Laurel Stadler has a quality problem
with the menus made by her tiny company
in Mound House.
They're too good.
So good that some of the restaurants
that bought her menu covers five years ago
don't need to replace them even after daily
handling by patrons.
So good that the company suggests its
customers take the number of menus recommended
by most of its competitors and
slash the order in half because replacements
won't be necessary.
But that's just fine with Stadler. Her
company, John Jantos Menus and
Advertising Specialities, profitably plugs
along handling orders ranging from five or
10 menus for tiny diners to thousands for
national chain restaurants.
The products produced by the company's
three fulltime employees range from
single sheet placards imagine a typed
diner menu protected behind a plastic
sheet to richly embossed Naugahyde
menu covers.
Prices range from $3 or $4 each for a
single-sheet placard to $18 or so for a
menu embossed with the restaurant's logo.
Each is made by hand in the company's
modest facility, a cinderblock building in a
Mound House industrial park. And much
of the time, each of the menus is made by
hand by one person Debra Dill.
When she's constructing one of the
company's old-fashioned see-through
menus they account for 60 percent of
sales Dill starts with a piece of clear
plastic. Not vinyl, mind you, because vinyl
can become rippled and distorted, but a
tougher plastic. Like everything else in the
menus, the plastic is American-made.
Using a book-grade binding, Dill sews
a back for the menu and binds the edges.
The corners are finished with brass tips.
Together with Bob Williams, the production
manager at John Jantos Menus
since 1986, Dill carefully inspects each
menu before it's shipped.
The attention to quality, Stadler said, is
the company's primary marketing tool. It
relies largely on word-of-mouth advertising
to generate sales leads for the independent
distributors who handle its line
nationwide.
Williams and Dill are challenged to
maintain those quality standards when the
company gets one of its periodic big
orders.When that happens, the company
calls on a cadre of about 10 part-time
employees to get the orders out the door.
Dill, who has worked 13 years for the
company, leads the teaching.
The effects of a big job are all the more
pronounced because the company doesn't
build inventories of finished products in
advance. Instead, it follows the lead of
Stadler's father, company founder John
Jantos, in working closely with individual
restaurant owners an order at a time.
Jantos launched the company in Los
Angeles in 1962, meeting with one
restaurant owner after another from
Bakersfield to San Diego to design and
produce menus.
Eighteen years ago, Jantos moved the
business to Carson City. At about the
same time, restaurant owners began to use
personal computers to produce their own
menu inserts, and John Jantos Menus
shifted its emphasis to see-through
designs.
Jantos retired in 1990, shortly after
his wife died, and he sold the company
to their daughter, Stadler. Jantos died
in 1995.
While the menu business is profitable
on its own, Stadler in 1998 added distribution
of advertising specialities to the
firm's line. (Ironically, her father once had
been an award-winning salesman of advertising
specialities.)
Still, Stadler isn't eager to push the
company's growth too hard. Among other
things, she wants to keep plenty of time
available for her work as a Nevada leader
of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
"It's not always necessary to grow
really, really big," she said.
