Entrepreneurship — hard work, not magic.

A case study.

Introduction

I am always on the look out for good entrepreneurial stories as there is often much to be learned; so was pleased to find this one in the Financial Times this weekend. This article is also a pleasant change from the majority of startup stories we read about in the press and social media — this one is a genuine, sweat and toil, non-lean, real business — a butchery. Sure, I like the AirBnB, Uber, Slack funded-tech stories of young founders doing well too. If we did not have these, why would any of us enter the lottery that is the start up adventure? But I also think we need to balance this with information about non-digital ventures too, as they tend to get ignored in the entrepreneurial press, especially in the US.

The story is about Sam Solasz who escaped the holocaust and then started a new life and has become one of New York’s leading butchers. I am summarising mainly from an FT article that can be found at: http://on.ft.com/1XfImYd

Sam’s story

On a crisp December morning, with daylight still an hour away, the interviewer arrived at the Hunts Point Meat Market in the South Bronx. A trio of white-coated workers stood on the loading dock, rubbing their gloved hands together and stomping their feet to keep warm. A guy with a dark wool cap pulled down over his ears explained that they were waiting for a trailer to arrive from Chicago. “It’ll be hauling the carcases of a hundred steers. Once it gets here, we’re looking at four, five hours to unload the stuff.”

A young worker in a yellow safety helmet led me inside and up a short flight of stairs into a conference room, where Sam Solasz, the unit’s owner, was waiting. He’s a short, solidly built man with hands that look thick enough to wrestle a bull to the ground. Now 88, he’s still going strong. Dressed in a heavy sweater under a butcher’s coat, he closed the door and indicated I should sit in the chair across the table from him. I turned on my tape recorder and began with one of my usual first questions: where are you from?

“I grew up in Bialystok, Poland. At the very beginning of the war, all the Jews from my town, including my family, were rounded up and sent to live in a ghetto — an area walled off from the rest of the city. At one time, there were 65,000 Jews crammed into this one space, which was designed for perhaps one-tenth that number. For the next several years, the ghetto operated as a forced labour camp. You did what the Germans needed you to do, what they told you to do. Those of us who could butcher animals — my father, who was a butcher, taught me how — we were trucked every morning by the Germans to a slaughterhouse outside the ghetto where we processed meat for the German army. In the afternoon they brought us back and left us off inside the ghetto walls. Periodically, they would come to get some of the people, rounding them up for deportation to a concentration camp. Out of so many thousands, maybe 50, 55 survived. You ask me, how did I survive? I’ll tell you how.

“In 1942, I was already 23 months in the ghetto when, one morning, 8,000 of us were told to get on a train; they were transporting us to Treblinka, one of the camps built by the Nazis in occupied Poland. I was only 13 years old but I knew already about Treblinka, and I knew what was in store for us. Don’t ask how we knew. People knew.

Just 3km from Treblinka, I jumped from the train. I ran as fast as I could into the nearby forest where I found a large group of partisans hiding out in secret encampments. They were not only Jews. There were Russians too and others who, like me, were trying desperately to stay out of sight of the Nazis. We stayed in hiding in the forest, foraging for food and sometimes receiving it from the kindness of strangers, until the end of June 1944, when the Russians found us. They told us: ‘We liberated you. Now you have to do something for us.’ They needed us to help them because by then we knew every inch of the forest. The Germans had hidden live mines in there and bombs, and we knew where these mines were. And where it was safe and unsafe to trespass. I stayed there with the Russians for four weeks and then I escaped. I made my way to Warsaw, then to Lodz, to Czechoslovakia and finally to Munich, Germany. It was 1945. The war had been over for four months and I was put into a displaced persons camp. I was 16 years old. The rest my family (11 siblings) had not survived.

“In Munich, they had places where survivors could get help searching for relatives. I spoke only Polish, so I got someone to write a letter for me to Forverts (a Jewish newspaper) in New York, where my grandparents and my uncle had emigrated in 1922. One Saturday, right after synagogue, a relative of my father’s came across my letter in the newspaper. Right away, he called up my uncle and said, ‘Hey, I just found somebody. It’s a boy. He’s looking for you.’

“Five months later, I was on a ship to America. When I arrived in New York, my whole family came to the docks to greet me. At the docks also were people looking for men who wanted to work. One guy was looking for butchers. My uncle took me over to him and I got his business card, which I put in my pocket. It turned out that he was from Hygrade Food Products, the third largest food company in the United States. The next day my uncle took me over to Hygrade. The manager gave me a white coat, an apron, a set of knives and said: ‘Show me what you can do.’ So I sharpened the knives the way I like them and I worked for two hours straight. The following day, I had a job.

“I was butchering meat the way I knew from home but he thought I was special. He wanted me to teach his workers how I did it. I showed them how to cut beef, how to break up the cattle into sides. In their slaughterhouse I butchered hogs, pigs, cattle and other things. Always working and teaching. And then, 1956 rolled around.

“After five and a half years, I decided it was time to strike out on my own. With $6,500 I had saved, I gave my boss two weeks’ notice, took the bus to 14th Street and rented a space in the wholesale meat district. It all happened so fast, when the landlord asked the name of my business, I didn’t have one. My first thought was to call it ‘Meister’s’. In Europe, a ‘meister’ is someone who knows everything. At Hygrade, anytime they needed something in the company they said: ‘Call Saul. He’s a real meister.’ I added the word ‘Purveyors’, because that meant I sold provisions as well. Then a friend said: ‘You know, Saul, you’re in America, now. You should use the English word.’ In English, meister means master. And that’s how we became ‘Master Purveyors’. We got all the legal stuff out of the way and, on August 16 1957, Master Purveyors opened for business.

“August 16 was a lucky day for me. A very sad, but also very lucky day. August 16 [1943] was the date when they killed all the people in Bialystok. But they didn’t kill me. The business kept growing and as it did, we’d move into larger and larger quarters. Finally, in 2001, we left the Meatpacking District. The area was undergoing a gentrification into a nightlife and shopping destination. Rents went up and, like so many others, we moved our operation to Hunts Point in the Bronx. Which is where we are today. Even in these new surroundings, we have continued to do business the old-fashioned way. I buy straight cattle from the slaughterhouse. Close to 500,000lb of meat arrives here every week. Maybe around 70,000lb a day. Give or take. And only the top, top of the line. All our beef comes from steer. Those are male cows that have been castrated. They do that when the cow is a calf so it develops muscles and weight. You also get quality, taste, and everything you want in a piece of meat. When I call up a slaughterhouse and order 50 steers, they arrive already quartered. That means 200 pieces.

“As soon as the trailer pulls up to our loading dock, each of my ‘luggers’ grabs a quarter, which weighs between 220lb and 250lb, and hangs it on a hook that is attached to a bar on a roller. Immediately someone slaps our Master’s stamp on every quarter. We stamp it again when we break it down, so I can recognise whether it’s my product or not. If one of my customers complains the meat is bad and he’s looking here for credit, I’ll say: ‘Yeah? Show me the stamp.’ Once the meat is hung and stamped, it gets rolled through the door. While it’s still on the hooks, one guy is there with an electric power saw and he cuts it right away into two pieces. Then the next guy, and the next guy and the next guy. Each one has his own part to do. Two hours later, the hindquarter has been broken into 10 pieces and those get cut again by my butchers into large portions of sirloins, ribs, brisket, and so on. I taught every one of my guys how to cut the way I want it.

“On a smaller scale, we have benchers. According to the orders that come in, they take the meat from the cooler, put it on the bench and cut it into fillet steaks, sirloin steaks. Whatever you want, we do for you. We try to accommodate everyone. Amy Rubenstein, one of the owners of [renowned New York steak house] Peter Luger, comes in every Thursday morning to personally select her restaurant’s weekly supply. She’s been doing that for years. She chooses what she wants, stamps her selections with the Peter Luger insignia, and that way we both know it’s hers.

“I work 18 hours a day, five days a week. Always have. I start my day at 8.30pm. I come in at night because I want to see what product is coming in and what’s going out. I leave here at two in the afternoon. Usually, I meet my wife at a restaurant. This is our time together. She has lunch, I have dinner. I eat steak five times a week. And I don’t eat a little hamburger. I eat a steak. One and a half pounds, sometimes two.

“I don’t let my wife cook. She deserves to be treated well. It hasn’t always been easy for her since I’m never home at the normal times. But we’ve been married 56 years, so I’m guessing she’s used to me by now. By 4pm, I’m ready for bed. I sleep maybe four hours, until 8pm, when I get up and go to work. My kids work with me here so they’re up crazy hours too. We’re all night owls.

“Scott, my younger son, comes in at 10pm. Mark, my oldest boy, comes in at midnight. My son-in-law, who used to be a doctor but recently hung up his stethoscope to join our team, comes in a half-hour later. And then my workers start drifting in at different times after that. I’ve been doing it like this from day one that I came to this country. Sixty-three years and I’ve always worked nights. Always. I can do it blindfolded.”

The conclusion

This guy is really successful and I think it is pretty obvious why; but let me pull out the key points as I see them:

• Success take hard work: starting at 20h30 and leaving at 14h00 the next day. Every day! That is mind-blowing even to a self-confessed workaholic like me. Sam is 87 and is still working these hours.

• Do what others do not want to do — starting work at night is a good example. But things like making cold sales calls, having those difficult employee conversations, … these are the building blocks of success (or perhaps lack-of are the building hocks of failure)

• Building on your strengths, competencies and assets — Sam really knew how to carve meat and I guess the fact that he got the business card from a butchery shows great focus. He could probably have found lots of manual labour jobs that would have allowed him to survive.

• Getting good employees and training them well looks to be a key in this situation. Sam could obviously not scale if he was the only person cutting up the meat, so he taught others.

• Finding co-founders who you know, trust and who will not let you down is critical. Here it seems as if Sam’s family are a great source.

• Networking nearly always plays a role in successful entrepreneurship. Day 1 in New York, 16 year old Sam was picking up business cards the moment he got off the boat.

• Finding a unique positioning

⁃ I love how he branded where normally branding does not happen (stamping the meat) — you can just imagine the diner party conversations around a branded piece of meat on upper 5th Avenue.

⁃

Plus the branding of the butchery itself — Master Purveyors — in an industry that might be considered supplying a commodity.

⁃ Targeted customer segments — the top restaurants — with personal relationships

⁃ The whole business focused on this positioning — from the quality of meat that is bought to how it is cut …. I can just imagine the business model canvas!

• Appreciative of his supporters — read again what he says about his wife of 56 years!

We can not all be Sam Solasz (and may not even want to be), but we can certainly learn from his success and think hard about how we might apply some of these principles to our ventures. Mashauri incorporates much of this thinking into our programmes designed to help entrepreneurs increase their chances of success. Why not try out our free “Test Drive” programme to learn how?

I would also be delighted to discuss these principles in the light of your own specific venture — drop me a line at simon.gifford@mashauri.com if you wish to have a chat.