more “better for you” than fast food. Or what about HoneyBaked and Sam Adams beer for poker night with the guys?

“Tailgating,” Kurz said. “It feels good for HoneyBaked, like a natural. But we’re not there.”

The process takes some getting used to – the exercises are rigorous and highly focused. But as the group moved from one exercise to the next, the consensus was that the program was producing results.

“It seems to work more smoothly as the day goes on – maybe there’s a bit of a learning curve,” said Keith Kurz.

Added HoneyBaked Marketing Director Beth Cavanaugh, “Ideas we’ve talked about before seem to be coming up in different, more refined ways.”

As the afternoon wears on, the ideas stretch farther and farther from life as usual. Craig Kurz suggests that maybe the company should become “HoneyBaked beyond Ham” or just “HoneyBaked.” That idea, in turn, suggests taking the opposite tack – a company that does nothing but ham in all it’s many forms, with experimental cures from different parts of the world and exotic sausages made with fruit and nut varitiels.

“Why run from ham?” Kurz posited. “Why not embrace it?”

At the end of the first day, dozens of ideas written on yellow cards are arranged on a table. The HoneyBaked team gathers to defend various ideas. Everyone gets to vote for four concepts. The four that get the most votes will be considered for testing.

Hall issued a warning as the team goes over the concepts and prepares to break for the day. “Think about what will be a stretch, but something you can get a win with early on. Our goal is to build momentum by getting a win.”

The team settled on four concepts to test with Merwyn. The ideas were tested and at the next meeting the Merwyn results were revealed to the team. The average Merwyn test score is a 33. The four identified by the HoneyBaked team range from a low of 43 to a high of 60. The team members are pleased with the scores.

Following review of the ideas two were selected for Trailblazer action planning. Trailblazer is a process for reducing risk on new ideas and for accelerating their speed to market. The collective intelligence of the group is used to identify potential weaknesses, develop strengths and dozens of factors that could get in the way. As they debate the questions put to them by the Trailblazer process, they find that some pathways are blocked and others are opened. More and more ideas emerge.

“Too often in the corporate world, they need to know the answer before they start,” Hall said. “So where’s the opportunity to learn? This is a system that can help you muck around with an idea – a fail fast, fail cheap approach that makes it possible to test it, make it better, test it again and make it better until the idea’s right. As opposed to a big launch, a huge failure and a good idea that never really had a chance, it’s important to let ideas nurture.”

They came looking for ideas, and they left with a system for creating ideas on their own. “That’s way better,” Keith Kurz said.

By his own admission, the CEO says the company’s culture is such that its leaders spending more time debating initiatives than acting on them. “I feel that, as a company, we’ve been in the quicksand sometimes,” he added. “Now I feel like someone has thrown us a rope. I have to say I’m more excited about the future than I have been in a good long time.”