Jonathan Leal is the founder and owner of Milo’s Whole World Gourmet in Athens, Ohio. After graduating with an MBA from Ohio University in 2001, he wanted to become a flight attendant and travel the world, but when the terrorist attacks on 9/11 crushed the airline industry, he was forced to look at other options. He liked to cook and became a personal chef for private clients around Athens. This grew into a catering business and a partnership with a nonprofit incubator called the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks. There, he had access to a commercial kitchen that gave him the resources and equipment he needed to develop recipes, products, and eventually a new business.
In 2003, he took a leap, stopped catering, and launched Milo’s WWG as a standalone company that produces sauces, fruit spreads, and condiments. For almost twelve years, it was a hard slog that produced more failures than successes. Leal told me that it was a giant leap of faith that was based on hubris more than anything else.
“I thought I was God’s gift to mankind. I was so arrogant. Nobody could tell me what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t need help. I didn’t need anyone to tell me anything. I had an MBA, I was on top of the world. Nothing could stop me. And I’m in an area that doesn’t have anyone else doing what I’m doing. I’m destined to succeed! This was my thinking, which was clearly arrogant and wrong.”
“It was the worst thing I ever did. I wrote a business plan that said in two years I’d be doing a million dollars. In my second year I did $70,000. I was so deluded. I had these projections and charts and all this other MBA bulls—. None of it came true. None of it. It proved to be much, much harder to get that kind of traction. I later learned that, in the food business, if you’re doing things right it takes three to five years to get a return on investment. You have to have the money to make it through that much time. Starting out, I didn’t know that. It made things very difficult.”
Milo’s WWG experienced lackluster growth for years and when the U.S. economy collapsed during the 2009 financial crisis, Leal believed he was at the end of his rope. “In 2009, I had typed-out an email that told everyone I was done. Milo’s WWG was over. I apologized, but it was just not working. But then a good friend helped me look at the profit & loss statement to see what we could do. We cut 95% of the fixed expenses and were able to ride it out. This kept me from hitting send on that email. I still go back and wonder what would have changed that day if I had. Maybe I’d be building canoes in Peru or something.”
In 2017, Milo’s WWG expanded into co-packing other companies’ products and purchased a small competitor called Brownwood Farms. Brownwood’s products overlapped with Leal’s, and when he tested the two lines with customers, Brownwood’s sauces performed much better. “The truth is, we had been very static for close to twelve years, and our products weren’t that great. Once we acquired Brownwood, I realized that this was how products were supposed to sell.”
Things were going well, and the business was growing, but a serious problem surfaced later that year when Leal made a near fatal miscalculation on a co-packing project. Even with the increased revenue from Brownwood’s products, the business lost significant money that year. But once again, Leal was able to pull it out of the fire. “I am learning to take credit for being insanely persistent and scraping our way out of that hole to the point we are now doing really well.”
In 2021, Leal’s company took off and made serious money for the first time in almost twenty years. Ninety-minutes into a call that was originally scheduled for 30-minutes, I asked what kept him going through the hard times. Ultimately, it came down to the friends and family who had invested in the company. “I couldn’t stomach disappointing them. When I have close friends who put in a lot of money and believed in me, I told myself that I had to pull this out.”
There are many success stories in the small business world, but Leal’s is one of those special circumstances that’s worth noting. There aren’t very many people who have the personal strength and fortitude to stay with a struggling business for two decades, but he did, and it’s starting to pay off. But like many averagists whose lives seem to be on a never-ending cycle of success and near failure, the decisions we make can often cause us to question our choices.
“Sometimes I have regrets, yeah,” Leal told me as the conversation was winding down, “I grew up as a missionary kid traveling all over the world. Now I’ve spent twenty-years of my life building up an expensive specialty foods company for people who can afford to buy it. This isn’t my life’s purpose. I’ll tell you that. This is a way for me to get to my life’s purpose. I don’t know what it is, but it’s probably going to be something like my vice-president who goes to Africa and help’s drill wells for villages that need fresh drinking water. That kind of work is in my blood.”
No matter what challenges lay ahead for Jonathan Leal, whether he recognizes it or not, he has had a major impact in his corner of Middle America. Milo’s WWG’s fifteen employees are paid well and have full benefits for both themselves and their families. That’s an amazing accomplishment in any area, especially one like Athens, where economic opportunity is limited. Never-ending challenges often produce introspection that can either lead to despair or guarded optimism. Defining success in the small business world is difficult and it varies from person to person. For Leal though, it’s pretty simple, “At this point, [success] is having a functioning company with happy employees and making products well that make our customers happy.”
That’s one of the best answers I’ve heard from an American Averagist, and it’s a sign that Jonathan Leal has legendary grit and determination.
