The Society of Entrepreneurs is inducting three new members into the organization this year and elevating Jay Martin to Master Entrepreneur. Martin, president and founder of Juice Plus+, was inducted into the SOE in 2008. A celebrated storyteller, he’s written two books and is sought after as a speaker. Being named Master Entrepreneur indicates particular excellence in the entrepreneurial spirit as well as being an exemplar of giving back to the community. The inductees are Tyrone Adam Burroughs, president and CEO of First Choice Sales and Marketing Group, and award-winning restaurateurs Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman of Enjoy AM Restaurant Group, which includes Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, Hog & Hominy, Catherine & Mary’s, Grey Canary, and Bishop. Membership in the society is of Mid-South business owners, presidents, and other key executives. The 29th Annual Dinner and Awards Banquet was broadcast on WKNO-TV on Saturday, May 1, 2021.
photograph courtesy juice plus+
Jay Martin
President and Founder, Juice Plus+
Inside Memphis Business: How did you embark on your life as an entrepreneur?
Jay Martin: I started out at Wake Forest and wound up at the University of Georgia. Seven years of undergraduate study — don’t ask me why — and then taught school for a year. I taught world history and I was the coach in basketball and also in football and golf. And then I had to drive a bus with no license. I figured out that I was earning 64 cents an hour, that was it. So some friends and I decided to get in the fire alarm business. And we wanted to go somewhere else and build a business. I’d come to the Liberty Bowl and liked it, so that somewhere else became Memphis. We had $2,000 with the four of us and we got a $200 house rented in Whitehaven. And that’s kind of how it got started.
IMB: How was the fire alarm business?
JM: The makers were in Rochester, New York, and were impressed with us, so they let us have the territory that bordered on Tennessee. I don’t think they had any idea that was eight different states. We caught on fire with fire alarms but then they got bought out and [stopped] making fire alarms. We got interested in water filtration and I didn’t even know much about it, but we decided to take a look . We brought in a marketing company and they brought in focus people and they all said, forget it. And we forgot them and started making water filters ourselves, selling $2 billion in 15 countries.
IMB: And you did well with that, but then came your big breakthrough with Juice Plus+. Tell us about it.
JM: Our foundation is fruits and vegetables, and we’re involved with our farmers. The first thing we wanted to do was to have clinical research. We had doctors who were interested saying we should test for bioavailability — in other words, is it working or isn’t it? Is it there or not? The results were positive and researchers said the immune system would benefit if it was taken regularly. Now we have 40 clinical studies and we’re in 26 countries.
IMB: Tell us about the corporate culture at Juice Plus+.
JM: Virtually all the people that had a piece of the rock were all involved in the business. We didn’t have outside people with us at all. There are a few, but our people had a piece of the rock and that was the rock. We also have a strong profit share and employees can go across the street and visit a nurse practitioner at no cost. We have 15,000 people that have been with us over 16 years, so our retention is good. We also urge our partners to find a buddy: The ability of two people to influence a third is significantly easier than one person trying to influence a second. Bob Dylan wrote about the power of two in his song “If Not For You.” And I tell people, success is a team sport.
IMB: What’s been your biggest challenge?
JM: Being international is the toughest because you’ve got language and you’ve also got cultural differences. And it’s more difficult. Europe is our biggest market and trying to deal with that is the hardest thing to do. We also have Canada and Australia and Mexico.
IMB: What’s been your best decision?
JM: I wanted to see that once a family became a customer, then we’d give them the products for their children. That was the best thing because people were concerned about that. There’s been over a million people we’ve done that for, from age 4 to age 18. Even though we were giving product away, that was the best group in terms of doing well for us. And we had over 90 percent that said that their children now understand what food is about.
IMB: Talk about giving back to the community.
JM: Transportation is a tough issue for us in this town, which I found out working with the technical training center at the Boys and Girls Club. I figured scooters were an answer. My City Rides provides affordable scooters through a lease-to-own plan. We’re close to 300 people with the scooters and they get 75 to 80 miles a gallon. They really like it. And I’m involved in A Step Ahead Foundation and I can’t think of anything any better than that one has done.
photograph courtesy First Choice Sales and Marketing Group
Tyrone Burroughs
President and CEO, First Choice Sales and Marketing Group
Inside Memphis Business: How did you know you were going into business?
Tyrone Burroughs: I knew at an early age that I wanted to own my own business. … There were six kids who watched my parents work extremely hard on the farm. And as I was watching them, I noticed that the workers would either bring their lunch to work or would go home to have lunch and then come back. So subsequently I decided that I would save all of the money that I earned, travel to town with my parents, and I would buy snacks from the local grocery store. I’d sell those snacks to the workers at lunchtime and I did it for a profit. So I knew then that business was something that I wanted to do.
IMB: What was the lesson you learned?
TB: If you’re willing to put in the hard work, create value, and let people know what your worth is, it will open up numerous doors and create opportunities for you that you would never realize or recognize that they exist.
IMB: You mentioned that a man once offered you a great business opportunity. How would you have handled it differently?
TB: He said not only did he have an opportunity for me to start my own business, he would also front me the money to start it. My pride would not allow me to take the money. I told him all I needed was the opportunity and I’d figure out how to make the rest of it work. My wife and I took what little savings we had — it wasn’t a whole lot — and we poured our sweat and tears into the business. And we had more sweat and tears than we had money, but we poured it into the business. Over the years, we built the business out. If I had to do anything different, I probably would’ve taken the guy’s money because I would have been better capitalized. I could have built out a bigger infrastructure and a bigger team a lot earlier.
IMB: Describe your company.
TB: First Choice is a consumer product management company that deals in beauty products. We manage those manufacturers that don’t have a sales force. We are responsible for taking your goods to market, but we also have a marketing end of our company and a logistics end of our company. A lot of people can do product development, but they don’t necessarily know how to market the product. So we have a marketing team that can help develop marketing strategy. And we can literally pack and ship your goods. So when you come to us, you literally don’t need anything because we’ll do your marketing, we’ll do your selling, and we’ll even do your invoices. We’ll even collect your money for you if you want us to.
IMB: How is philanthropy important to you?
TB: The Lord has been truly good to me and he’s been good to my family. I think he’s blessed us because he wants us to be able to share his blessings and make the world a better place for all mankind. I serve on the board of trustees at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina. I’m the chairman of the board of trustees at Metropolitan Baptist Church. I serve on the Guaranty Bank board. But the thing that gives me the greatest appreciation is that we have been instrumental in either paying for, or helping, over a hundred kids go to college. I believe that everybody who wants to have an opportunity to share in the American dream, you should create the pathway for them to be able to do that. In 2017, the Tyrone Adam Burroughs School of Business & Entrepreneurship was established at Benedict College.
When we started that program, we had 20 Burroughs Scholars that we funded. We followed them all the way through school with the funds until they graduated. Now we are up to about 50 kids that we are educating. My mom and dad probably didn’t get to the third grade but they would always tell us that with an education, an opportunity could be postponed, but never denied.
IMB: Why is Memphis such a good place for entrepreneurs?
TB: The people in Memphis are very kind people with lots of generosity and lots of creativity. When you think about all of what I tend to call change makers and innovators, you have people here who want to be creative, who want to start businesses, but at the end of the day, they’re not doing it for themselves, they’re doing it to make Memphis a better place.
You know that when you create a business and you create a job for somebody now, you make a difference not only in their lives, but you make a difference in the lives of everybody connected with that person. So you change lives.
IMB: What was the best advice that anybody ever gave you?
Tb: Have a strong spiritual foundation, and then find you a partner who is determined and willing to work hard, and to help you succeed and achieve your goals in life. That’s the thing that I found in my wife — she has supported me. She’s been along my side throughout my journey. And, you know, you couldn’t find a better partner.
photograph by Emilee Robinson
Michael Hudman (left) and Andrew Ticer
Andrew Ticer & Michael Hudman
Restaurateurs
Inside Memphis Business: How did your entrepreneurial journey start?
Michael Hudman: It really came pretty natural. Our love for cooking is rooted from our grandmothers and we both come from pretty big Italian families. So everything — every celebration, everything that was good, positive, or bad — was always around food. And we just grew up really loving it. Andy and I met in about sixth grade, both Memphis born and raised. And we started talking about opening a restaurant in the freshman year of high school. We love food. We both talked about going to college first — our parents really wanted us to do that.
Andrew Ticer: After college, we went to the Memphis Culinary Academy and then to Johnson & Wales University in Charleston, South Carolina. Michael was always kind of pushing to go get some chops in Europe. We stayed in Memphis and worked at Chez Philippe with José Gutierrez when he was there, and after that, we went to Italy and went to school at the Italian Culinary Institute in Calabria. We loved how it resonates so much; seeing how the Italians approach their philosophy of cooking is like using what’s in their area. So we’re like, let’s take that approach and come back to Memphis.
MH: I feel like the driving force for our success is our grandmothers and that hospitality. We really want to have that feeling of coming into our home and letting us take care of you. That was like watching our moms and grandmothers and aunts and uncles do that, and friends would come in.
IMB: What else goes into your success?
AT: Having a business partner that you’ve known since you were 12 has helped keep each other stay pretty grounded and stay focused. Because there’s an accountability conversation that can happen easily. Like, you know, “I’ll call your mom!” In the beginning it was tough because we’re both very passionate about what we’re trying to achieve. Sometimes that would cause friction and problems, but you know, at the end of the day, it’s like you have to step back and remember that we’ve both trying to achieve the same goal and how we go about it. The different ways in that collaboration moment to get to the same track were a big part of it.
MH: I think you nailed it. It’s all about passion, passion, passion — and being told you can’t do something. Those are two big drivers for me and Andy. We were writing a list of five things that we want to do, five goals, and that’s what’s driven us.
AT: Go to Italy, work for a master chef, go to college, open our first business, win a James Beard Award — whatever it was.
MH: And they’ve changed a lot from more individual to more of a group thing, a group idea. Our focus now is to open up restaurants, to be able to take care of the people that put us in such a great light. In no world will we be as successful as we are without the team that’s behind us.
IMB: Talk about the culture that makes your enterprise so strong.
MH: For us it’s to be there for anybody at any time. And they know — we tell all of our staff, we’re open to you guys 24-7. We don’t treat you like you’re our kids, but we’re here for you. If you need financial help, or if you need to cuss about him or about me, the one or the other, we’re here for that.
AT: Keeping the energy and the motivation and the inspiration and the work ethic and all those intangibles, you need to have the foundation of a workplace environment that people want to be a part of. It’s a lot of collaboration and conversation with everyone with an equal voice. Because there’s so many ideas, so many things that can come through in the restaurants and the food and the drink and the wine service, whatever that we’ve implemented or done, it’s been with our team members.
MH: We start with hospitality. Second is knowledge and then passion. There’s more to it, but I think those are the three pillars, and hospitality has got to be the number one. If you’re not happy when you come into work, you’re not going to be able to put good food out. You can’t go to be hospitable. And so we try to let that be the judge
AT: Having a support network, our team has to always feel like we’ve got their back and we’re going to be there for them at every step of the way.
IMB: What was a hard-learned lesson?
MH: A sense of humility. I think a big one we first learned that we weren’t expecting when we put the food out was that it’s art, and art is extremely personal. We put out our best dish and if someone said they didn’t like it, it wasn’t that we were upset with them. We’re upset with ourselves. You get immediate gratification or disappointment after the plated table. And that was something that we really took a lot to learn and how to navigate through it.
IMB: What was one of your best decisions?
AT: We invested in getting a walk-in refrigerator at Andrew Michael. It was our Christmas present to each other. After year one, we were about to kill each other. We’d go to the market at 7 a.m. to get all this stuff and then prepped all day and had nowhere to put it. We had to start over every single day.
MH: We love working with the farmers and those guys were like, “Hey, I can drop off 10 pounds” and we’d say, “We’ve got room for half a pound, can you come back tomorrow?” So every morning, we had to basically start over.
IMB: What was the best advice you were given?
MH: Taste everything.
AT: Absolutely.
MH: Taste, taste, taste.
AT: Every single thing that comes out because you had to have tasted it.
IMB: The pandemic has been particularly hard on restaurants. How did you deal with it?
AT: At the beginning, we took it as a time to take a step back and just breathe for a second and then see where we were and where we wanted to kind of grow into, not knowing what it would look like. We’d think about our practices and I suppose it was honestly a restart. We’d meet with all of our teams and put everything on the table on what works and what doesn’t work. To be able to have a turn-off switch and shut everything down at the same time will never happen again, hopefully, but at the same time, it was such a blessing because you will never have that opportunity again. So we’ve been able to use it to better ourselves about the company and listen to every team member. So many ideas were put out there and so many things were pointed out that weren’t working. We totally flipped the training program around our steps of service, how we approach our organization, our accountability with meetings with our team members and menu development. Everything, just everything, changed for the better.
MH: At the beginning of the pandemic, I felt this was going to be an extended week vacation, that it wasn’t going to be a thing. And then we realized, this isn’t going anywhere. The two words we love to throw around are hustle and pivot. We thought how could we say thank-you to the people that do come out to the restaurant and get to-go food, and take and bake.
AT: The support throughout the whole thing has been awesome.
MH: It was an amazing feeling. People would see us and say, “Man, you guys have got to hold on.” That support that we were getting from the city has been unbelievable. And I think that’s what makes Memphis so special, at least for us. It’s a really cool thing.
