The Wizard's Apprentices
Fred Clark (right) says handing off Clark Associates to his son, CEO Gene Clark (left), and protégés like COO David Groff (center) was the hardest thing I ever did in my life"
On a snowy January morning in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a flat-screen monitor in a former Mennonite elementary school displays the vital signs of WebstaurantStore, which, excepting produce, sells everything a restaurant might need, from $25,000 walk-in freezers to 15-cent takeout containers. Business is booming. By 9AM, WebstaurantStore, the Internet storefront of Clark Associates, a 53-year-old family-owned firm, has already rung up $800,000 in sales. It bagged $8.6 million the day prior.
In a former classroom nearby which still has a chalkboard on the wall, employees run demand projections to ensure Clark's warehouses remain well-stocked with 35-pound buckets of peanut butter, boot-shaped beer mugs and the rest of the 420,000 products the website offers. It's a struggle to keep up. Clark Associates' sales have ballooned from $80 million in 2009 to $4 billion today - an eye-popping growth rate of 32% a year. Over the same period, employee head-count has gone from 350 to 7,000. Hence buying the elementary school. "We were desperate for space," says Clark's CEO, Gene Clark.
Clark, 39, took the helm in 2020 from his father, Fred, a blunt-talking 65-year-old former electrician and self-taught businessman with a penchant for bucking conventional wisdom. In particular, everyone thought restaurant equipment was too complicated to sell effectively online. A standard two-door refrigerator, for instance, can be configured 150 ways, depending on if you run a busy seafood joint or sleepy neighborhood cafe. Fred disagreed-and it paid off handsomely.
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