You Can Be the Best: Life Lessons From the Butcher and the Businessman by John Ply

Author:John Ply
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781544540207
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2023-03-21T05:00:00+00:00

The Entrepreneur That Did

In my final days at Lauritzen and Company, I learned a valuable lesson from George Lauritzen, something I’m certain my boss never realized he was teaching me. Fancy titles don’t mean a thing. You can rise through the ranks—from inventory control to president overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company—but that impressive-sounding title doesn’t mean a thing if you’re not given the latitude to run the business free from interference.

Only one title matters in the business world: owner. The owner calls the shots.

After leaving Lauritzen and Company, I decided to become an owner of my own company, Priority Food Processing. The timing was terrible. It was the day before Thanksgiving, 1980, when I decided to leave Lauritzen. It also happened to be a time of stagflation and sky-high interest rates. It was some of the worst economic conditions (outside of the Great Depression) on record, with the US undergoing not one but two economic recessions in a few short years. A month after I quit, the Federal Reserve hiked the prime rate to a staggering 21 percent—a half point shy of the all-time high. I couldn’t borrow money because all the banks I went to had the same message: “John, we can’t give you a loan while we have hundreds of clients going out of business due to the highest interest rates in history!” But I didn’t allow any of that to deter me. If I was going to start my new business, I would need to find a way.

Thankfully, my parents believed in me. They put in $15,000 as a loan, which is all the savings they had at the time. I was friendly with the people at the bank where Lauritzen and Company kept its payroll account, and convinced them to lend me $15,000, at 2 points above prime, or 23 percent. So I was able to raise my $30,000, and I had a potential client lined up who agreed to provide an additional loan of $30,000 in exchange for 49 percent of the business and a sweetheart price for blending his product. With this, Priority Food Processing was born. We launched on January 8, 1981, and blended our first product on January 29—just a little over two months after I left Lauritzen and Company.

I had also hired my first employee—José Arellano, who helped me blend that very first order. Even though I was the owner—really, because I was the owner—I was out there on the floor with José, doing the hard work. We filled fifty-pound bags, one hundred-pound boxes, and two hundred-pound drums. We got the powder mixed, the bags filled and sewn shut, and everything stacked at forty bags to a pallet. The work was physically demanding and intense, but also rewarding.

We managed to reach $182,000 in gross service revenue that year. To help survive the year, I had planned on paying myself only a $12,000 annual salary. Unfortunately, even with my wife’s income, I had to pay myself $18,000 to cover our mortgage payment and other living expenses.

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