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In The Trenches
First, let's go to
Florida and meet a man who got started with practically nothing. You think you
need money to start a business? This man says you're wrong.
Let's visit him, In
the Trenches.
HATTIE: This is a farm.
This is a farmer. But the farm is not producing what you might think. This farm
is growing the pet of the '90s: tropical fish. You can name your pet, and it
will be waiting for you when you come home, but it takes very little commitment
to have a fish for a pet, says owner of Ekkwill Waterlife Resources' Tim
Hennessy.
Oh, my God! They're
eating each other!
(Voiceover) Tim's company
is now the world's largest producer of freshwater tropical fish, shipping 120
tons, or more than six million fish, a month to customers around the globe. I
asked his partner and brother Mike, how does one ship a fish?
MIKE HENNESSY (Ekkwill
Waterlife Resources): ...plastic bags....
HATTIE: Right.
MIKE: ...there's a
Styrofoam insert here. We have these high-quality square-bottomed plastic bags
in this box, with a certain quantity of water in each.
HATTIE: Is this plain
water?
MIKE: This is plain
water, and it's clean well water, aged water. What we do is when we're packing
out, we transfer the fish from their holding tanks into this water. It is then
sealed with commercial oxygen, and then we have a bander or--it looks like a
sausage till--there's some clips there--it's like a sausage bander here, and
they twist around into a little pretzel and actually seal the bag up. A foam
lid goes on top of this, it folds down, gets stapled shut, gets loaded right on
the truck and goes to the airport.
HATTIE: (Voiceover) Mike
and Tim have a third partner, Sherry, Tim's wife. The three got into raising
tropical fish accidentally.
TIM HENNESSY (Ekkwill Waterlife Resources):
We started raising tropical fish in the ponds with the shrimp at the same time,
and that looked like it was going to be good for us, and we thought there was
opportunity in that, but about this time, we were pretty low on funds. We were
pretty broke.
HATTIE: These are
armor... (Voiceover) If you met Tim at a party, and you asked him what he does,
he'd say, `I'm a farmer.' However, don't be fooled. He has a degree in ocean
engineering and an MBA, while Sherry has a BS in biology and Mike, a degree in
marketing.
In 1981, they bought
Ekkwill, which at that time was an aging fish farm fallen on hard times. Lucky
for the Hennessys, because they were on hard times, too.
TIM: We paid off all our
creditors.
HATTIE: The shrimp
business.
TIM: The shrimp business,
right. Right. And we put together a bunch of business plans and proposals to
different venture capital companies and different investors and that type of
thing, a lot of them. I'm talking 12-15 over some period of time.
At this time, Sherry and
I were living in a parking lot up in Tampa. Our joint income that year was
under $2,400.
What we were able to do
-- again, we were pretty broke, and we really didn't have any assets either --
is put together a series of notes. We found a fish farm that was an old
tropical fish farm. It wasn't very big, but it was--had a good earnings record,
and it was a good small business for this one guy. By this time, we had done
lots of business plans and lots of proposals, and we had experience in the
aquatic farming industry, and we knew how to raise some kinds of fish, so we
were able to put down--he wanted 20 percent down and owner-finance the rest.
Pretty standard deal. So
the trouble was how to come up with the 20 percent down...
HATTIE: Yeah, when you're
living in a parking lot.
TIM: Right, and
then...
HATTIE: What banker's
going to give you a loan when you're living in a parking lot?
TIM: And then there's
working capital, too, that it takes to get things going. So we were able to put
together a series of three debt instruments, three notes, that were secured by
assets that came along with the farm that we had not purchased yet, so with a
stroke of a pen, we executed all these debt instruments at the same time, and
we were able to buy the farm with no cash. So we literally started the business
with $5.
HATTIE: (Voiceover) A sea
of trophies greets you when you enter the small office. They have been
recognized countless times by their own industry because they are focused on
innovation and progressive technology. They wrote their own software programs
for every aspect of the business. They have introduced new types of fish by
using the latest methods of artificial insemination, hybridization and selected
breeding.
TIM: These are fertilized
fresh fish eggs. So these have been fertilized, and they're incubating in this
container.
HATTIE: So there are
hundreds of little eggs in these brush...
TIM: Right.
HATTIE: ...fibers.
TIM: This particular type
of fish has adhesive eggs, and the eggs cling to these brushes, and then they
hatch over a couple-day period. We have people from different areas of the
aquaculture industry, but we also have people that have experiences in the pet
trade, too. We have people that are real experienced in reproductive physiology
for the fish, and there's a lot of real interesting things can be done.
5
Win
Awards
HATTIE: (Voiceover) The
Hennessys also have won praise from businesspeople: The Greater Tampa Chamber
of Commerce Small Business of the Year, the Blue Chip Enterprise Award for the
state of Florida, and the Dun & Bradstreet Best Small Business in the USA
award have been given to Ekkwill. With over $10 million in sales, today they
have 240 acres with 800 production ponds, more than 500,000 square feet of
greenhouses and 4,000 aquariums. They sell nearly 1,000 different types of fish
and aquarium products.
HATTIE: Now how many
employees totally in the operation, because you're responsible
for...
MIKE: Right now, we have
about 95.
HATTIE: Ninety-five
employees. And you're responsible for those people, right?
MIKE: Well, that's what
they say.
HATTIE: Sort of. How do
you go about finding the people that you have working for you?
MIKE: Well, a lot of it's
word of mouth. We have a good package for a small business, to--in terms of a
benefit plan, so I think there's a natural gravitation for people to try to go
with something that offers some stability, and our company's been able to
provide stability and growth over the years.
HATTIE: What kind of
advice would you give to people who are starting businesses or running
businesses today?
TIM: Well, that's a tough
one, because just in nutshell, you know, there's no way I can equip somebody
for all of the challenges that they're going face ahead. But things are never
what you think they're going to be, you know. It's a Darwinism out there.
You're going to have to change and adapt or go the way of the dinosaurs. Our
business is in farming, and it, in particular--but I think it's true of a lot
of businesses--that to us, if you think of it as a job, you're going to be
pretty disappointed. To us, it's a way of life.
HATTIE: Do you work long
hours?
MIKE: Not as long as it
used to be. Used to be we were, like, seven days a week, 18-20 hours a day. And
thank goodness those days are over.
HATTIE: And what are the
hard parts?
TIM: Well, there's lots
of hard parts. It's hard to say. It's not like there's one hurdle you pass,
see? That's the thing about business. Businesspeople always have problems. It's
just a matter of what their problems are. Some of them are serious, some of
them aren't. But you've got to be a problem solver. That's--you know, people
ask me what I learned in engineering school. And really, I learned a lot of
technical skills in engineering school, but I think, looking back on it in
retrospect, the most valuable skills that I learned was how to solve problems.
You're always going to have problems. Anybody in business is always going to
have problems.
HATTIE: If we wound the
clock back to 1975 and you know what you know now, would you have done this?
TIM: Boy, that's a good
question. I'd have to really think about that. I don't know. I don't know. I
probably would have. I probably wouldn't have made a lot of the mistakes that
we've made. You know, people always say, `If I had to do it all over again, I'd
need a lot more money this time.' |
