If Joanne Lalonde-Hayes had not already raised three children to the ages of six, seven, and eight, she might have been overwhelmed. But when 720,000 recipe cards arrived in the basement of her suburban Ottawa home, Lalonde-Hayes called on her home-bred expertise in chaos control and took it all in stride. She and her five business partners set the cards out on makeshift tables and started putting them in boxes. “It was pretty scary,” she says as she recalls the day in September 1993 when the recipes arrived. “But we just sort of made them up and sold them.”

The cards were part of the first printing of Lalonde-Hayes’ bestselling More Time Cooks for Families – a six-week set of recipes, shopping lists, and menus aimed at busy families. Lalonde-Hayes, a strategic planner by profession, has since produced two more similar sets – More Time Cooks for Singles and Going Vegetarian. And she is hoping for a new hit with her latest project, a four-colour calendar called the More Time Moms Family Organizer. Together, the products are meant to make families healthier by helping them find more time for themselves. “What we’re trying to do is develop products that will improve the quality of life at home,” she says. “Something like More Time Cooks for Families saves time in the week as far as cooking and shopping goes.”

More Time Moms Inc., the home-based business that designs and publishes More Time books, was established in August 1993 when Lalonde-Hayes and several friends realized their own lives were in disarray. “I kept hearing all these horror stories. The first big one was dinner time. It’s chaos,” she says. Instead of asking a publisher to take on the project, 15 parents bought shares in the company and raised $10,000. The compromise meant everything had to be done as inexpensively as possible. The first set of cards was printed on a single-colour press (each card was done four times to produce four colours) and cut by hand. Lalonde-Hayes sold the first sets on consignment to Coles and SmithBooks stores in Ottawa. And she marketed them herself, by setting up booths at trade shows aimed at women.

Despite their humble beginnings, the three series have been a huge success. Priced at $19.95, More Time Cooks for Families sold 5,000 copies within two months of its Ottawa debut in December 1993. Since then, the three titles have sold 45,000 copies and Lalonde-Hayes has been able to sub-contract production and packaging. Her cooking demonstrations have become a regular feature at Ottawa stores and she arranges a cross-Canada media tour for each new production. The next step is to expand into the United States. Although she has turned down offers from several Canadian publishers because “I like doing it on my own,” Lalonde-Hayes says she hopes to sell rights for a repackaged version of her books to a U.S. publisher within a year.