Cherry Hill Foods - Manufacturing Product
incurred when a company goes public. Our game plan was in trouble from the beginning. Still, we tried. Over and over again we pitched small companies that we thought could benefit from our cash but to no avail. If this was not enough, we had another limiting factor. The ‘Use of Proceeds’ section, as defined by our original prospectus. Hank and I argued about this section for weeks before he prevailed. I wanted it to be written in an open fashion so that we could invest in any business that we determined had growth opportunities. Hank, on the other hand, was set on limiting the use of our proceeds to frozen food companies. We compromised to limit the use of funds to food companies. It was a reasonable compromise but, in my judg- ment, imposed an unnecessary limitation on what we could do. I was 43 years old, the President of Cher- ry Hill Foods, a public company with no debt, and $550,000 in the bank. The future, though uncertain, looked great. For the first time, my
company was in very good shape financially, and I had influential friends to help take it to the next level. Opportunities began to materialize. We landed The Brass Rail Restaurants of New York as an account. They selected us to produce a line of frozen foods for them to be marketed through supermarkets. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Soci- ety was underway. This is associated with a period of rapid economic growth in the Unit- ed States. I was hoping to ride that wave by first sustaining the early period of selling our own products and services. I felt like we were in a position to succeed and I did everything to ensure we could. We made a quality prod- uct. Packaged it professionally. It had great eye appeal. All of our hard work gave me the confidence to call on distributors. It didn’t take long before I learned, if the distributors were going to buy our product, I had to pre-sell it to the restaurants and hotels that they supported. Distributors expect
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