Professional

Mine is a professional life that has basically had only two segments. These are various types of academia and the world of food service. By training at Drury University, I am a writer, but, much like others in the arts, I stumble at being able to call it a professional career since I've never actually been paid to do it. Much of my early young adulthood was spent trying in vain to get paid for writing while I went to college and grad school. During this time, I worked the usual collection of food service jobs, white collar internships, and even, quite briefly, in telemarketing. Following that old maxim which states that those who can't do teach, I substitute taught in three different school districts for two years while returning to college to become a gifted education teacher specializing in English & history. Although I liked teaching, I found I wanted to teach more complex subject matter and applied to a number of PhD programs to become a college professor. Those plans changed when the economy crashed in fall of 2008, which led to go to culinary school since it was a more professionally practical pursuit about which I was already passionate.

Once I was out of culinary school, my first real job in the industry was working in the gelato shop some college friends had begun. They knew I had gotten through most of the way through a baking and pastry arts program and wanted me to make better gelato for them than was available for wholesale distribution. After spending about six months of private research, taking two trips to California to train, at CIA Greystone and with a legendary gelato shop owner respectively, and buying a home gelato machine to test recipes on, I began work at their gelato shop. Although things went very well, the working relationship broke down after I was never paid, despite acting as chef, supplier, and  dishwasher, something I unwisely let slide for so long since they were old friends. During that time, I had already started my own gelato wholesale manufacturer called F.C.B. Desserts. Six months after I quit the gelato shop, we began distributing under the brand name Benissimo. At our height, the Springfield, MO company had product as far south as Northwest Arkansas and as far north as Columbia, MO. We made our product right and were known for it.

Before I began my company, I did not have much leadership experience. About the most I'd ever been a leader was a brief stint in Drury University's student government when I was an undergraduate. Knowing this, I brought on a woman to be an administrator and fill much of the managerial role that I was too inexperienced to perform. Being an autistic man, I am not terribly comfortable with hugging or being emotionally demonstrative, but I can certainly tell you that you must get over that fast when your staff is almost entirely composed of young women in their late teens and early twenties. Such handicaps aside, we became a fun an familial workplace. My realm was the kitchen and my culinary knowledge, quality standards, and insistence upon safety and sanitation procedures (very important in a production kitchen specializing in dairy) were what made our product the outstanding showstopper it invariably was. Nonetheless, I signed all paychecks, made ultimate decisions, and shared responsibility for figuring out how to solve problems as they came up. I can safely say I learned quite a bit from the experience.

-Frank