The Beltram Foodservice Group
is Foodservice & Equipment's
2004 Dealer of the Year
Dan
Beltram
The
Beltram Foodservice Group is proud to be the recipient of FESmag.com's
Dealer of the Year Award for 2004.
Beltram
Foodservice Group: Market Masters From An Entrepreneurial College
By
Mitchell Schechter -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 5/1/2004
Founder,
president and "dean" of the Beltram Foodservice Group,
Daniel Beltram has developed a market-mastering full-service dealership
based on his remarkable aptitude for nurturing new businesses and
business leaders. The result is an FE&S Dealer of the Year that
is as internally dedicated to autonomous management and staff skill-building
as it is externally focused on delivering extraordinary customer
service.
It
is 1981 and, at the Beltram Foodservice Group in Tampa, Fla., Quirino
Beltram is in his habitual workspace, hand-grinding new edges on
cleavers, scissors, razors and other utensils in the firm's knife-sharpening
service center. Across a narrow street stands a second building,
this one filled to the ceiling with staged jobs and inventory belonging
to the company's nine-year-old E&S dealer division, founded
and run by Quirino's son, 30-year-old Daniel Beltram. Before anyone
is aware of a problem, smoke begins to billow from the E&S warehouse;
it has just been set afire by a pyromanical new hire and will shortly
be engulfed in flames. Alarms sound, aroused Beltram employees contact
the fire department and trucks are dispatched, TV crews arrive in
vans and begin filming, and a helicopter circles over the scene
as the first pumper crews arrive to battle the blaze.
Just
yards from the devastation, chaos and rescue efforts, Quirino Beltram
remains at his grinding wheel, composed and focused, as is his life-long
custom, on the job before him, content to leave the rest of the
world, flaming company building and all, in the hands of a God in
Whom he has an abiding and unquestioning faith.
"That
warehouse burnt to the ground and we lost everything in it. And,
of course, we had no insurance on it," Dan Beltram recounted
recently during a visit by FE&S. "That wasn't my father's
way, to put the assurances of man over the protection of his Lord.
So, we took a total loss, which was kind of ironic, because just
a few days before our accountant had told me we might have a problem
with [too much] retained earnings." Beltram laughed, a deep
throaty chuckle, and offered one of his rare, broad grins. "Well,
that problem went away in a hurry, but the fire forced us to borrow
money for the first time and that experience led me to take a new
look about how we wanted to grow this business."
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Respectful
of the tenets and beliefs of his parents (pictured at left),
Beltram tries to instill these values in his children (above).
Photo by Robert Thompson |
Recognizing
that he found the act of borrowing distasteful, certain that he
wanted never to be "at the mercy of anyone or anything"
and determined to build a vertically integrated dealership with
multiple, independently managed components, Beltram spent much of
the next 20 years planning and developing his organization. Today,
FE&S' 2004 Dealer of the Year has some 130 employees, locations
in Tampa, Tarpon Springs and Ft. Myers, operates a millworking shop
and a stainless-steel fabrication plant, has a thriving design/build
and contract business, serves a broad range of chain, independent
and noncommercial customers, and recorded sales last year of some
$36.2 million (after selling off three profitable company divisions
over the past three years). (For a close-up look at the people and
departments that comprise Beltram and are responsible for its success,
see the side stories on the following pages.)
The
fire that wiped out much of what Dan Beltram had built on the E&S
distribution side, that forced him to rethink what he wanted his
business to be like and to start basically anew, also helped to
cast into sharp contrast the different approaches to life expressed
by this son and his father. Born in Europe at the end of the 19th
Century, Quirino Beltram came to America and devoted his life to
his faith, his family and his work to a degree that excluded almost
all other interests. He believed in the tenets of his faith, trusted
his Lord to determine the outcome of his efforts and taught Dan,
his older sister Jackie and older brother Andy to work unstintingly,
avoid shirking as a sin and never to complain if events turned against
them. Molded from stern stock, Dan Beltram nevertheless grew up
motivated, as well, by restless competitive energies that drove
him to participate in the secular world and to prove himself against
new challenges at every opportunity. So, when the '81 fire set them
back, Quirino endured, stuck to his tried and true ways, and continued
the knife-sharpening and servicing business he had operated since
1951 until at last retiring at 91. Dan, however, began to study
foodservice E&S markets, other distribution businesses and,
most importantly, his customers, to ascertain the sorts of products
and services that would most closely match their needs. What he
also learned, from life experience and adversity alike, was that
more often than not, "bad" events simply provide chances
to do things better.
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Dan
Beltram starts most workdays by meeting with Secretary of the
Corporation Xio Polewaski (right) in his Tampa office to review
his agenda and appointments. Photo by Robert Thompson
|
"I've
always believed that how you choose to look at a situation will
determine how you respond to it. If you take a negative attitude,
you'll see a problem; if you have a positive perception, you'll
find an opportunity," he remarked while touring his Tampa headquarters
facility with his visitor. "Over the past year or so, for example,
we've lost several account managers to the chain customers we've
been serving; they saw someone who understood their business and
hired them over. Now, is that a loss for us?" he asked rhetorically.
"From one perspective, it might be. But it also seems to me
that our people are doing a hell of a good job for our business
partners, that now we have folks working on the customer side who
know and appreciate our resources and services, and that we're likely,
therefore, to do even more business with those chain accounts. And
just as important," Beltram added, satisfaction evident in
his voice, "I get to promote rising young stars within our
organization to take over for those who've left."
This
willingness to trust and promote employees is central to both Beltram's
business ethos and the culture of the company he has helped to create.
"We don't believe in micro-managing or rigid procedures,"
he explained. "The model we've tried to develop is more along
the lines of an entrepreneurial college, where promising E&S
professionals can come in with a business idea or the skills to
grow a business line. My role, as 'dean,' if you will, is to give
my managers whichever tools they need to operate more effectively
than our competitors.
"The
way we do this, and I honestly don't know if this is a strength
or a weakness in our organization, is to give all our enterprise
managers nearly total autonomy," Beltram continued. "We've
always had a large number of businesses and each has been self-funding
since start-up because the managers and employees are free to do
their jobs the best way they know how, without me looking over their
shoulders. They are responsible for their own success, and my role
is mostly that of a consultant and a banker. What's positive for
us about this is we have also learned to be responsible to each
other. Our managers are putting their feet in the shoes of their
employees every day and making sure that they get opportunities
to grow, their ideas are heard and they advance as they deserve."
Then,
what's the weakness in an empowered, autonomously managed organization?
Beltram was asked.
"It
comes from the fact that each of our divisions operates according
to its own procedures, which creates individual strengths and weaknesses
and makes it hard to share best practices," he related. "Also,
over time, you always have some managers who are less skillful at
truly being in charge than others, who may not believe or want to
believe that the buck actually stops with them when it comes to
their own enterprise. It takes a certain breed to succeed here."
One
sure way to help promulgate accountability and a readiness to turn
problems into opportunities is to lead by example. Beltram himself
undertook this responsibility recently by taking on the role of
de facto account manager when the company's largest customer, a
chain with which the dealership had been doing business for a decade,
unexpectedly announced that it was planning to split its business
among several suppliers. "Could we still lose some or even
all of that customer's E&S orders? Sure," Beltram told
his guest. "But the way I choose to look at it, this situation
gives us a chance to find ways to increase the value we add to the
relationship and to step up our game and take our services to the
next level."
It
is interesting to note that the rapidly adaptive culture and purposefully
loose organizational structure that defines the Beltram Foodservice
Group today both have their roots in a strongly authoritarian tradition.
Dan's father, Quirino, was born in Austria in 1898, during the twilight
of the imperial Austro-Hungarian Empire. Raised in rural surroundings,
he first worked as a herdsman and rancher, but also gained skill
as a blade-sharpener and utensil repairman from his father, who
was also a grinder. In 1914, when he was 16, Quirino Beltram came
to America to seek his fortune, all but penniless and with no command
of English. Nonetheless, he established a knife-sharpening business
in New Jersey. Quirino married Eliane Gruet in 1945 and maintained
his business in the Garden State until 1949. "At that time,
Dad's employees reportedly voted to unionize the shop, very much
against his wishes," Beltram remarked. "He took it as
a sign from God that his time in New Jersey had run its course,
so he chose to leave and relocate to Florida."
The
Beltrams settled into a mid-sized ranch outside of Zephyrhills,
Fla., where Dan was born in 1951. Though proclaiming himself "retired,"
Quirino kept right on working and earning for his family, both as
a farmer and rancher and, inevitably, as a grinder, resuming this
work at first in the garage of his home. When knife-sharpening,
scissor-tightening and related tasks once more grew into his primary
money-earning occupation, Quirino took a small work space, barely
big enough for his grinding and polishing wheels, in a former grocery
on North Florida Avenue, a location that, while greatly expanded
over the years, has served ever since as the headquarters for all
subsequent Beltram businesses.
Because
hard work and contributions to the family livelihood were a given
in the Beltram household, Dan was only eight when he started working
alongside his father, spending many hours after school and often
all day on Saturdays washing the animal fat off butcher knives and
adding fine edges to blades with a polishing wheel and honing stone.
"The name of that business was Beltram Edge Tool Supply and
that also stood for 'Brings Every Tool Sharp,' because that was
what it took to please the people we worked for," he explained.
"It was a very hard way to earn a living, and for all the respect
and admiration I had for my Dad, I knew I wasn't going to do that
for my whole life."
It
was, in fact, during Dan's career at local Hillsborough High School
that the qualities that most distinguished him from his father,
and which continue to define him today, were first made manifest.
Dan excelled at school, earning top marks, being elected student
body president and accomplishing so much as an All-State athlete
on the football team that he was named his division's player of
the year as a senior. "I've always been very, very competitive.
Whatever I try to do, I want to win, be the best, whether that was
on the field or today when I'm trying to make a new sale,"
he related. "It may be a personal weakness, but I have always
found myself drawn to taking on the next challenge that presented
itself in my life."
Although
he had earned widespread recognition and nearly every award available
to a high-school football player in Florida, at five-foot nine-inches
tall and about 160 pounds, Dan Beltram knew that a future in intercollegiate
and professional sports was unlikely. With characteristic adaptability,
he dedicated himself to surmounting a new challenge: mastering a
pre-med curriculum when he enrolled at the local University of South
Florida. This, Beltram accomplished with aplomb, gaining a B.S.
degree in three years and planning a prospective career in medical
group management as his professional future.
"I
knew from the beginning that my greatest talents didn't lie in scientific
research or even the practice of medicine," he admitted. "Business
was in my blood, I'd been a trader of stocks since I was a kid,
so I could see myself using my understanding of markets to develop
a multi-physician medical group or perhaps lease real estate to
doctors."
In
pursuit of this plan after completing his pre-med studies, Dan interviewed
practicing physicians at Northwestern and Johns Hopkins while preparing
to apply to med school. Before returning to the academic grind,
however, he decided first to spend a few months in Alaska visiting
his older sister Jackie who had already passed the bar and opened
a law office. It was during this sojourn that Dan received a phone
call that, literally, changed his life.
"I
took the phone and it was Dad. This was in 1973, he was 75. He said
to me, 'I think the end is near.' It turned out he thought he had
cancer. I knew he needed some help," Beltram recalled quietly,
"so I decided to fly back the next day, spend some time with
him, get him proper medical help and, if necessary, help him sell
his business."
As
events transpired, Quirino Beltram was found to be cancer-free and
returned to his knife-sharpening work. Though he had not planned
on working alongside his father, Dan was again restless for a new
challenge and soon put himself out on the road, opening up new knife-sharpening
accounts. "As I understood it, our mission was to please our
customers," he commented. "So, since we were already out
there in their businesses, bringing in sharp knives and taking away
dull ones, when they asked me to get them other items they needed
to run their operations, I said, 'Yes, of course.' We started selling
smallwares and everything up to slicing machines, that side of the
business grew bigger and bigger, and what started out as a sideline
became our primary activity, even though we had never planned it
that way."
In
the years that followed, Beltram continued to build up his new E&S
organization, becoming a distributor of slicers, ice machines and
microwaves. In 1981, he formed Food Equipment Distributors Inc.,
a wholesale distribution company that sold these lines of equipment
to dealers. He also kept on growing his sales of E&S (and sharpening
services) to operators in central and north Florida. "We had
to learn how to be traditional dealers, how to order and inventory,
and how to negotiate win-win relationships with factories,"
Beltram pointed out. "Starting up down here, then, there was
nobody around to teach us how to do these things, so I gathered
E&S product knowledge as I went along and relied on the business
lessons I had learned while working with my Dad."
One
of these business lessons included the admonition to "do all
jobs right, to the best of your ability and strength. Dad also taught
me never to look down on little accounts, to treat all customers
the same and to be faithful in the execution of small responsibilities,
because then people will trust you with larger ones," he added.
After
recovering from the 1981 fire, Beltram began to apply his beliefs
and management principles across a broader range of businesses.
In 1984, for example, he put into an operation a millworking company
called Creative Woodworking Concepts by bank-rolling two former
wood-workers "whose business plan I didn't like but whose character
I did." That same year, Beltram opened its first branch location,
Beltram Supply Inc., which included its own showroom and warehouse
in Tarpon Springs. "The reason we went to Tarpon was that it
was becoming a growth market with enough year-round business to
support our physical presence. Just as important," he related,
"we had some people here who were ready for a new challenge
and I wanted to give them their own game."
This
expansion was followed in 1986 by Beltram's formation of a branch
of Food Equipment Distributors, which was situated in Orlando to
facilitate the parent company's wholesale equipment distribution
business in that booming central Florida market. In 1987, Beltram
started up Tarpon Stainless Fabricators Inc., his stainless fabrication
plant, to add another layer of vertical integration and to position
his company better to offer complete solutions, from smallwares
to custom FFE manufacturing, to customers.
Beltram's
drive to grow and further diversify his company continued throughout
the 1980s. In 1991, he partnered with Danny Skipper to open Beltram
South Inc., the firm's third location, in Ft. Myers. Though Beltram
and Skipper are notably dissimilar (the former is urbane, intense
and devoted to sales, while the latter is rural, genial and an expert
at facility design) and had never done business together before
opening the branch location, their mutual trust and the autonomy
Ft. Myers' personnel enjoy to find the best ways to meet the needs
of their market has allowed this location to prosper since its inception.
Also
in 1989, Beltram created Perky's Foodservice Concepts Inc., which
sold patented pizza-making equipment modules to non-conventional
pizza operators. With the help of Secretary of the Corporation Xio
Polewaski, who developed and ran the international side of the business,
Beltram built Perky's into the largest pizza chain in Central and
South America and the Caribbean, establishing over 800 units in
the United States and in 28 countries before the firm was sold.
Having
put the components of his company in place during the '80s, Beltram
groomed their management teams during the subsequent years, raising
company sales above $35 million and, equally important, refining
the practices and systems that directed the business. One important
move was the decision to join the EDI buying group in 1988. Beltram's
affiliations with EDI and FEDA, and the networking they have fostered,
have helped him form a clearer understanding about the role of the
traditional E&S dealer and how he and his peers can best remain
essential in the distribution channel.
"Our
relations with customers are the most valuable things we have to
offer our manufacturers, because they want to be a part of those
relationships," he noted. "So, the more we add value for
our customers, control the buy and have discretion over where we
take it, the more valuable we will be perceived to be in the channel.
"On
the other hand," Beltram continued, "it's up to us as
dealers to prove to our manufacturers that we care about them, too.
We cannot have success unless they do. That's one of the reasons
I so passionately support the new 'preferred vendor' guidelines
EDI has just initiated, because it demonstrates our commitment to
the suppliers with which we most want to do business."
Though
Beltram is reasonably certain that traditional dealers will retain
their primacy as E&S distribution outlets over the long-term,
he is much less sanguine about short-term industry prospects. "We
are still facing a required cleansing, at both the manufacturer
and dealer levels," he stressed. "We have too much capacity,
too many sources of supply for the status quo to continue, so I
believe a certain amount of attrition is inevitable. In addition,
rank and file E&S dealers are already being starved by erosion
of their margins, so charging and getting new revenue for services
are going to be the ultimate challenges for many of us in the immediate
future. It does look to me that lax dealers will not survive."
To
ensure that his company is best prepared for more difficult economic
times, Beltram has taken several key steps. As far back as 2000,
when the latest downturn began to hit hospitality market sectors,
he started selling off a couple of his companies, including Food
Equipment Distributors and Perky's, and liquidating a portion of
the real estate portfolio he had spent decades assembling. "I
felt it was time to go to cash," he said. "I feel there's
going to be a need to ride out some tough times and I wanted us
to have the liquidity to be prepared."
In
complementary fashion, to help assure that Beltram Foodservice Group
can function as cost-effectively and efficiently as any competitor,
Beltram has consolidated three former inventory-stocking locations
into a single central warehouse. He and his IT managers have also
rolled out over the past three years a new enterprise resource planning
system that ties sales to accounting and inventorying and automatically
generates new orders. "It was a struggle to get the new software
to function seamlessly across all our branches and locations, especially
given our autonomous management structure and lack of centralized
systems," he admitted. "Now, however, we have a better
understanding of our sales and inventory turns and we can provide
more detailed order histories for customers." The next IT-driven
productivity enhancements at Beltram will most likely include an
upgrade of the company's web site to enable e-commerce and development
of a company-wide wireless intranet to allow more real-time data-sharing
by employees in the field and at locations.
Beltram
himself begins his workdays by about 7 a.m., meeting first with
Polewaski, who also functions as his executive assistant, to review
his agenda and prioritize his meetings and calls. "Dan literally
works with his door open and there are days when salespeople and
suppliers are lined up to see him," Polewaski advised. "He
also spends a lot of time on the phone taking calls from the branch
managers and participating in EDI business. After a brief lunch
break, Dan goes back to work until past five, when he frequently
eats dinner out with his managers or suppliers. He often returns
to the office after dinner, too." Asked how Beltram has changed
since she began working with him 13 years ago, Polewaski replied,
"He's definitely more mature, more settled in his judgment
and a little bit more conservative than he used to be. We're not
as quick to start new business ventures as we were before Dan decided
to go to cash, but he's still very entrepreneurial and willing to
invest in good salespeople and find new opportunities for our co-workers
to grow into. I think Dan gets his greatest pleasure at work from
helping colleagues put their ideas into action and enabling their
success."
To
ensure that the self-guided efforts of his managers and employees
are in fact producing the results the company requires to reach
its goals, Beltram still spends many hours reviewing a wide variety
of key reports ranging from daily financial statements from all
his companies to sales tallies and analyses of Service department
productivity broken down by man-hour. Unusual for a chief executive,
Beltram will also habitually seek the advice of those whose opinions
he trusts before making a new hire or financial decision, including
older sister Jackie (who has been his life-long confidant), Polewaski,
CPA Jim Decker and his business managers.
Although
he is now spending more time in the office than in previous years,
when he can get away Beltram heads most often to a ranch in rural
Montana he originally bought at the beginning of the 1990s and is
now developing into a resort. The Montana spread also offers Beltram
another locale to which he can fly the Beechcraft airplane he enjoys
piloting and pursue his love of fishing and gun- and bow-hunting
(as witnessed by the trophies in his Tampa office), as well as to
spend time with his wife and two children. Beltram first met his
wife Andrea in 1993 in Tampa when she had come from her native Hungary
to visit her brother in the States. So smitten was he with his new
acquaintance that Beltram made an unannounced trip to Hungary in
July 1994 to woo Andrea in her native village of Balaton. The couple
now has two children, eight-year-old D.Q. and four-year-old Jacqueline.
Having
attained a measure of security in both his professional and personal
lives, yet still eager to find new opportunities for success for
those who look to him for leadership, Dan Beltram is now aware of
the legacy he expects to leave. "First, the rule we all try
to follow is, 'In all things, give thanks,' because any other behavior
is not wise," he stated. "I think we are and always will
be seen as a company where customers, suppliers and employees have
been treated with equal respect and consideration. I'd also like
to be thought of as a smart, hard-working, competitive and successful
businessman but, most of all, I'd like people to know that I was
an entrepreneur who taught and made it possible for others to have
fun and become fellow entrepreneurs."
The
Beltram Foodservice Group
www.beltram.com
E-mail: bfgtampa@beltram.com
1-800-940-1136
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Copyright
© 2008 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved. The above article is reprinted from Foodservice
Equipment & Supplies, May 2004, with permission.
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