Hearing-Impaired Cookie Maker Has Recipe for Success : Entrepreneur: Innovative system of flashing lights aids deaf bakers at Gimmee Jimmy’s, which had 1994 revenue of more than $1 million.

For cookie maker Jimmy Libman, whipping up the perfect batter requires flour, sugar, eggs--and lots of flashing lights: blue ones, green ones, all kinds.

“I wouldn’t be able to get by without them,” Libman said. And, he added, neither would his two bakers.

Both employees, like Libman, are hearing-impaired, and they all rely on a panel of colored lights that flash throughout Gimmee Jimmy’s, Libman’s West Orange cookie store, for direction.

Inside the small shop, a green light flashes when a customer has entered the bakery. An orange one signals that it’s time for the bakers to take their cookies out of the oven, while red represents the fire alarm. A white light alerts Libman that his special telephone, which is equipped with a screen and a keyboard, is ringing.

To ensure that employees look up at the panel, a blue strobe mounted beneath a kitchen counter flashes whenever another panel light goes on. It’s positioned there so that its light can bounce off the walls, enabling all employees, regardless of where they are, to see it.

“Those lights are really good for all of us--hearing or deaf,” said Libman, who created the panel with a local alarm company when he opened the store 12 years ago. “It makes all of us pay attention.”

Even the customers, he said, take notice.

Office manager Fran Stark, one of nine hearing employees on the 12-member staff, said that first-time customers often look up and seem puzzled by the flashing lights. “Sometimes they’ll ask what they’re for,” she said, “and when they do find out, they’ll do a lot of oohing and aahing.”

That awe is something Libman--and other big corporations--would like to capitalize on.

In fact, Libman said, he has had offers from franchise operations like Steve’s Ice Cream to sell “his idea” but has turned them down.

“They wanted to drop my name and use their own, so I said, ‘No, thanks.’ It’s my company,” said the 38-year-old native of West Orange, which is about 15 miles outside Newark.

In addition to running the store, Libman sells up to 3,000 pounds of cookies per week to about 100 New Jersey retailers--such as King’s Supermarkets--and to customers who order them via CompuServe and other on-line services.

He has also branched out to New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, marketing his cookies to automobile dealerships as thank-you packages for car buyers. So far, Libman said, he has picked up Saturn, Ford and Honda dealers as clients.

Those sales have been a boost for Libman, who said that Gimmee Jimmy’s 1994 revenue was more than $1 million--a far heftier sum than he took in peddling his mother’s cookies in 1983 to local delis, beauty parlors and grocery stores.

Libman, who received a degree from the Rochester Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y., had quit his job putting together eyeglasses. He was taking some business courses at New York University when his mother suggested that he try selling her homemade chocolate chip-and-walnut cookies.

Libman took up her idea, peddling the cookies his mother baked at home.

“Everybody just loved my mother’s cookies,” he said. “The business kept growing and growing.”

At that point, he pitched the idea of opening a shop to his father, who went along with the plan by giving him $30,000. Then he applied for and was granted a 15-year, $70,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. Supplied with funds--and his mother’s recipes--Libman built Gimmee Jimmy’s.

As for the future, Libman said he plans to expand his store. His greater goal, however, is to open a “high-tech deaf” bakery where he could communicate with customers through computers hooked up to both sides of the counter.

“That’s my dream,” he said. “It would be my way of communicating with the customers.”