Qualifications
If you're the president of a successful niche food company, nobody's going to be asking to see your résumé, because you're the one making the rules here. You're the one asking to see their résumés. How about that? Take that, Coach Malarky. Who doesn’t have the makings of a college ballplayer now?
Ahem. It's true though. If you've got the hustle and the skills to move product, what are they gonna say? You can't argue with cash. That said, what does it take to be able to make it in this field? There's no set formula, but we've got some ideas.
For one, you need a healthy cache of business savvy. That means experience in marketing, accounting, and management, or finding some employees who can help with those things. A degree in one of those concerns wouldn't hurt. Business acumen also means keeping up to date with compliance and tax hurdles—the oft overlooked necessities can swiftly and abruptly end your niche food entrepreneurial hopes if not dealt with properly.
Next, there are the people skills: charisma, for schmoozing business folks and early customers; a good memory, for faces and for details of the business; and style, in the form of understanding the cultural trends that'll keep you cool and relevant within your niche.
Finally, you're probably going to need Spartan-warrior-like resilience. Remember what we were saying earlier about nine out of ten startups failing? It likely won't be a quick, easy road to fortune as the Gourmet Pretzel Prince of the Pacific Northwest.
Entrepreneurship is the original school of hard knocks. Sometimes you might just feel like a hapless salmon swimming upstream. But swim hard, little fishy. There's a mighty cash reward up that stream if you can manage to get there.