How I Did It...Chobani's Founder on Growing a Start-Up Without Outside Investors.

The author grew up on a dairy farm in Turkey, where his mother made yogurt from scratch. When he moved to the United States, in 1994, he found : the yogurt to be "disgusting-too sugary and watery." So he made his own at home. By 2005 he was running a cheese factory in upstate New York when he saw an ad for a run-down but fully equipped yogurt factory that Kraft was divesting. It had a price tag below $1 million. Against the advice of his attorney and business adviser, he bought the factory with a bank loan backed by the Small Business Administration and immediately hired a master yogurt maker from Turkey. They spent two years perfecting their recipe, and Ulukaya worked hard to get the packaging just right. Three crucial decisions allowed him to finance growth after the business took off: He insisted that Chobani be sold in mainstream grocery stores and be stocked in the dairy aisle alongside existing yogurt brands. He negotiated with retailers over their slotting fees. And he spent a lot of time determining the right unit selling price. Within a few weeks of launch, very large orders started coming in; by 2009 the company was selling 200,000 cases of yogurt a week. It needed to make a big investment to increase capacity-but Ulukaya ruled out private equity investors. Here he tells why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]