Detained in a Coup and Stranded in a War Zone: The CEO Who Risked Everything for Crab

I was kind of hoodwinked into trying. Hey, there's a lot of crabs in Mozambique. So I went to South Africa. They had a charter plane for me there, and I said, well, why do you have to fly? He said, well, you can't use the roads. They're all full of banditos. What do you mean banditos? Well, we're in the middle of a civil war. Really? So we hopped in this jeep, and it's about three o'clock in the afternoon, and all of a sudden the jeep runs out of fuel. Well, we're all going to have to get out of the jeep, and we're going to have to walk very tightly to the plane where we can leave. All right. And by the way, the lions are sleeping this time of day. Lions? Today we're joined by Terry Conway, entrepreneur, author, and former CFO of Purdue Farms at the age of 31, before leaving corporate life to take over a struggling soft crab company on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. What followed was an extraordinary journey that transformed a small seafood operation into a global business known around the world. Along the way, Terry pioneered ideas that helped shape the modern farm-to-table concept. In this conversation, we explore leadership, risk-taking, innovation, and the stories behind building a household name in seafood. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Terry, welcome to Bay Area Innovators. Thank you. Great to have you here. You're in Salisbury, Maryland, the other side of the country, and we welcome you. Now, I think you had an amazing career, and on this show, we really like to highlight careers such as yours, and I think a lot of people can learn and understand and develop their own careers through learning this. So, I want to start with, you were an accounting major. You learned accounting. When one thinks of accounting, it's not necessarily the most glamorous or the most amazing career, but you certainly proved everyone wrong with that. So, how did you choose accounting, and how did that play into your career? Well, accounting was a first job. Accountants got jobs out of college. Other people did not, but it was quite an opportunity to get into the balance of business and really understand how it worked, and it was also an opportunity to work with 12 of our clients from a management services standpoint who were learning how to be competitive, trying to figure out how to grow their business. So, I was able to spend a lot of time with them. The most interesting person was Bart Zakarian, came into the office one day and said, I have five little seafood, five little health food operations in downtown Pittsburgh, and I'd like to figure out how to grow this business worldwide. So, we worked with a plan to design a kind of a worldwide store that breathed quality, but also good prices, and he took that concept and he built 8,000 units worldwide. This is before you were at Purdue? Yes. This is fresh out of school, really. So, I was able, even though I was an accounting major, I was able to work with these potential entrepreneurs. Most of the clients were. They were all figuring out how to grow, change their business. So, yes, I had an accounting background. I knew how all the pieces in the financial statement fit together, but it was much more than that. Now, at age 31, you became a CFO of Purdue Farms, which was a pretty major company already at the time. Tell us about how you got there and your experience there. All right. Well, a little bit of background. So, I went from the CPA firm, Management Services, to Wall Street, working for a family company that sponsored entrepreneurs, found entrepreneurs, helped them with their first acquisition, made acquisitions after that to grow the business until they became public. It was founded by the DuPont family, and it was a wonderful experience for me and a lot of fun working there. But at one point, the DuPont family said, I think we're going to move on. We're going to kind of close it down. A few little pieces left, we'll sell them. So, I was out of a job. It didn't take long before I had some interesting things to explore. Was that the time what sparked your ideas for later becoming an entrepreneur, for later having your own company? Well, this started actually when I was a teenager. I was fascinated with business, people who made products that people would actually buy. I thought that would be really fun, wouldn't be boring. And I told my dad about it. And he said, well, that's where you're going. You need a first-class business education. After that, you need to work with people who know how to compete, compete for revenues. It's very important. They will not teach you that in school. So, I went from a CPA firm to Wall Street, and then Wall Street sort of closed down. One of my fellow people there said, I've set up an appointment to go see the world's largest, best headhunting firm. I wandered in the office. We didn't know who you were. We had no appointment. But we've got a client in the next room that's been looking for a CFO. You are candidate number 37. I said, well, okay. What was wrong with the other 36? So, I went in and talked to him. He was a stranger to me, Frank Perdue. He had not advertised yet. But we spent a couple of hours really kind of down in the weeds talking about things. And he invited me to come see his company. And I did. I thought it was the best-run company I'd ever seen up to that point. So, at age 31, I was appointed CFO. Perdue Farms was a big company already in chicken. They were processing and raising chicken. But they had never had a CFO. And the banks were after Frank. They said, look, Frank, you're growing fast. You don't have a CFO. You ask us to borrow more money, give you more money after, time and time again. And you don't have a CFO we can rely on. You've got to hire one. So, he said, well, we don't really need one. But I'll take your word for it because I need to be able to borrow money. So, I walked into an operation which really had nothing. They had no financial statements. They were not able to project anything. They had no estate plan. They were not in the mood to make acquisitions. The numbers were atrocious. I couldn't rely on them. I had two sets of books, which is always confusing. So, anyway, I accepted the challenge because I still thought it was the best-run company I'd ever seen. Now, Frank was a pretty unique individual. He became CEO. It was a family-run business, right? And I think he became CEO at the age of 19. And I think he ran the company for, what, 40, 50 years. Can you tell me what was he like? I know from your book, which is right here, amazing book. I went through it. It's fascinating, very interesting. But Frank would give you a lot of independence, not just you, but pretty much all his employees. And how did that work out? You pretty much can do whatever you want. And once in a while, you adapted him, right? Well, all of his reports, he gave broad responsibility to, which was very impressive. And he, quite frankly, didn't know what to do with me. I was a CFO. I don't know what you do, but just go do it, which was fine. I was ready for it. I'd had enough experience at education and Wall Street to be able to handle it. So I had to build a team. I went to some really good schools and hired some very good people to start building a team. And then there was one project after another. The most memorable was the estate plan for the Purdue family. When Frank passed on, there was hardly a bump in the road, which could have been really expensive at the time with the estate taxes. And it was just very enjoyable work. I had freedom to do what was really important. Yeah. Give us some highlights. I know one of the highlights was the fact that you really had to set up books, which is like a really big red flag for IRS and for banks, right? So I know you took care of that. What, it took like a year or something to consolidate? Well, there were 90 cost centers and each one of them had to be addressed separately and had to tie the numbers to the cash disbursements. That was one little task. What we call shrinks, you go from the feed mill to feeding the chickens, there's always a little shrink there, all these little shrinks built up. So when you added up the management reports, the profit was like two and a half million. By the time the orders got finished, it was only a million because they were not measuring the shrinks. They were not tying things to the cash. It was down in the bowels of the business that had to be done. I needed value of numbers so I could present our borrowing applications that were dependable, that's tied into the year-end audit. It was kind of, I don't know, just a little underappreciated, but it had to be done. What did you learn the most when you were at Purdue? What was your most significant lesson learned? Well, I think it was watching Frank Purdue at work. He was an outstanding entrepreneur. He understood the basic economics of everything he was doing, how to be more integrated, how to get a little premium for the product, basic economics, but he knew how to do that. Those lessons were very valuable and he never wasted money. He was always on point with the basic economics. Very unusual to see that. I know that there's a story in your book you mentioned about building a new headquarters, a new office, where he actually didn't know about it until it was kind of a done deal, right? Can you tell us about that a little bit? Well, it became kind of a pattern. I always had to do the right thing. Sometimes it was a little dangerous because it wasn't really approved. One of the chapters in the book was called I'm Against It. Okay, I understand that Frank, but it's got to be done. I made an acquisition which he told me absolutely not to do. I went ahead and signed it up anyway. He was free to out of it if he wanted to, but it was taking over a competitor's complex, poultry complex. I bought it for depreciated book value, which never happens. He was a little surprised when I told him one morning that I made arrangements to buy that. You know, I told you not to do it. Well, Frank, it was the right thing to do. I think you got it for $5 million and it was worth like $25 or $30, something like that. That's right. Depreciated book value. Nobody buys anything at depreciated book value. But he ended up being okay. Once he learned, he understood the numbers, he ended up being okay. I think he called the other CEO, right? Yes, he did. He said, Conway had no authority to do that. The other CEO said, well, Frank, it's okay if you went out of it, but one of your competitors just called and offered us a lot more money than Conway did. Another example of that kind of thing was his estate plan. Estate taxes were monstrous at that time. I worked with a fellow who really knew how to handle estates of big companies at the University of Pennsylvania. I finally found an attorney who knew how to do this called Peg and Freeze. Convert common stock into preferred stock that didn't depreciate it. So I got it all arranged, all done. Frank called me one day and said, where are you? I said, well, I'm in New York working on your estate plan. What? I'm not going to die. Well, Frank, if you don't do it now, your family's going to be really sorry. Okay. So I saw him the next day and he said, well, what'd you find out? How does it work? And closed the whole estate plan 10 days later with a fabulous law firm in New York City. The purpose of this is then when he passes, when he passes the company to his kids, there is not going to be a huge tax that's going to be applied on the company, right? That's right. And if you don't plan for that, it can be, the family can say, well, we've got this bill here for a billion dollars. Yeah. You guys don't have any that kind of money. We've got to sell it. And without Frank there, that's not, you're not going to need a very good price for it. You were 31 when you started Purdue and then you, you ended up buying a company, a soft crap company, and we'll get more into that. But, but why, why did you, why did you leave Purdue and why did you go on your own in business? Well, it all goes back to kind of an early, I guess, thought process. Well, as my father said, get a great business education, work for people who know how to, how to be competitive. And someday you might be in a position to own your own company, which was kind of a goal. And so that was kind of tucked away in the back of my head. And when this little company came about, yes, it was very risky to take on a kind of a nature related crab business, but I felt very prepared. I could be the sole owner, somewhat familiar with raising live animals at Purdue. And so if Heather was a good time to own her own business, this was it. So tell us a little bit about Handy. It's a, seafood company. Is it the main product? At least at that time was soft crabs. Was that what it was? Yes. Okay. Tell us a bit about what is a soft crab? Okay. It's a very specialized crab business, very complicated, very interesting fishery. So the watermen, the fishermen, as we call them, would catch these crabs and special crab pots and look at them and they could tell whether this crab was going to molt within one day, three days, five days. Malt, malt means lose the shell. They would come out of their shell. Every crustacean has to come out of its shell, puff himself up to grow. That's the only way they can grow. And they do this 18 times since they were tiny little specks until three years later when they were a full size, hard crab. It's the only way they can grow. Right. But the taste is exquisite. I mean, it's a specialty, perfect taste. Some people call it the best taste that comes out of the ocean. So the fishermen or the watermen can, looks at the crab and they know when it's about to molt, to lose the shell and then catch them right then? Yes. Wow. So they put them in these special tanks, circulating water, wait for them to back out of their shell. And then they've got four hours before they have to come out of the water before the shell starts to harden up. Crab pulls the calcium out of the water to grow this new shell. But it was a specialized business. It's only taking place in this small area of the Chesapeake Bay. And they said, well, it's there's no other place in the world where this happens. I said, oh, come on. There's brackish water everywhere. It comes out of fresh water out of the mountains, mixes with the seawater. And that's brackish water. There ought to be crabs many places in the world, which turned out to be true. So the requirement is what is brackish water? Is salt water combined with fresh water? Yes. I see. I see. Well, I got a story for you. I was two days ago, three days ago, I was in San Francisco and I went to the Fisherman's Wharf and I asked a couple of restaurants there. I said, do you guys have soft crab? The first one didn't know. The second one said, no, we don't have it. And another one said, well, but I know a place in Ghirardelli Square that has it. So I went there. It was pretty close. I went to Ghirardelli Square. I found a restaurant, a very fancy restaurant, and I was going to have some. But the guy said, well, the season just started. We don't have them yet. We'll come back in two weeks. And I said, fine, I'll go back in two weeks. Ask him, where do you get them from? He thought about it for a second and says, oh, from Maryland. I said, oh, he must be getting it from Perry. So, yeah, it's amazing. But there's not many places, at least in the U.S., that these soft crabs grow, right? That's right. The area around this one area of the Chesapeake Bay is where there is good brackish water and where it grows. And that's where this company was located. Had a very good reputation, a good brand, did a quality job. Still, it was tiny, really tiny. I called it a cottage business because it was smaller than a small business. Large, medium, small, cottage. How many employees did it have at a time when you went there? About 90 in the summertime. OK, that's not that small, but OK. Kind of a seasonal business. The crabs go into the deep water in the wintertime to hibernate. When the water warms up, they come out, they're hungry. And that's when they're caught, about five months out of the year. So what were some of the first things you did when you got there? Well, the quality of the crabs was OK. They were the best in the industry, but it wasn't acceptable to what I would call international markets or even large national markets. Quality wasn't there. So, OK, this is one of the things I had learned. You have to continually improve the quality of your product. So it got to the point where we had a machine designed for us that can size the crabs into these five different sizes. We sent off our freezers to IQF, individually equipped, freeze them as opposed to bulk freezing. And the quality zoomed. And we went national and we were even able to break into the Japanese market, which was very difficult at that time. And they became a huge customer for us. Yes, I remember. I remember the story from from your book about, you know, you you met with many different potential customers, but there's one of them who replied, but he happened to be a distributor for for a lot of restaurants, I guess, and locations. And I think was it the first the first time you supplied crabs to him? You know, it was on a plane, I guess it was overnight. And then it was like 30 hours from the time the crab was caught to the time that it was on a plate in a restaurant in Tokyo, 30 hours, which is unheard of right at the time. And probably even now, the preference was always for fresh, live crabs. And the important we were working with said, Well, can we can we get them all the way to Tokyo? Alive? Sure, let's try it. And because we've been shipping them to California, good results. So we work with Japan Airlines to put them in the right temperature, right place in the belly of the plane. Sure enough, we trucked them to New York City Airport, put them on a direct flight to Tokyo. Our customer picked them up at the airport, took them right to the restaurants. And they were alive. 97% of them were alive. And this is a very delicate, delicate animal. Oh, they were still alive. They were alive the whole flight and getting there. Wow. So there was a there was a pretty big boost for the business. Well, it was something we were quite good at. But the numbers didn't really work out very well. All that extra flights and so forth. So we had a little trouble selling them. That's all right. We did a frozen product that was just as good. But we kind of proved ourselves we had all the technology and the know-how and the desire to do it well and to get them there alive. Now, I want to go back for a second to Purdue Farms, because I think you coined the term there from farm to table. And also, I think you were involved in opening a restaurant in New York City. And I think what's significant about that is that places like Panera Bread and Chipotle now follow that model that you came up with quite a long time ago. Tell us a bit about the story about opening a restaurant in New York City. It doesn't seem like the easiest thing to do of all of your endeavors. It was an extremely hard thing to do. So Purdue had an advertised brand at that point. So my chickens eat better than you do. I use different well water. I do all these little things really well. And I'm the tagline on his advertising was, I'm a tough man who makes a tender chicken. All right. But Frank said, I really would like to go from farm to table and build a restaurant, build a prototype. And let's see how it works. He said, I want you to do that. But you have no restaurant experience. It has to be very consistent with our advertised image. It has to be really good value. And by the way, in a restaurant, the food is everything. You don't have good food, people aren't coming back. So and especially the chicken has got to be really good. So it was a kind of a 20 minutes struggle to figure out what kind of restaurant would Frank Purdue open? Well, it turns out it was quite similar to Panera Bread and Chipotle these days. It was kind of a short cafeteria line. There was no waitress where he had to spend money on waitress. The food was very hot, very fresh. And all the little side dishes, the lemonade, the breading, all these little things had to be perfect. Frank Purdue was quite a perfectionist. And we opened it up and he spent time there. He can never find anything wrong, which is a compliment that I had and was quite proud of, because all the little things going on in a restaurant that you're building for value and quality and good food were working. And we built this restaurant in Queens of all places, New York City, where all the food critics are. Mimi Sheridan came to the restaurant, wrote up a big article about how good this was and what an accomplishment it was for a farm to go to the plate directly. There's this prominent poster of Frank holding a tie, which was used as advertisement. I guess he didn't like that to begin with, right? You convinced him to still use it. So in the restaurant, we had this enormous picture of Frank, about 25 feet high, maybe 15 feet wide, holding a drumstick, saying, my chickens are better than anybody else's or something like that. But for some reason, he didn't like the smirk on his face. So he said, you got to take that thing down, we'll get a new picture. I said, well, Frank, I don't see anything wrong with it. You look like yourself. No, take it down. I'll shoot another picture, and then you put it back up. Okay, so he did find something wrong. But it was his own personal picture. Yes, yes. But that was a great learning experience for me, because I was starting from absolutely nothing to pull that thing off. Inventing the concept, inventing the food, the preparation, the whole serving, the kitchen, designing the kitchen, and do it perfectly. Now, going back to Handy, so now you established the Japanese market, at least in some way, and then you had this desire to grow. I mean, you could have stayed where you are. You could have been happy and stay with just one market, or even just the US market and keep it at that level. But I guess you wanted to grow. You felt like there's more you can do to grow different geographies, different markets. What was next after? First of all, why? Why did you want to grow to be bigger? Well, Chesapeake Bay, where these crabs came from, was kind of, the whole ecosystem changed. Fish came back, and they found these molting crabs, these soft crabs, pretty good food, and basically lost 90% of our supply. So what are we going to do? Well, let's go to those countries that we think have brackish water and see if we can set up operations there. Most of them were around the equator in Southeast Asia. So I literally bought a ticket to Bangkok and got off the plane. I had some minor contact with a friend of mine from Hong Kong, met a broker, got it started. Three months later, we had our first plant in southern Thailand, rented space for the first time. And interestingly enough, I had to keep the quality of the Asian product exactly the same as America's. So I said, oh, all right, well, we've got to take some of our good workers out of the small plant, and we've got to take them to Asia and so they can perfect, keep the quality the same. So kind of an interesting story. One lady said, well, I'd be glad to go, but I don't have a passport. Oh, okay, go to the post office, they'll help you with a passport. Came back and said, well, I went to the post office and I don't have a birth certificate, so I can't get a personal. Well, go back, just tell them it's your job, you've got to go, they'll help you get a birth certificate too. Okay, next question was, well, I've never been on an airplane before. This one is your employee? Yes, domestic Yes. Well, you got, you're going to go anyway, so you got to figure out how to get to the airport and you're going to go. Well, what happens when they get off the plane? There's a reception area after you show your passport. And some, one of our people have a little sign that says handy on it. And you just go see that person and they will get you to the hotel, get you to the plant the next sometime. Came back three months later and said, I had the most fun over there you could ever imagine. Those people are wonderful. They want to do a good job. It was exciting working with them. And then kept wanting to go back. Well, I got to tell you, I did quite a bit of traveling after college, including Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries all over the world. And to begin with travel is not easy. It's fun, like you said, but it's not easy. You have to get used to so many things and different culture. Now to do all of that, to even hire people there and to start a plant there that ships product that's also sensitive because these things will not live for long or whatever. There's like a whole different dimension. How did you do that? I mean, what, I'm sure you take step by step, you make it happen, but it still sounds pretty amazing to get all of, to put all of that together in one piece. Well, in retrospect, maybe it was amazing, but first of all, we had to find water on fishermen who could knew how to catch these crabs and get them all in a soft stage mold. And we started out with a handful and then we were able to pay for them. It was a new fishery for them. More and more, the word spread. This is a new fishery. Handy will pay you on time. You develop this trust with the fishermen and then we got the plant going with our own people. And at the same time, we started hiring what I call quality control people, food technologists that had just graduated from colleges in this case, Thailand. And they were wonderful young people here for, to work for an American company. Very knowledgeable, did everything really well. And now we have in our seven plants, seven countries, we have over 40 of food technology people, food technology graduates. Worked out really well because when product comes from another country, you want to make sure it's perfect when it arrives. And you don't want any disputes with your customer about the quality or anything about the product. You mentioned trust, which I understand it's probably a crucial element in the success of your business. Tell us about your philosophy, your business philosophy that made it successful in so many ways. Well, as I was observing other companies, even with the accounting firm and Wall Street and especially Purdue, you had to have a trusted product. The product, it had to be the cornerstone of everything you did actually. Now I observed this and I said, well, if I ever am able to buy my own company, that's going to be one of my core values, trust. And so it just, it's something I had in my head before I even thought about another company. The second core value that was a little, a little more rare to see what it was, I was what I call collaborative, a collaborative atmosphere to make products that had a competitive advantage. So if your people aren't talking to each other, there's no collaborative conversation going on, you're not going to innovate. But if that's going on, you're going to find innovations and you're going to use those innovations for competitive advantages. That was very important. So those two things went through my head day one after I bought Handy. We got to make the product partner, we got to have a trust, we got to collaborate. So basically creating that platform to enable collaboration, which in turn would create innovation and a better product. Right. Yeah. And it became a competitive advantage for us. Right. Now, Terry, you had other, you had other adventures. I know you mentioned some of your adventures are similar to like Indiana Jones type adventures. Maybe we can talk about Nigeria. Nigeria seems to be a place where things didn't work out as well as you thought they would. But I mean, even going there, it's already an adventure, but you wanted to establish a business. Tell us a bit about what happened there. Well, an acquaintance from the University of Maryland, knew the ambassador in Nigeria to the whole economic, the whole European Union. And he was begging me to go there and set up a tilapia farm, which I was in the tilapia farm business in Costa Rica at one time. And I said, OK, I'll go. So I was in Asia and I said, I'll just go to Nigeria, see what this potential farm is like. So got off, plane landed. Before I knew it, two very muscular people grabbing my arms and saying, what are you doing here? Are you a CIA? I said, no, no, no, no. They were in the middle of a coup and I had no idea. Went off to the integration room and these people had these scars on their face trying to be as intimidating as possible. And I kind of laughed and no, no, I'm here to set up a fish farm in northern Nigeria. No, you're not. Let me see all your papers. OK, you look at them all. So after half an hour of this, I was kind of sweating it out. I hadn't told anybody I was going to be there. I didn't I didn't have a phone. I didn't know how to contact anybody. Hey, I'm stuck in Nigeria. Come rescue me. But I said, go into the lobby and you'll see somebody there with a little sign says handy on it. And you ask him what I'm doing here. And five minutes later, they were back in my passport saying, sorry for the inconvenience. These are military people or government people or whoever was in power at the time, I guess. So coups were quite frequent in Nigeria at that time. So unusual. But even the pilot, the one who took you to northern Nigeria, also wasn't that forthcoming with the trip, right? Well, that was that was another trip. I was kind of hoodwinked into trying. Hey, there's a lot of crabs in Mozambique. Oh, different country. Okay. Okay. I guess I'm the retired government person. I know all about these plentiful crabs and Mozambique. You got to go there. So I kind of I kind of fell for it. So I went to South Africa. They had a charter plane for me there. Flew about three hours to the middle of Mozambique, landed on this dirt road. And I said, well, why do you have to fly? He said, well, you can't use the roads. They're all full of banditos. What do you mean banditos? Well, we're in the middle of a civil war. Really? Okay. So when I got off the plane, there was a big barrier there. I said, what's this barrier for? He said, well, we're in the middle of a civil war. We had little rebels that raided us not too long ago, killed one of our people. Really? And you got me into this? So after a couple of days, the soft crabs were not, the crabs were really not there in any kind of quantity. It was very difficult because they had to be flown, equipment had to be flown. They didn't have freezing equipment. They had generators, but they had trouble getting fuel to the generators. They had to unload them in these big 55 gallon barrels, load them off a ship and throw them in the water. And then the people there would have to swim out and get these barrels to bring into the beach. Anyway, on the way back, the pilots who were handling this charter flight, kind of a freighter, said, you know, a good friend of mine has this kind of a safari type plantation. Do you want to stop? And he has a Jeep and we can take a tour around the place. I said, yeah, sure. That sounds very interesting. So we landed on another dirt road, went to get in the Jeep. They looked at the cascades and said empty. And these two pilots said, let's go anyway. Wait a minute, one of your instruments says you don't have any fuel. You pilots, you can't fly. Well, let's go anyway. So we hopped in this Jeep and we're going about, we're touring around. It's very interesting. About three o'clock in the afternoon and all of a sudden the Jeep runs out of fuel. Really? What are we going to do? Well, we're all going to have to get out of the Jeep and we're going to have to walk very tightly to the plane where we can leave. All right. And by the way, the lions are sleeping this time of day. Lions? Yes, lions. Okay. So we huddled up and walked briskly to the plane and got on and went back. I got to ask you this. So, you know, you were doing this to grow the business, but did you enjoy traveling? You had to enjoy the adventures and the traveling at least to some degree, right? Otherwise, what was it doing the business more important? Actually, I really enjoyed the travel. I mean, it was long. It was hard to sleep upright, but the excitement was working with different cultures, family businesses in these 17 countries I had visited, talking about economics and other cultures. I found it fascinating. And the three different religions, the Muslims and the Hindus, I really enjoyed that. And they were very, these people, these family companies were very gracious. They took good care of me. They found food that was acceptable for me. Didn't burn your mouth too much. So that was fun. Plus I was building the business. I was exposing the brand worldwide. Handy had a good brand back in the States, but it became an international brand. Very excited about that. And I was building something that could last a long time for my family. I know there were many other trips, other countries. I think you did like, what, 20 some countries that you went to, to be able to try to get crabs there. How many were successful out of the 20, 26, 27, right? Seven of the 17. Seven of 17. Yeah. Okay. And some we tried and it just wouldn't work. Mexico, just, I couldn't make it work. Borneo had some obstacles there, government obstacles. So, but six that I looked at seriously, but they were mistakes. Started them up to some extent, but they were mistakes. What are the seven that you are in right now? Okay. It's Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Philippines. Wow. That's amazing. Those are all working. They're working to this day. And they're shipping crab to here, to Chesapeake Bay, to your processing location. No, they process. The crabs are loaded, landed on the beach. They're sorted through, they're processed very locally in these fishing villages because you're dealing with fresh product. Eventually get to a processing plant where they're, IQF frozen, and then put on containers to ship to either Japan or Europe or back to America. Got it. Now there's, again, there's many chapters in your life and in your book, but another one that I want to touch on, there's a few more, but the next one I want to touch on is having the Guinness Book of World Records biggest crab cake. Tell us about that. Well, we had been making these very high quality crab cakes in America. Then we started making them in Thailand with a lot of crab meat in them. Nobody else had anything like that on the market. And it was all fresh crab meat too. It was a wonderful taste, wonderful product. But one of our customers in Delaware was having a big festival, part of a big festival. And he said, we want to have something special. Can you make the world's largest crab cake? And we said, sure, why not? So we worked with an engineer to bring up a way to do this. And sure enough, made these crab cakes with 50% crab meat in it, which was a lot. Found the right kind of temperature, the right kind of heating, and we put the flames to it. And 14 hours later it was done, all night. And then we scooped out the crab cakes, put them in a sandwich and sold them, in this case, at a state fair for kind of a bargain price. How big was the world winning record one? It was a little over 300 pounds. 300 pounds. Wow. It's still in the world's largest crab cake records. But it was a worthwhile thing to do. And we had a little profit left over, and we gave it to the local future farmers at the state fair. Now one difficulty was for the crab cake itself to stay together, right? So it doesn't like break or come off. Yeah. The first time we made it, we took the lid off and the thing was just falling apart. And somebody said, well, you're using the wrong kind of mayonnaise. Okay. So we tried it again with a recommended mayonnaise and it stuck together. Came out in one big piece, like a big piece of cheese. When you try things for the first time, you're going to have to realize you're going to make a mistake. But you ended up not even losing money on that. You sold it, they bought it. So it was at least a break-even or even profitable adventure. We had some money left over to donate to the festival. Now, there's another amazing part in your life. I guess, were you always staying in shape? Were you always fit? You know where I'm going, right? Well, I think that's part of being in business. You've got to stay in shape because there's going to be long days and long nights and long travel and so forth. So I'd always been doing a few little things, hiking, for example. And on one of the hikes, the leader said, well, we're all in shape. Let's do a little triathlon in our little town. A little sprint triathlon. Okay. So I told him I'd do it. I had to learn how to swim. I really couldn't swim very far. So I took swimming lessons from this very famous swim leader. And so this whole group that Bono said they were going to come, I was the only one who showed up. But 16 people in my age group, and I came in sixth, and I said, you know, that was kind of fun. All that good exercise and the other people were very interested and life was getting better. So I started doing triathlons. After two and a half years, I was on the starting line of the world's championship triathlon in Hawaii. Which you had to qualify for. It's not like anyone can go, right? No, no, no. You had to qualify. Wow. And I was able to finish it. I had a coach. He said, don't try to race it. Just get in your kind of cruise control speed on the swim and the bike and you run a marathon at the end. Just kind of get in cruise control and you'll be fine. So that's what I did. So just to talk about that a little bit, so it's a 2.4 mile swim, a hundred some mile bike ride, 112 or something. 112. And then a marathon on top of that. And I think the swim for you was the hardest. For me, swim would be the easiest, but you had an Australian guy who was kind of guiding you, right? So you wouldn't bump or go off as you were swimming. It just sounds like an amazing feat for someone that's not a professional athlete in any way. I don't know. It's pretty amazing. Well, swim was difficult. I had to take these swim lessons and I had a little bit of a crooked back. I had trouble swimming a straight line. And if you have to pick your head up to look around, you're wasting a lot of energy. Your legs go down. It's a drag. So I was doing that, not going very well. This Australian came up on a surfboard and said, Hey, I want to take your picture. How are you doing? I said, well, if you could kind of give me a guide here, kind of go beside me, I wouldn't have to pick up my head so much and I could probably make it. He said, okay, I'll do that. So he did. And I finished, you have to get to the swim at a certain time. I had 20 minutes to spare. That's just pretty good. Was the whole thing like 16 hours or something? Yeah. My time was like 16 hours, 25 minutes. You have to do it within 17 hours. Now, it really seems in your career, I mean, you had failures, but it seems in many ways, whatever you put your mind to, you were able to accomplish. Can you tell us a little bit about how did you do that? What was your mental state or philosophy that in so many ways you put your mind to it and then you did it? Well, the tasks were new to me. The CFO position was new to me. I had never done that before. Certainly the restaurant was completely new. But he said, okay, I understand what has to be done. I understand my boss is a perfectionist and I've really got to do everything really well. And I asked for a lot of help. And when the restaurant came, I was really given tremendous help. I would just say, hey, I barely know what I'm doing here. I've got to find a way to develop a restaurant concept that is consistent with the Purdue advertisement. Can you help? And I talked to some really famous restaurant owners. Windows on the World, the World Trade Center, the highest grossing restaurant in the world at that time, enormously helpful. I made me share it. I wrote for the restaurants in the New York Times. Fantastic person, just volunteer stuff. Wrote up an evaluation of some of the food we were doing. I said, yeah, this is really outstanding. Everybody needs help to accomplish things. But if you approach it in a very humble way, people are usually very willing to help you. Even in Asia, working with all these other religions and cultures and so forth, they say, hey, you know, I barely know what I'm doing here. Can you tell me about your culture? What your holidays are like, what you celebrate, what your family life is like? I never ask about the government, but it's just amazing. They just blossom like, you know, yes, let me help you here. Here's what you have to do in Thailand. We had some cultural obstacles we had to get over, but here's how you do it. Here's how you do it. Great, great lesson learned. Terry, anything else? You know, I want to ask you about what your legacy would like to be. You know, you leave your company to your kids, but anything else you want to add from your amazing ventures? Well, if I had to leave a parting sentence or two, I would say your core values, everything you do, put trust. Trust has to be the cornerstone of everything you do. And any kind of organization, you have to have this free-flowing communication, collaboration to innovate and then be able to use those innovation as a competitive advantage. If somebody was just able to comprehend that, I think they'd have kind of the world would be their oyster. What was your motivation? How did you keep yourself motivated during all the years when you were either a CFO or a CEO or traveling? What was back in your mind? Why are you doing this? And what kept you going? Well, I guess it was the challenges and the enjoyment of pulling something off, opening up a market that was kind of closed, coming up with a new product that people really liked. And just when you have these little victories, they're very motivational. You want another victory. They were so much fun. So get that first victory under your belt. You're a self-motivator from that point on almost. And when you have the so-called failures like Nigeria or Mozambique or whatever, you just put those behind and moved on? Or did they seem to drag you down in any way? Well, I knew what I was looking for. I got a bumster on both of those. It's all right. You have to get back to kind of the core of what you're trying to do. You're trying to generate revenues for your enterprise. And you've got three places to look. You can continuously improve your products. You have to process products at a competitive advantage. And you have to have marketing to develop leads. And you have to have people to close the deals. Now, if that's the structure that I had to preserve before I bought Handy, I was there. I knew how to do that. I knew that's how you handle competition to develop more revenues. So before that structure, I was, oh, I don't know where to start. But I knew where to start. It took away a lot of the risk of buying a company because I had built that structure and those core values. One of my five children read the book and he said, Dad, yeah, you were a CFO of a big company. Why in the world would you trade that in for a little cottage business? Yes. Well, maybe it was a time to say, all right, I've had all this experience. I wonder if I've got it to own my own business and make it successful. And the only way you're ever going to find that out is to buy a business. And it is risky. But if you think the risk is small, then you should take it. Yes. So you work for big companies all the time. You know, you're drifting around. But to take something where you're the owner and make it work, that's risky. No excuses, right? You couldn't blame anyone else if it failed, right? You couldn't blame Frank or any CEO. Even though Frank was doing a great job, but still. He's needed me. He really did. He needed me to keep growing and he needed me to make sure his estate was set up and he needed me to help him figure out how to make acquisitions and to get down to one set of books. He needed me badly. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Again, it's an amazing story. I think it's something a lot of people can learn from, especially these days when there's just so much things that happen. People want to make money without putting the work in or whatever, you know, to get down to the traditional way of hard work and thinking and going out of your way and always thinking how to improve your product. And I really like when you talk about trust, because to really have the best product versus, well, how am I going to trick my audience or how am I going to trick my buyer that it's a good product? Well, why trick them? Have the best product to begin with. You don't have to make it look like it's the best product. So those are all such important principles, I feel. And I hope that's a great program for your listeners. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.