Chris Mittelstaedt was just a child at the controls of a Cessna aircraft when he got his first lesson in business. An entrepreneur and a pilot, Mittelstaedt’s father taught him the importance of keeping an eye out for early indications of trouble.
Later on, when the dotcom bust severely damaged his regional fruit delivery business, leaving The FruitGuys with about $50,000 of bad debt after customers went belly up–and Mittelstaedt with $100,000 of personal debt–that lesson took on special meaning. “We were growing so fast at the time, and I wasn’t paying attention to my dashboard or thinking macroeconomically,” admits Mittelstaedt.
He recovered by restructuring his business to include a tighter credit policy, more variable costs and national expansion.
The dotcom crash wasn’t Mittelstaedt’s first brush with adversity. Since the beginning, necessity has forced him to turn up the juice. In 1998, Mittelstaedt was earning $9.50 an hour at a temp job when he learned his wife was pregnant. With no time to waste, he launched his business.
By starting his 18-hour days at midnight, lugging heavy crates of produce and making the deliveries personally, his business slowly came to fruition.
A decade later, The FruitGuys has grown into a full-scale operation that delivers fresh, high-quality produce to more than 3,000 businesses nationwide. But at the pit of the company is a proactive effort to promote wellness in the community–whether it’s by helping clients establish athletic clubs at the office, reaching out to low-income communities or working with farmers to maintain sustainable businesses.
Photo by FruitGuys.
cassy on September 21st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Wow! Fresh fruits are much better that those in packs or containers being preserve. Usually, all people still like fresh fruits.
jaeda on September 21st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
even me prefer fresh fruits than the preserve ones, but pretty sure a lot of people wants preserve too, that depends.