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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Andrew Tellijohn
October 2003

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Mergers & Acquisitions


Asian Foods’ CEO expects
new corporate parent
to fuel major growth

Asian Foods grew from $40 million in sales in 1998 to $115 million last year, when CEO Frank Hamel sold the private company to giant food distributor Sysco. Hamel, who remains at the helm of the Sysco division, expects Sysco’s resources to fuel much grander expansion.

“Our goal is to be a $1 billion division of Sysco in 8 to 10 years, with 10 facilities around the country,” Hamel says. Asian Foods serves Asian grocers and restaurants. He plans acquisitions of small food distributors, and the building of warehouses, both of which take big corporate money.

Hamel started the company in 1985. “We didn’t understand at that time the capital required to be in the food distribution business,” he says. “It took us years to grow the businesses. It was almost a 10-year ordeal,” to grow to the point where he could attract a buyer.

About four years ago, Hamel says, he was approaching 40 and began to wonder about his exit strategies. He looked into venture capital offers. “We were fortunate that we didn’t get a venture offer that really knocked our socks off,” he says. Fortunate, because he and his employees then engineered a growth spurt, and large distributors, with the management and other resources Hamel needed, got interested.

Asian Foods did three acquisitions in three years. “That helped us grow and ramped our profitability.”

 He also credits his employees for much of the growth, as well as a stock appreciation plan that he added to a profit-sharing plan. Sixty-eight employees got a piece of a $1.4 million pie, and were happy when Sysco paid cash for Asian Foods.

Hamel expected plenty of time spent integrating the company into Sysco, and he got it. “Autonomy is the buzzword, but man, it’s cumbersome,” Hamel says, adding they’re “over the hump.”

Frank Hamel, Asian Foods: 651.558.2429; fjh@asianfoods.com; www.asianfoods.com