From Psych Ward to Bagel Mensch - Berkeleyside.com

Noah Alper started his bagel business with a single storefront on College Avenue back in the summer of 1989. Six years later the company, Noah’s Bagels, had expanded to 38 West Coast outlets and was sold to Einstein Bagel Bros. for $100 million dollars.

Talk about a rocket ride from start up to stunning success.

Truth is, though, Alper is a self-described serial entrepreneur who has launched six businesses with mixed results. Early on in his career back East he did a roaring trade selling rustic salad bowls out of the back of his VW bug. And a homewares operation he began in 1971 did well, as did a natural food store he started in 1973, Bread & Circus, now a chain owned by Whole Foods.

But Alper’s venture into the mail-order catalog market, Holy Land Gifts, which sold religious handicrafts imported from Israel to evangelical Christians, was a total bust in the mid-80s. And his kosher Italian Ristorante Raphael lasted only four years in downtown Berkeley before calling it a night in 2007.

So the 64-year-old business consultant knows a thing or two about the ups and downs of an entrepreneur’s life. He shares the lessons he’s learned in his recent book, Business Mensch: Timeless Wisdom for Today’s Entrepreneur, written with Thomas Fields-Meyer.

Part memoir, part motivational manual, and part homily to the Jewish traditions that have informed how he lives his life and conducts business, Alper’s book is an antidote to a post-Madoff Ponzi scheme world. In its pages he stresses spiritual values such as honesty, integrity, and ethics.

All this from a man who survived a nine-month stint in a mental institution following a breakdown during his student days at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where drug experimentation, coupled with the violence and stress of the antiwar movement, proved too much for his fragile psyche.