New El Rey president Balverde-Sanchez revives old El Rey recipe for spicy success.

New El Rey president Balverde-Sanchez revives old El Rey recipe for spicy success When the new El Rey Sausage Co. was just getting started four years ago, it had nine employees and grossed about $13,000 a week at its 10,000-square-foot plant in downtown L.A. Now the company has 39 employees, grosses about $5 million a year and is preparing to move to a new 60,000-square-foot building in the nearby city of Vernon.

But despite its success the young company - it makes Mexican-style chorizo sausage - was no hot dog, according to President Laura Balverde-Sanchez who was feted last Friday as L.A.'s Small Business Person of the Year by the Small Business Administration and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

"We've been a real austere company," she says. Where a lot of fledgling businesses fail, she says, is that "they want to have the pride of ownership. They want this nice-looking building, nice-looking furniture."

The New El Rey, however, wasn't about to waste money for appearance's sake. "I brought in a lot of office stuff from my home - old filing cabinets, my old type-writer," Balverde-Sanchez recalls. "We bought a lot of our equipment at auction."

Yes, there was an "old" El Rey sausage company, the subsidiary of a larger food manufacturing company that had gone bankrupt in the early 1980s. Balverde-Sanchez and her husband, Joe, bought the sausage subsidiary from the bankruptcy court in April 1983.

"The product had been off the shelves for over a year," Balverde-Sanchez says, "so we had a lot of obstacles to overcome to convince people that the product was back."

The company hired brokers to sell the sausage, but they weren't getting any nibbles. "We decided that in order to have the confidence regained we had to go out ourselves and let the buyers know the El Rey brand was under new ownership and was just as good."

(Joe Sanchez, who is the company's treasurer, has other businesses including grocery stores; Balverde-Sanchez runs the day-to-day operations.)

"The tough thing was regaining the confidence of the industry in our product," Balverde-Sanchez says, "We were fortunate that the product had excellent name recognition and the public remembered it." Indeed, the old El Rey's Mexican sausage business had been the national leader in sales, grossing some $8 million a year.

"The smaller independent grocers are the ones that gave us our initial start," she says, "Without them we would never have been able to get the major supermarket chains. It took a year and a half to get the Safeway chain back." Besides Safeway and the independents, the company's chorizo is sold at Ralphs, Lucky, Vons, 7-Eleven, Irvine Ranch Farmers Market and Gelson's. It's also sold to restaurants

"Our objective over the next five years is to go national," Balverde-Sanchez says. The company also wants to broaden the market for Mexican sausage. She notes you can use chorizo in spaghetti, lasagne, sloppy Joe's and any other dish calling for Italian sausage.

Balverde-Sanchez, who is just two courses shy of a master's degree in public administration from USC (she has a degree in psychology from UCLA), has taught night school classes in citizenship and English as a second language, and was personnel director of a Foremost ice cream plant "where I was exposed to quality control and supervision."

She's at work by 6 a.m. "I usually eat my lunch at my desk going over invoices, or doing sales calls," she says. A few years ago she wouldn't have taken the time to be interviewed for a newspaper article. But she feels now she can savor her success a little bit. And, she says, "I would like very much to finish that master's degree."