Paula Janssen with her parents, Eileen and Joseph Jr. Janssen’s Market was founded by Joseph’s father. Courtesy of Paula Janssen
One key to the success of Janssen’s Market is “family.”
Sure, it’s a family-owned business, run by three generations of the Janssens since 1952.
Over the decades, “our staff has become like family,” said Eileen Janssen, who joined her husband Joseph Jr. in the business in 1984 after teaching at A.I. du Pont High. The Greenville market closes on major holidays, allowing staffers to spend time with their families.
And sometimes staffers are family, said her daughter Paula, noting combos of parents and children, plus aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces among the staff of about 100. Until this summer, there was a grandmother and a grandchild, with the late Linda A. Seidenstat known as bubbe – Yiddish for grandmother – to staffers and customers alike.
Janssen’s has multiple revenue streams
Janssen’s is primarily a grocery store, covering 18,000 square feet. It is large enough to offer a wide selection of quality items but small enough to allow for a quick shopping trip, especially with multiple cashiers. Paula calls it “a gourmet convenience store.”
Plus it’s a cafe, with the 65-seat J’s dating back to 2007, when the store tripled its space by moving to the Greenville Shopping Center.
It’s also a catering operation, handling many office lunches and family events, like weddings. Janssen’s employs 10 to 12 chefs, who prepare all the deli food (except for customer-favorite surimi salad and rice pudding) in-store, as well as catering and takeout orders.
And it’s the kind of place that has hosted a free holiday tasting for two decades. For two hours, customers and potential customers sample turkey and all the trimmings, enjoy specialty items from local vendors, listen to a live band, and just hang together at tables under tents.
Inside Janssen’s Market in Greenville. Courtesy of Paula Janssen
Behind the scenes at Janssen’s
Paula was 12 when she started staffing the cash register and pricing items the old way, one sticker at a time. After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, she worked as a consultant and in software, in assignments where she lived around the world.
Then she had an epiphany. “I could work that hard for somebody else,” she said, “or there is this great business that my family has back home, and I could work that hard for myself. But I wanted to bring something to the business, so I went to business school [Wharton, class of 2004] before I went into the business full time.”
“If you want your children to come back,” Eileen offered, “you have to let them go away.”
Paula and her late husband, veterinarian Gregory M. Greene, have no children, but his nephew and nieces have worked summers at the store. Will they choose Janssen’s as a career? “They have a lot of living to do,” Paula said.
The Janssens think all the time about expansion. “We’re always looking for the right opportunity,” Paula said. “But we also know how people-dependent what we do is, and I think the mistake some entrepreneurs make is that first [expansion]. Going from one to three stores is a big step because you can’t clone yourself. You get pulled in a lot of directions.”
Even though she had years of corporate experience and book learning from the MBA, Paula had to learn some critical elements on the job, like facilities management and HVAC systems. “Such a big cost” is also key to the store’s commitment to sustainability, including as much as possible in recyclable and compostable containers and serving in a Delaware Solid Waste Authority pilot program to use a digester on food waste. “We want to leave this place better than we got it,” she said.
She has assigned herself a lot of back-office responsibilities and leaves the managers in the store to run the departments well, as they have learned over years, even decades in the job.
She also learned the importance of investing in people (good benefits and good career development opportunities. “The best way to grow is not micromanaging,” she said.
As a manager, “I had to learn patience,” she said. “Stop talking and listen to what other people have to say. Strategic patience is a smart way of tackling problems and not just rushing headlong into finding a solution right away.”
Paula believes in networking (“We’re better when we learn from others in the business,” she said), so she chairs the Delaware Food Council (which represents supermarkets, convenience stores, and pharmacies) and serves as secretary of the Delaware Restaurant Association. The two trade groups provide differing perspectives since Janssen’s is a small business in the former, a large one in the latter.
In her little free time, she loves to golf (with a handicap that tops 20, “but it’s still fun”) and being with her three dogs and four cats. “They teach you patience,” she said. “They’re good stress relief.”
Alapocas residents Henry and Julie Voigt have been customers for decades, with Henry citing the “quality of the food, the service, the people who know you and know what you like. If there’s a product I don’t see, they’ll try to get it. We’re lucky to have this here.”
“We’re very spoiled,” Julie added.
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