Here’s another story from the trenches of starting businesses. This time, I’m focusing on my friend and long-time partner, Bill Shepard.
In the mid-1990s, two people looked at the food system and came to a pretty simple conclusion: We needed better food. Healthier food. And we needed a way to get it to ordinary families at scale.
That was about the extent of our resources.
We had no real money. We had no established reputation in the food business. We had no giant company standing behind us.
What we did have were a few credit cards, a belief that food could be produced differently, and probably just enough naïveté to believe we could actually do something about it.
Those two people were my friend and partner Bill Shepard and me. And the company became Eco Terra.
The idea was not complicated.
We believed there were farmers and producers already doing things better — using practices like integrated pest management, reducing unnecessary chemicals, improving the way animals were raised, and reducing or eliminating unnecessary antibiotics.
The problem was that those practices were fragmented. The farmer might have a great story. The poultry producer might have a better way of raising chickens. Someone else might be doing something different with eggs, meat or produce.
But there wasn’t necessarily a system to pull those ideas together, create standards around them, tell the story to consumers, and then get those products into major grocery stores.
That became our idea. Find the people doing it better. Understand what made them different. Create a program around it. Tell their story. And build a bridge between those producers and the major retailers.
There was only one minor problem. We had absolutely no idea whether two guys with credit cards could convince major supermarket chains to give us shelf space.
Apparently, that detail didn’t bother Bill very much. That was one of his great gifts.
Bill is positive. Not artificially positive. Not the kind of person who ignored reality. He simply seemed to have this ability to look at something difficult and believe there was probably a way through it.
I would see the obstacles. Bill would see the next step. And somehow, between the two of us, we kept moving.
We started talking to producers. We walked farms and facilities. We listened to their stories.
We began putting together a business model where the producers could continue producing, packing and shipping their own products while Eco Terra helped establish the standards, create the program, build the brand story and open the doors to retail.
Then came the moment that still seems improbable to me today.
We went after major retail distribution.
A company like Giant Eagle had absolutely no reason to take two unknown entrepreneurs with very little capital seriously. But they did. We got the opportunity. Then another retailer listened. Then another.
And what had started as an idea between two people with some credit cards began becoming a real food company with real products on real supermarket shelves.
Looking back more than 30 years later, what stays with me isn’t the distribution or the business model.
It’s all about the friendship.
Entrepreneurial stories are often told as stories about ideas. I think they are just as often stories about people.
Someone has to believe with you. Someone has to stay positive when the answer is no. Someone has to make the next phone call. Someone has to walk into the meeting believing you belong there even when all the evidence suggests otherwise.
For me, that person was often Bill Shepard.
Bill helped make Eco Terra real. More importantly, he made the journey fun enough, hopeful enough and believable enough that we kept going when common sense might have told us to stop.
And there is a lesson in that I appreciate even more today. You don’t always need all the capital. You don’t always need the perfect résumé. You don’t always need the established reputation.
Sometimes you need a good idea, a willingness to work, the courage to ask for the opportunity — and a friend beside you who keeps saying, “We can do this.”
Bill, thank you for being that friend.
Thank you for always being positive. Thank you for believing that two people without much money or much reputation could somehow help build a healthier food system. And thank you for making things like Eco Terra a reality.
Some companies are remembered for what they sold.
I remember this one for who I got to build it with.
