Lebanon — To outsiders, it looked like Bruce Bergeron’s professional life had gone off the rails.

The Lebanon native had had a glamorous career traveling the country as an executive with digital mapping company Geographic Data Technology, managing a department of 250 employees, meeting with engineers and earning a bonus that was tied to how many people he could hire every quarter.

Now he was showing up at 4:30 a.m. to work at a convenience store where he grilled egg sandwiches, kept the drink coolers stocked and mopped the floor.

“People would walk in, see me behind the register and say, ‘Oh God, he’s really come down in the world,’ ” Bergeron said.

That was 2008, and in reality, Bergeron was starting willingly at the bottom rung to learn the convenience store business from the ground up.

It’s a process that will culminate this month when he finishes taking control of all nine of the Upper Valley-based Jake’s Market & Deli convenience stores along with the Jake’s Coffee Co. shop from the chain’s founder, Ed Kerrigan.

Bergeron initially spent about 18 months running the Jake’s store off Exit 12A in Georges Mills. He followed the same learning-by-doing training program that Kerrigan experienced when he left a corporate job in the 1990s to open his first Jake’s Market & Deli on Mechanic Street in Lebanon.

“I was flipping burgers for two years,” Kerrigan said in the company’s head office above Jake’s Coffee Co. down the street from his first convenience store.

“Sometimes you have to take a step backwards before going forwards,” he said.

Kerrigan, 65, and Bergeron, 51, have come a long way together.

For some time, Kerrigan said, he has been working on a transition plan to turn over his convenience store empire to Bergeron, who he first got to know when Bergeron worked as a marketing analyst at the former Johnson & Dix Fuel Corp.

Bergeron had joined the Lebanon-based heating oil and propane distributor, which was later acquired by Irving Oil, after graduating from UNH with a business administration degree.

“Two months into my job, I learned my position was being eliminated,” Bergeron recalled. “And my wife was six months pregnant. They said, ‘Well, we have this job down in Ascutney if you’re interested ...’ ”

With a baby on the way, he was interested.

“I said, ‘Yes, I am. I’ll take it,’ ” Bergeron replied, straight up.

Bergeron spent the next two years “reconciling accounts receivables” in the gasoline department before he was transferred back to the main office, where he again worked for Kerrigan.

“When I had a chance to promote someone into a position, it was always Bruce,” Kerrigan said.

Kerrigan opened his first Jake’s Market & Deli in 1996 on Mechanic Street after buying a parcel along the Mascoma River with a derelict building. He tore it down and built the convenience store and gas station. He hired a manager and kept working at Johnson & Dix for the next three years before leaving in 1999 to become president of a software company located at Centerra Park.

After a year of running the company while it was in the process of being sold, Kerrigan went to work at his Mechanic Street store as the on-site manager. Meanwhile, Bergeron had left Johnson & Dix to join GDT, which later merged with Tele Atlas before it was acquired by TomTom.

After three years at GDT helping to build the company’s navigational technology business — “it was spend, spend, spend,” Bergeron recalled of those boomtown years before the tech bubble burst — he joined Norwich property manager The Simpson Cos., where he oversaw relations with the firm’s townhouse and home association clients.

Kerrigan and Bergeron periodically checked in with each other over the following years to discuss possible joint business ventures. Then in 2008, when Kerrigan bought the former Georges Mill Country Store, which would become the fourth store in his growing Jake’s Market & Deli chain, he reached out to Bergeron to run it.

Bergeron said he made the leap because he always wanted to run his own business.

For the opportunity, Bergeron also took a 40 percent cut in pay, in the belief that the move could lead to something bigger down the road.

Like Kerrigan had done years earlier, Bergeron was taking a step backward to move forward.

“It was really an opportunity to have Bruce join the company in a job that was not as challenging as the ones he had been doing,” Kerrigan said. “There was an understanding it would grow into something.”

The bet paid off.

“It wasn’t too long before Bruce was managing everything except the Lebanon store,” Kerrigan said, explaining “I was reluctant to give that up because that’s where I began.”

Kerrigan had done the same thing years earlier. He took a 20 percent pay cut when he left a job at Mobil Oil in Detroit to move to the Upper Valley to work for Johnson & Dix, and then again a second time when he stepped into running his first Jake’s store — and didn’t take any salary for six months until the store, which had been losing money, began turning a profit.

After the Andover location is sold, there will be Jake’s Market & Deli stores in New Hampshire in Lebanon, New London, Georges Mills and Walpole, and in Vermont in White River Junction, Hartford and Springfield.

Last year, in addition, Bergeron on his own bought Pappa Z’s in Canaan and converted it into a Jake’s Market & Deli, which, along with the Jake’s Market & Deli he is currently building in Enfield, will give him a total of nine store locations. All the Jake’s Market stores are branded as Irving Oil gas stations.

With its image as a low-wage, entry-level job, the convenience store industry typically is not associated with a rewarding career path.

But Bergeron said the convenience store business is “incredibly challenging. … It’s merchandising, figuring out the best way to display stuff, learning how customers think and what they want. There’s nothing like the excitement of having them enjoy the experience.

“I like the nuts and bolts of running a company,” he explained.

Added Kerrigan: “What I really like about the business is you get a report card every day. You know what happened the day before.”

If a particular menu item doesn’t work, it can be substituted with another. If a product on the shelf isn’t moving, it can be dropped.

Kerrigan’s and Bergeron’s offices are located on the second floor above Jake’s Coffee Co. where they are assisted by office manager Jean Ollis, of Enfield, who has been with the company since 2000.

The trio does it all.

“We’re the accountants, the marketers and the maintenance department,” Kerrigan said. “We don’t have a CFO or a HR director.”

Kerrigan, who grew up in Westport, Conn., the son of an auto body mechanic, said his and Bergeron’s similar backgrounds have been an asset in building the Jake’s chain.

“We came from blue-collar backgrounds,” Kerrigan said. “I think that is why we are good at this. Having done it ourselves, opening the store, working in them, we are respectful of how hard it is.”

The company now has a total of about 125 employees, between a dozen to 15 workers per location. Employee benefits include a dental plan and a matching 401(k) contribution from the company — but no longer health insurance.

“The cost kept going up and it just got too expensive for us,” Kerrigan explained.

Kerrigan is selling the Andover. N.H., Jake’s Market to Jen Braley, who joined the store as manager 18 years ago, shortly after Kerrigan acquired what had been the former Andover Mini-Mart. The store gets a steady stream of hungry student customers throughout the day from Proctor Academy boarding school across the street.

“He always said I would have the first opportunity to buy it when he retired,” said Braley, who will be changing the name to JJ’s Market & Deli when the sale closes at the end of the month.

“They’ve been easy to get along with,” Braley said of Kerrigan and Bergeron. “They always allowed me to do what I want here without hovering over me too much.”

Kerrigan is holding onto Jake’s Car Wash and the storage and truck rental business adjacent to Jake’s Coffee Co. on Mechanic Street as well as Jake’s Quechee Market, the grocery store and cafe in Quechee that is managed by his son, James Kerrigan. Father and son are also in the process of building a combination laundromat/car wash across the road on Route 4, which Ed Kerrigan said will be named — wait for it — Squechee Clean.

Seriously? Really.

“Are you kidding me?” Kerrigan responded, as if the wordplay for the laundromat/car wash’s name was anything other than just too golden an opportunity to pass up.

Kerrigan said he is also holding onto the real estate associated with the stores, although he expects that Bergeron will acquire that too at some point in the future.

But Kerrigan said his retirement does not drastically change the way Jake’s has been operating.

“Bruce has really been running the day-to-day business for the last eight years,” he said. “So this doesn’t change my business that much. It feels kind of good to walk through a store and know this is Bruce’s store. I’m just a customer.”

Bergeron acknowledges the partnership with Kerrigan has been a unique one for which he is grateful.

“I couldn’t be where I am today without Ed’s support. Ed could have sold to an out-of-town distributor, any of our big competitors … this is the way you’d like to see a local company transition.”

John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.

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