Small
Business Solutions
Mountain Harbor Seafood, Abingdon
Seafood distributor
The Business
Mountain Harbor Seafood of Abingdon, an 11-employee company formed in 1993.The Players
Brothers Tim Goodman, 41, and Layne Goodman, 42, who started the business on a roadside in
Tazewell County with two 60-quart Igloo coolers of fresh Florida shrimp.
The Problem
The brothers had a small but successful retail seafood business. But growing the business
meant competing against regional grocery chains — and at that level their chances in
retail didn't look strong. The Goodmans felt their small company needed a new strategy or
it would always be small.
The Background
The Goodmans started with $270 and a 1987 Nissan pickup. They bought shrimp in Pensacola,
Fla., for $4 a pound and sold it at a roadside stand for $8 a pound. It worked so well
they both quit their jobs and started selling seafood full time, driving back and forth to
Pensacola.
Their first year they totaled $14,000 in sales. They started supplying a few
restaurants and opened retail shops in Abingdon and Richlands. By 1995, sales reached
$97,000.
They felt well-prepared to keep the business growing. Tim Goodman had earned an
associate's degree in business administration in 1994 from Southwest Virginia Community
College, and they scrupulously put their profits back into the business. "The
temptation when you get that first big check is to say, 'OK, I'm going to pay myself.' But
me and my brother said, 'With this money we can add another cooler, we can buy another
truck.'" Even so, the brothers found their business leveling off as they began to
compete head-to-head with the big grocery store chains.
The Solution
The brothers studied the market again and spotted an opening. They figured that the same
thing that made their retail store profitable — getting fresh seafood to Virginia
cheaply — was what the grocery stores didn't have. "It blew our minds that those
guys didn't have [an affordable] delivery system," Tim says.
So the brothers closed one of their retail stores and focused on wholesaling.
Their first big client was the 100-store Food City chain of grocery stores, which is based
in Abingdon. "I found a name, put on my best khakis and went and made a pitch,"
Tim says. Food City said yes, and the business took off. The Goodmans bought three acres
in the Washington County Industrial Park a few blocks from Food City's headquarters and
built a distribution center. With Food City and other grocery stores and restaurants as
customers, revenues soared to $1 million in 1997, $2.2. million last year and have already
passed $3 million this year, Goodman says.
Today, the company distributes to stores in a five-state region. But now they move
products both ways: They haul farm-raised trout and blue crabs to Gulf Coast states and
come back with seafood and catfish.
The seafood business has been joined by a second business: Abingdon Cold Storage and
Express Freight. It handles the deliveries and leases storage space in a freezer to other
companies hauling perishable goods through the region.
The brothers stumbled onto the cold-storage business after building a cooler for their
seafood operations and realizing that other companies were willing to lease space in it to
store perishable goods. In March, they plan to open a new, $900,000 freezer with enough
space to hold 100 truckloads of perishables. "That's the real money maker," Tim
says. "That's going to be the one that retires me."
If you have a case study in small-business problem solving, e-mail cleitch@va-business.com.
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