Founder's Story - Grow Your Business From Start Up to Exponentially Successful Scale | Ep. 61 With In-Demand Business Coach, Larry Snyder

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Larry has successfully led businesses for over 40 years. He began his career with a major food processing company and quickly became – at the age of 25 - the manager of an $80 million operation that moved 700 truckloads of peaches, pears, and tomatoes a day (yes, a day) to processing facilities throughout California. He was able to take that big company experience to a smaller, closely held company where he became a leader and a partner. That company serves the fresh produce industry and cools, then stores and ships lettuce, celery, and strawberries among other fresh produce items.  During his time with the company, Larry and his partners have grown the business from $25 million a year in sales to $150 million a year in sales. As the company grew, facilities and equipment were built, the organization was developed and financing was needed.  Larry and his wife, Lori, are also real estate investors with investments in apartments, shopping centers, and office complexes primarily in the southeast and in Texas. Larry has lived the pains and the thrills of growing and operating a successful business. He loves business and he loves helping people. He is now is able to do that by using his business experience along with world-class training and development programs. To learn more how you can scale up your business, you can visit: https://www.larrysnyder.com/coaching/ For more info on guests and future episodes visit KateHancock.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ibhshow/supportOur Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Inspired by Her, the podcast that will give you the inspiration, motivation and tips for success from some of the top executives, CEOs and influencers from around the globe. With your host, serial entrepreneur and named one of the most influential Filipina in the world, Kate Hancock. What moment from your childhood are you most proud of, Larry? Wow, I haven't been asked that. That's a good one. A few things stand out, I'll say, and this is off the spur of the moment. One is I loved baseball. I just loved playing baseball. I used to play baseball a lot as a kid. Even two-on-two, we'd play down at the local school and figured out a way to cut the field just right so that we could play two-on-two. Played it a lot, loved baseball, still love it.

And so that's one. Interesting fact, I was a pitcher, pitched through high school, got into college, but my arm went out. But later in high school, opening day, our senior year, I pitched against Dennis Eckersley, who was a famous pitcher and is in the Hall of Fame. So that's a claim to fame is pitched against him in high school. Wow. Someone here on Facebook said watching baseball and playing the best sport ever. So, Larry, so what was your journey like to get where you are? Well, I think still going on what you were talking about as a child, one of the things that I think was interesting, was it was a great start, was I was a paper boy, you know, like 12 years old to

14 years old, something like that. And back then, you know, you rode your bike around in the morning and you delivered papers. And it sounds like, hey, I was just a paper boy. But when you think about it, you had operations because you had to deliver those darn things seven days a week, early, early in the morning, whether it was raining or cold or whatever. And so seven days a week delivering. Then you had to go out and collect. You had to go find the new customers. You had to settle customer service problems.

I broke a few windows because I always like to put the paper right on the top stoop. And every once in a while, the darn thing would bounce and I'd break a window. So, you know, I think that was the start of business and entrepreneurism. Wow. Then what happened? What was your first business, Larry? Well, I got my start after some things in college and everything else. As I was finishing up college, I went to work for a large food processor, a cannery. And in, you know, city born, city raised, but I ended up spending two summers out in the Central Valley of California, working for a cannery and just fell in love with agriculture. And I got involved on the operations

side. We were moving trucks of tomatoes and peaches and pears, actually 700 truckloads a day of peaches, pears, tomatoes from all over California to different processing plants. And so it was a logistical challenge. And so I got a chance to get involved in ag, loved it, fell in love with ag, ended up staying there for nine years, got a chance to do a lot of wonderful things, including working with the board of directors, the president of the company, worked on a few special projects. And then the other thing that happened that really helped in the long run was we went bankrupt and so I got a chance to see what happens when you you know when you struggle what puts you into

bankruptcy you know getting getting your your business out of line you know too much supply not enough demand running yourself into problems how do you work through bankruptcy how's the process work and that that came into to be an advantage later on when i was on the other side and some of our customers went bankrupt because i i i had had that experience wow and um what was your very first company aside from the your paper i think dan did that paper boy the paper route so what was that very first company when you feel like okay i got this and it's successful what was that company well first of all dan and i not only were we paper boys but we shared earlier that we have the same haircut and c-rock i had just joined so i cut my hair about every three days. I love it. But the first company was after the cannery went bankrupt. One of the

vendors that we'd worked with asked me to join them. And ultimately, I became a partner in that company. So, you know, I joined that company, again, tied into agriculture. Really amazing. This one was focused on fresh produce for the most part. Ninety-five percent of our business is in the fresh produce industry, another phenomenal industry. Really people that are creative and always figuring out how to make things work. And, you know, trust is your bond in the ag industry. So it's really, really incredible. But to answer your question, Kate, joined it, became a partner. And then together, we led this from the time I joined,

we were at roughly 25 million a year in sales to, as Dan mentioned earlier, we just hit 150 million a year in sales. And one of the things that we do there is we believe in long-term relationships. So we've created a number of joint ventures with different growers, shippers, people that we work with, and it really develops that long-term relationship. Wow. Larry, what is the profit margin in that industry? I mean, what are some of the issues? I mean, I could understand if you make

mistakes logistics-wise, they're all going to be rotten. What is the profit margin for fresh produce? Yeah, well, if you're one of the folks that's supplying the celery or the strawberries or the lettuce, it's funny because when you ask somebody in the industry, hey, what kind of margins do you guys see? Everybody will chuckle because the growers or shippers spend a lot of the time being at break-even or even below break-even, and they wait for those moments. They need to be in the market for those moments when it gets better, and they actually make money. It's gotten a little more stable over the years because there's fewer shippers. Of course, there's fewer on the buying side, whether that's food service or the retailers. And I think everybody's beginning to see that

there's a common interest that they need to keep the shippers in business. So they've come together and found different ways to price things to make it work for everybody. But it's a very competitive industry. Pricing is really tough. And I mean, for example, the vegetable markets over the last nine months have been horrible. So the poor vegetable growers and vegetable shippers have been losing money for like nine months straight. Wow. So I can imagine if you're a smaller farmer, that's a tough industry. You need to have a massive volume for you to make it, to sustain that business. Because your margin of error, I mean, it's just one mistake of not shipping it to the right place and it will go bad. That or, you know, there's things that can happen in the field.

Maybe the timing's off or pests, you know, heat, cold. There's so many things that get them. Wow. And tell us about, you mentioned bankruptcy, where that company you're involved in. Can you tell us, how does that feel like going through that? Very, very, very frustrating. Yeah. We had made some strategic errors. We had too much supply in our warehouses at the time. But the neat thing was, and so you could see this building. We kept carrying inventory, carrying inventory, and we were building on our line of credit. We had a change in the CEO. The new CEO put together a team, and I was fortunate enough to be part of it.

It was a five-person team. We put this team together, and we came up with a plan on how we could turn things around. So just the ability or the opportunity to be involved in those discussions and figuring things out. But we figured out a plan. Unfortunately, the bank wasn't willing to hang with us. They pulled the plug and they turned our plan over to our largest competitor and had everything organized in bankruptcy court to just slam it through. So to answer your question, I was very frustrated and my competitive nature came out. I wasn't too happy for a number of years with that bank. Wow.

Real quick, Kate, just really quickly. Sorry, just some logistical things. I usually don't want to do this. Larry, can you hit the unmute on StreamYard just to make sure that people can hear you here? There you go. Fantastic. Now they'll hear you much better. Thank you. This is Larry Snyder, by the way. Last year alone, almost 150 million in sales a really incredible story back to you yes and larry knowing what you know now what would you do differently would you still be you know doing you know fresh produce or would you do something else um well i thought a couple of thoughts. One is, you know, again, I fell in love with agriculture years ago,

and so it's really, it has a special place inside of me, in my heart. So that's neat. And the other thing is because it's always evolving and always changing, almost every day has been a new adventure. That's what's neat. The other thing, though, to keep going with the answer is a few years ago, my wife and I decided to get more deeply involved in real estate investment. We'd been around real estate for years, obviously buying our own homes and doing things like that.

But in our business, we have 17 distribution facilities, refrigerated warehouses throughout the western United States. And so obviously by doing that, we had to do a lot of buying land, developing buildings, at that time selling things. So I was around real estate in that. And then also about 20 years ago, we had some ground here in the Bay Area that was in a perfect position to be developed. And so I ended up developing a shopping center with that 20 acres. Long story made short, I've been around real estate. And so Lori and I decided, hey, she saw something and we dug into real estate investment a little bit more. And so for the last few years, we've been doing more and more of that. And that's been a lot of fun. We've gotten to meet a whole new group of people. We've got some investments, a good share of them down

in the southeast, with apartment buildings, shopping centers, and even a few office buildings. And then we've also got some apartments in Texas that we've invested in. Thank you so much, Larry. And Larry, can you name a person who has had a tremendous impact on you as a leader? Who is that? Well, I think back in my first boss, when I first started at the cannery, he was outstanding. And he had a very creative mind. He was willing to give me a lot of opportunities and take over certain things. And so the leadership, the guidance, the insight, and the opportunity to go do certain things was tremendous.

And I think of him, his name was Bill. He was fantastic. And what a great, great start that was. I've also, you know, I've been around a number of great people in our business, partners and everything. And I've learned a lot from them, whether it was to, you know, working hard, thinking through things, you know, doing your homework, being prepared, also trusting your gut, relying on people that, you know, they may not be all that polished, but they really know what they're doing. So different things like that. And then recently, and it was one of the other things I was going to touch on

with your earlier question, Kate, is the other thing that I'm now doing is working with other business owners to help them grow a strong, successful business. Obviously, a lot of people, they want to have their business, they know the craft, but they may not really understand business or they may not understand how to protect themselves and how to take advantage of opportunities. So I'm wanting to take my experience along with some other programs that we've got and really help these people build a strong, successful business. Oh, I love it. Now, tell me, think back to a time that you felt transformed and how did you change and why, Larry?

Well, you've got some great questions. About, well, a couple of things. I've always liked to learn. I've always liked to improve. And I'll say roughly 25 years ago, it was during the cassette era, but about 25 years ago, Lori got me the Tony Robbins package, Personal Power. And I thought that was tremendous.

And I would listen to that probably every six months. And I always made sure that I did the homework. I just didn't listen to it. But every day, you know, you had something that you had to work on. And so I would do that. And you kept learning and improving and learning and improving. And that was great. But I've also relied on, you know, I think of Stephen Covey with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Tom Peters with, you know, I think of Stephen Covey with the seven habits of highly effective people.

Tom Peters with, you know, with Wow. Our daughter, Ashley, as you mentioned earlier, she's on the call. She's probably laughing right now because I got to meet him one time. She said, you met the Wow guy? You know, but so Tom Peters, I think of Jim Collins, just, you know, good to great, great by choice and a lot of those things. Uh, and, and now recently in the last few years, I've had the chance to connect with some other people that are just amazing. You know, I, I, Grant Cardone licensee as part of that. I've also been able to connect with Brandon Dawson

at Cardone ventures and, and just getting stretched and learning so much from them. I've connected with JT Fox and learning and stretching so much from him. And JT's, you know, opened the doors on a few things. I recently was able to spend a half hour with George. And I want to say George Ross, and all of a sudden I'm drawing a blank. But he, you know, he was on The Apprentice. He was with Trump in the real estate side for 47 years. And so being able to spend a half hour with George was fantastic. Wow. It seems like you really tap into getting into partnership. Can you tell me the disadvantage and advantage of just doing it solo rather than leveraging other people's knowledge and teams?

I think a lot of entrepreneurs make that mistake of wanting to do it all. Sure. Well, and I think a lot of times, you know, we want to have our own business because we want to have control. And, you know, we think, all right, now I'm in charge and, you know, I'm going to go make this happen. And certainly that's true. But even if you're going to be the king, the queen, the czar, you need a team, right? You can only go so far if it's you. So how are you going to build the team? That would be number one. Even if you want to look at them and you say, hey, they're employees, and I'm in charge, and I'm the owner, and everything

else, all true. You still need them. You still need to design things. In addition, if you look at partners and partnerships, it can be very tricky. But if you have that faith and if you lay things out and if you have trust in each other, partnerships can also be enormously empowering. I mean, you can really go places. And you've got to organize it right. You've got to set it up right. I will say also, from more of a technical perspective, they're easy to set up, they're easy to get into, very difficult to get out of. So you want to be really careful before you jump in. You want to really think it through. Wow, thank you, Larry. And is Lori part of the business? Lori and I are, she's, you know, a couple of thoughts. One is Lori and I are running the real estate deal together, our investments.

She's really running it. And, you know, we talk all the time on the business coaching where I'm going out now and working with business owners. Yes, we're working together. We're trying to make it happen. She's doing a lot of the marketing. You know, she's the one that's helping with or not helping she's doing the social media I mean we talked through it but she's got the insight and the creativity to go make things happen so that's the other thing that's really

really neat is we're working together and so and as you guys know it brings a lot of joy it also brings some some emotional hurdles but you know it brings a lot of joy that's the reason some emotional hurdles, but it brings a lot of joy. That's the reason why I'm asking, because there's definitely some moment where we're yelling. It's hard to blend in the business and life together, because then you can't not talk about business all the time. But I'm going to ask you a question. What's the dynamic like having your daughter working for the company? Is there ever a time where there's some friction going on?

She's not really agreeing with you because we all go through this as a family business. Sure. And Ashley, actually, I mean, we rely on her for some insights on technology or, you know, her generation and things like that. But she's actually working with a large company. And so she's not part of our day to day. But she does get to see some of the sparks fly at times. Yeah. I love it. And Ashley is here with us. Now I have to say I have to thank JT Fox. He's actually the person that introduced, you know, you to us to interview. He was really like, you got to interview Larry. So I have to give credit to JT Fox. And Larry, how do you want to be remembered? I'll say honest, integrity, cared deeply about his family and wanted his family to do well. I wanted to,

I want to be there for him. So, you know, I want him to be able to count on me and think that I did a good job, you know, being a wonderful husband and also raised two beautiful children that are going to contribute to the world. That would be first. And then I think just making the, you know, helping business owners. I love business. So helping business owners succeed, you know, that would really be terrific. Because if you think about it, it's the business owner. It's the people that are working there as well.

And it's really all of their families, right? Because it's just going to, it's going to wash over. And so a successful business is going to make a lot of people happy. An unsuccessful business is going to make a lot of people happy. An unsuccessful business is going to make a lot of people sad. That's very true. And now, Larry, for our listeners live, where can they find you if they want to book you for speaking or your coaching? What's the website? Sure.

A couple of things. One, the website, I'll call it Under Construction. We're just about there, and we've got a couple blips. So I'm going to leave that alone for a moment. If they want to reach me right now through Instagram or Facebook, it's the Larry Snyder. So the Larry and then S-N-Y-D-E-R. Or they can email me at Larry at Larry Snyder dot com. We hope you enjoyed the show.'t forget to rate review and subscribe