Arkansas Inc. Podcast: Westrock Coffee CEO and Co-Founder Scott Ford

In this episode of the Arkansas Inc. Podcast, Scott Ford discusses his career as an executive, co-founding and running Westrock Coffee Company, and his reasons for continuing to do business in Arkansas.

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TRANSCRIPT

Scott Ford:

This is Scott Ford, I'm the CEO of Westrock Coffee, and you're listening to the Arkansas Inc. Podcast.

Clark Cogbill:

Welcome to the Arkansas Inc. Podcast. This is Clark Cogbill. I serve as Director of Marketing and Communications for the Arkansas Department of Commerce. I'm very excited about today's guest, Scott Ford. Scott Ford is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Westrock Coffee, based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Westrock Coffee is a leading, integrated coffee, tea, flavors, extracts, and ingredient solutions provider in the US, providing coffee sourcing, supply chain management, product development, roasting, packaging, and distribution services to the retail, food service, and restaurant, convenient store and travel center, non-commercial, CPG, and hospitality industries around the world.

Before starting Westrock Coffee, Scott served as Chief Executive Officer of Alltel Corporation, a Fortune 500 telecommunications company. Scott Ford, welcome to the Arkansas Inc. Podcast, and we're going to jump right in.

I've heard you tell the origin story of Westrock Coffee many times. You may have already told it today, but could you please just share that story with us?

Scott Ford:

Sure. I have not told it today. Westrock Coffee was a byproduct of some volunteer work my wife and I were doing in Rwanda, even back when I was running Alltel, the wireless business I ran, as you know, before Westrock. And we had helped to build an orphanage over there, and I ... after we sold Alltel, we closed on January 9th of '09, and I had chances to go to CEO jobs in other tech businesses, and I decided to take a year off.

I had two kids in high school, one in college, I had been on the road my entire life, 25 plus years. And I said, "I'm going to take a year off, and then I'll go do something. And in that year off, I'm going to go spend some time in Rwanda and help them develop their economy, which is a volunteer job I had had for several years.

During one of those visits, I figured out that coffee was the main cash crop that independent, kind of small holder farmers used to generate cash. And in the process of just looking at that market, I figured out that there were only two mills in the country, and it's not like corn or soybeans, where it's basically all the same, coffee is very different and you have to ... and you have to, in any given bat, very wide dispersion of outcomes, if you will.

So you have to mill it and then segregate it out and sell it down it's correct distribution channel, if you will, for that quality. So there were two mills and they were ... you had to sell your crop as a small holder farmer, and they wouldn't toll mill it. And they were offering the same price every morning, and that price, it became pretty apparent, was about half what coffee in that part of the world was trading for.

And you know this, my family comes from poverty. My father was the only one of three sons to survive the Depression. And you don't do that to people. You don't profiteer on the poorest people in the world, that are trying to keep their children alive.

And so maybe not the greatest business decision I ever made, certainly for a long time it didn't look like it, but really out of anger and out of, just a sense of this just can't stand, I called my wife and I said, "Let's build a coffee mill." And she said, "Fine. What are you doing?" And I said, "I'll fill you in when I get home."

That's where it started. And from that, that just build a mill so that people can get a fair price, we then figured out that the best way to grow that model around the world was to have a business that people gave us their demand. So if we can go in, in the developed world, we get a greater book of business to go place orders for coffee around the developing world, and that way we can expand that model to impact millions of people.

And that's where Westrock Coffee kind of came from, and it's the reason we've done everything since, in the last 14 years.

Clark Cogbill:

Scott, you went from being Chief Executive Officer of a Fortune 500 telecommunications company, to essentially being a startup founder. Pretty dramatic change. Can you please talk about what that transition was like?

Scott Ford:

Well, that's one of the more bizarre experiences, frankly, certainly professionally, than I've ever had. My wife had always said it'd be nice if I was ever home, when I was running Alltel, so the first week I stayed home and I worked outside and had a lot of projects, and just decompressing.

And the second week, we had breakfast, and then we visited, and we had lunch and we visited, and we had dinner. And on Friday, she said, "Well, this has been lovely, but what is it you're going to do next week?" Because apparently we'd gotten current, with me being in her house all day.

Well, so my dad and I were talking about looking at some investments and other things with Rick Massey, who was with us at Alltel. And so we started kind of a small family office and started looking around, doing two or three different things. Now we actually started a money management business, which one of my son's runs now.

But when we started Rwanda Trading Company, which was the first company, I'd never been in an agro-processing business, I'd never been in a futures market. I'd traded futures for Mr. Stephens and covered his agricultural interests when I worked for him, but I'd never been the soul responsible for writing the checks.

And I came to learn that startup entrepreneurs have the hardest job in the world. And running a Fortune ... I guess on a profit basis, we were a Fortune 100 company. That was unbelievably easier than running a startup business that has a mill and you got to get people to come in to work, and you got to get them fired up to run these machines, and you've got to find people that believe in your mission at a real core heart level, so that they are empowered to do these hard physical things all day, every day.

That was a whole different thing than allocating capital and hiring executives to run functioning parts of a multi-billion dollar business. It's a very different thing. And you carry it all. And we had to finance it all ourself because I was a telecom guy, not a coffee guy. I had to finance it all too, which is a really bad story.

But hats off to the guy or gal that says, "I'm going to open a restaurant or I'm going to open a shoe stand, or I'm going to open a retail store, or I'm going to open a catering business, or I'm going to open an accounting firm." Doesn't matter. Sole entrepreneurs have the hardest job in the world, bar none. And now I know that.

Clark Cogbill:

Scott, this may or may not be something you want to talk about, but I've heard you speak on the risk involved in starting Westrock in the early days, a significant financial risk. Will you tell us a little bit more about that and what it took for you to make this business successful?

Scott Ford:

Yeah. Sure. We all have a life and we all have things that drive us and call on us. And people asked me one time, they said, when I tell them what I'm about to tell you, they say, "I just wouldn't have done it. I just couldn't have done it. There's no way I would've risked 100 million ... I made $100 million at Alltel. I put every penny of it on the line and multiple days I thought they were going to pull the whole thing down. And I've had people that I've talked to deeply about this, they say, "I just wouldn't have done it." I said, "Of course you would, if you'd known what you were looking at."

Now, I happen to have had a specific background working for Jack Stephens, running Alltel, making acquisitions, studying market share and market dynamics of industry structure. I happen to have a background to recognize what was going on in Rwanda for what it was. It was a duopoly pressing on a monopoly, and abusing people in the ecosystem because they had the economic power to do it. I just happened to know that when we sat there.

Four or five other people heard the same story while we were having coffee, and none of them said, "Oh, I know what's happening." But I did. And so I said to my friend, who said, "I'd have just never done it." I said, "Sure you would. If you walked down the street and there were two men with a stick, beating a woman who's got her child strapped on her back, are you going to tell me you're going to walk past it?" Well, it's different. I said, "No, it's not any different. It's exactly the same thing." And you're not calculating what do I stand to lose when you run into that melee. You're simply looking at someone who needs defending, and saying, "The defense of this person and her child is worthy, and if I end up getting beat to death with a stick, I end up getting beat to death with a stick. That's not what you're thinking about."

Well, I did the financial exact thing as that story. And I had to come home and tell my life one Christmas, this is what you're referencing. And this is a little embarrassing, but it is life, and life is life. And she says, it was Christmas, I don't know, 2015 or so, and she says, 15 or 16, and she goes, "Man, what is it?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I just can't catch a break on this thing, and probably this is going to work out, right?" Like five really bad things would have to continue to happen in a row. And none of these five good things, if none of them happen, if any of these break the chain or any of these good things, I mean, we're good, we're good, we're good.

But if these five bad things all happen and none of these five good things happen, I mean, you just got to know, it's not what we invested in the coffee business. We're going to lose it all. I mean, zero. The shame, the humility, the zeroness of zero. That's what it'd cost us. But we're in 35 countries now. What we started in Rwanda is, we're in 35 countries. We are the price enforcer for these women in 35 countries. That was worth rolling it.

And she looked into the fire for a little bit, like anybody would. We were sitting on a little couch in front of the fireplace, and she looked at it for about, I don't know, 30 seconds, although it seemed like, I don't know, six months or something, and she said ... and these are the most meaningful words any human being's ever spoken to me, more than I love you, more than, "Yes, I'll marry you," more than anything. She turned back to me and she said, and we've been together since we were 18 years old, our whole lives, all through college. And she turned back to me and she said, "Well, we started with 600 bucks," which is what we had when we got married, and she said, "If we go back to zero, we'll just have to do it again, won't we?"

And from that second on, I knew we were winning. I knew it was turning. I wasn't afraid. As I told somebody, my grandmother taught me how to butcher a hog and plant a garden. So if it comes down to that, it comes down to that. And I just wasn't afraid. And you can't do what this team's done if you're afraid of losing. You just can't be afraid of losing. Losing's just part of it sometimes. But when it's worth it and the impact that it has is worth it, and that's why I love it.

Clark Cogbill:

Thanks for sharing that.

Scott Ford:

Yeah, that's so awful.

Clark Cogbill:

Thanks for sharing that. That is very transparent.

Scott Ford:

It's just awful. But God bless her.

Clark Cogbill:

I've heard you, years ago, talk about your wife. You were, I'm paraphrasing, but you were talking about, you were telling your wife about how much you had to travel, and you lived in an airplane, and your kids were small, and-

Scott Ford:

Yeah.

Clark Cogbill:

I don't remember exactly what you said she said-

Scott Ford:

I do.

Clark Cogbill:

But it was more or less like, "Suck it up," or something.

Scott Ford:

No, she said to me, "That's what you're wired for, you're made for. I don't want to go. I want to raise the kids, I want them to have a structure, they're going to learn to read and write, they're going to go to school on time. And then you come sweep them off and take them on any adventure you want," and this is what she said to me that you might be remembering, I've shared this in a Bible study group one time. She said, "You be faithful to me and you do whatever you want, and I will have these kids raised, and you come get them any time you want."

And that's one thing for a woman of 60 to have wisdom like that, she was in her twenties. And it freed me to be me and to follow my calling in business, which has turned into this.

Clark Cogbill:

This business, Westrock, has evolved, it seems, very quickly. Can you talk about how you got into tea, extracts, and ready-to-drink products?

Scott Ford:

Sure. Another funny story, we had bought S&D Coffee and Tea out on the East Coast three weeks before COVID hit. So they're the largest provider of coffee and tea to restaurants and C stores in the country. And we'd just bought that, we bought it, I think it was February 29th, and March 15th the government shut down all of our customers. Shut down all the restaurants for COVID, and thereby stopped traveling by car, at least for a while.

So 15 of us picked up, top 15 people at Westrock, we picked up and we moved to North Carolina. We lived in an apartment building. Everybody got a roommate. And we lived in an apartment building and we quarantined with each other, away from our families so that we could save the business that we'd just bought right before COVID shut it down.

And of course we did or we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation today, and I'm thankful for that. But at one of those points, she was home and I called her and I said, "Well, I've got good news and bad news," and she goes, "Well, it's been a while since we've had some good news, let's start with that." I said, "Well, the good news is I've had two people call me this week that want to pay me 50% more than we paid for the whole business for just the extracts business." And she went, "Well, that's great. What's the bad news?" I said, "I don't know what the extracts business is. I've got to go find it."

And I did meet this guy. I did meet this guy, named Collin Newkirk, who's originally from Oklahoma and Kansas, border country, and I said, "He knows what it is, I'm going to go find him tomorrow and we're going to figure this out." Well, there's only about five people in the world that can make super high quality, super high volume extracts in coffee and tea, that go in all these ready-to-drink cans and bottles, and multi-serve bottles, and all that. And the pump bottles that are on the restaurant shelves when you order a coffee milkshake, they pump some kind of syrup in, that's a coffee extract.

So there only about four or five people in the world that make that at scale, and that turned out to be the golden goose that has built the rest of the company, frankly.

Clark Cogbill:

This may not be a good analogy, but when Westrock bought S&D, it reminded me of when Alltel bought 360 Communications.

Scott Ford:

Yeah, it reminded me of that too.

Clark Cogbill:

Okay. Okay.

Scott Ford:

Everybody said, "But they're three times our size," I said, "Don't worry, I've done this before. I've seen this movie, it will work out, you just have to work it every day."

Clark Cogbill:

Earlier this year, we were right here at this facility in Conway, Arkansas, and Westrock announced at a press conference the expansion of this facility and it's development, production, packaging, and distribution capabilities, including adding hundreds of new jobs. Can you talk about how Westrock is now going to become one of the top companies in your particular sector?

Scott Ford:

Sure. Well, we're going to do that because of the great team that kind of joined the mission and said, "I love the mission, we're helping people, many of the poorest in the world, get a fair price for their crop." And they're getting agronomy trainings so that their crop improves, and their cash generation ability improves. And people said, "I love doing that." I'm a business person, but I want my business to count for something other than just making money. Nothing wrong with that, but only so much good about it, right?

And so it's attracted a like-minded group of people who says, "I want to engage in commercial warfare, where people benefit when we win as opposed to, well, somebody's stock price moved one percent more than somebody else's. So we attracted a like group of people, starting from the very beginning, the first one, two, three, 10, 20, 100 people.

Now we're 1,400 people today, soon to be 2,000, and that heartbeat is the common denominator up and down the hallway. So getting the team together was the most important part, and then getting the resources so that the team could actually do their job, getting them the capital and finding the facility, and allowing them the room and the cover to do their job. So this extract business put us in the center of every phone call from every big consumer product group brand and every restaurant chain, and everybody who's thinking about doing it, or every retailer who's wanting to offer a private label product in this category, or that category.

So we ended up in the flow of all these conversations, and we got great people that run those sales relationships for us, and those channel groups for ... and they all just started comparing notes. We talk all the time, a couple times a week we just set aside two hours just to talk as a senior group. It's the only way to kind of bubble all this stuff up, because everybody gets busy and you've got to clear time to talk. It's just like being married, you just got to clear a time to talk, and things kind of bubble up and work their way through.

Well, in that process, we realized we were seeing this guy has a need and that lady has a need, and this chief merchant has a need, and this contract manufacturing head has a need. And we realized we can put something together in the center of all that, and we designed this facility to do, if you will, this is about 400,000 square feet, we thought we would do ... this is how sill we were, we thought we'd do 100,000 square feet for ready-to-drink extracts, and maybe a canning line. And we'd do 100,000 square feet for more single serve capacity. And then we'd do 200,000 square feet for a distribution center. That's what we thought when we said, "We have this great idea."

Well, four days after we'd announced it, everything we had dedicated to the extract business was spoken for. And then we said, "Well, what if we doubled it?" And it took a week to get that spoken for. And then, well what if we doubled it again? So now this entire facility, all 400-and ... it's now 400, 500-what, Cedric?

Cedric:

505.

Scott Ford:

Thank you. 500,000 square feet is dedicated just to the extracts and ready-to-drink space, so cans, bottles, and multi-serve bottles, and we're building a 500,000 square foot distribution center two miles up the road to just do the DC. So where'd it come from? The right people talking to the right people with a great product and kind of, I would say, IP around how you make high quality extract at high volume.

And so Cedric's a great example. We said, "Who's the greatest plant manager on the planet that runs things like this?" And his name kept coming up, and so we just decided, "Okay, we got to go meet him, and we're going to go hire him." And I'd never set eyes on him. And the first time we met, I went, "That's the guy," and that's why I know why everybody says, "That's the guy."

And so we hired Cedric, and he's saving me on all of this, because you don't want me planning and running this.

Clark Cogbill:

A lot of people in Central Arkansas were very excited about that major announcement of the expansion of this facility, which was previously owned and operated by Kimberly Clark, but had been sitting vacant for quite some time. Can you just tell us how the progress is going of the expansion of this facility here in Conway.

Scott Ford:

Well, I'll tell you at a super high level what we've told kind of everybody publicly, is that we expect to start making commercial product in the second quarter, and it's about a 12 month ramp up by the time you take a line and you get each individual product that's going to go through that line, you got to go to each individual product through testing, you got to get each line through testing. You got to get the plant through testing, you got to get your quality controls through test, and it's about a 12 month process from when it starts, but you're going to see the machinery come into this facility, that which isn't here, you'll see that all come in over the next two or three months, and you'll see all of it connected, and you're going to see two big can lines, a multi-serve bottle line, and a glass bottle line all kick on. No one's ever done that, but Cedric's going to do it. And we're going to do it in the second quarter of next year.

Clark Cogbill:

You're also expanding globally, you're in multiple locations, you've talked about that.

Scott Ford:

We just had a big win, I can't tell you about it.

Clark Cogbill:

Okay. All right. Look forward to hearing more about it. You are still headquartered in Arkansas, why have you remained in Arkansas, and ultimately this is a business, why does it make good sense to remain headquartered in Arkansas?

Scott Ford:

I don't normally tell people this, but I'll tell you the secret sauce, all right? The business community in Arkansas, so you name a sports dynasty, the Yankees or Alabama football, or the Celtics back in the day, Chicago Bulls. You name a sports dynasty and study all the various interconnections that are not only in front of you, but that take place in myriad place behind the scenes, and that's what Arkansas is for entrepreneurs and business people. This is the greatest place to be an entrepreneur, to be an investor, to be a capital deployer in commercial for-profit businesses in the world. In the world.

And so people say, "I have friends all over the world, literally all over the world. I travel for a living, I always have. And people say, "You still live in Arkansas. Why?" And I said, "I hope that before your days are finish, you'll come to realize you could've lived in Arkansas all these years too."

Clark Cogbill:

Scott, I know you've had some important mentors in your life, including your father, Joe Ford, Jack Stephens. What are some of the lessons that you've learned from them and other leaders that you've applied to your approach to business and leadership?

Scott Ford:

Well, I have had ... you are right. I have had an unbelievably great string of mentors. From my very first job in New York, I was mentored by a guy who had just gotten promoted to vice president. He went on to run the M&A department at Goldman Sachs for years, and years, and years, guy name Jack Leevy. He was my very first mentor.

I got hired by Jack Stephens, I got to work for Warren for a couple of years, I worked for Jack for eight years, I worked for Joe for ... I worked for Fred Smith in the newspaper, Donrey Media. Not the Fred Smith from FedEx, but the Fred Smith from Fort Smith. I got to work for him for two years, in the newspaper business, got to work for my father for 13 years. Got to be great friends with Boone Pickens and spent a lot of time with him.

What I learned, in a nutshell, from them is that business is all about, just about, only about the people that you interact with. Everything else, any idiot with a spreadsheet can calculate. Anybody can punch numbers, anybody can have an opinion. Anybody can write papers, anybody can do studies. Anybody can do analysis, anybody can consult. It doesn't matter. If you want to build a business, you're only talking about building a team, and building a team is personal. It starts personally, it ripples out personally, it's only as strong as the personal connections that ripple out, person to person, to person. And every one of those guys understood that.

Jack Stephens told my dad, on his deathbed, he said, "All the money I made in the world, I made betting on eight people, and you were one of them." Eight people. He met a million people. He looked every deal. He had every resource, he had every white paper, he had every system, every trading system, every real time report on everything. He bet, in his life, on eight people.

When I get to heaven, I'm going to ask him who the other seven? I know two or three of them. Warren ... I know who two or three of them were. I want to sit down with him and say, "Hey, I have a question for you. I want you to fill me in on the other five or six." I think I could guess half of them, but I'm not sure who they all were.

Clark Cogbill:

Okay. This is a question that I've wondered from the beginning. When you hear about Westrock, especially how it started, some people might assume that this was setup as a non-profit organization, but that's not your background, and this will be an easy one, but why, especially when you think about the original motive to start it, why did you say, "We're going to do this as a for-profit company, and not a non-profit company?

Scott Ford:

Because it's what works. Right? So if I had built Westrock Coffee, you go back to Rwanda in 2009, if I had done that as a charity, eventually I would run out of money. And then I would've been asking for charity. And then one day I have a bad run, I ring my bell, I write my letters, I do my emails, I call, I can't raise any money. I can't help them.

Now, think about this. These women who were part of a commodity supply chain that was taken advantage of them economically, left that supply chain and trusted us to stay with them. If I'm relying on charity and I can't raise the money, then I can't be a market player in that market, and then she has to go back into economic bondage. And you think she's going to get the same deal she got last time or a worse one? Right?

So this mindset that there's altruism purely and only in non-profit versus purposeful for-profit businesses that earn a return and can reinvest themselves then and grow, and go from one country to 35, I would've never taken a non-profit from one country to 35. We only do that by being successful in the developed world, competing and earning a return for our shareholders that is higher than they could earn down the street, and providing better service to our customers than they can get down the street. And if we do that, we win the sale. And then with that profit, we can spend more in agronomy training and expanding the number of markets that we go to.

You can't do that in a non-for-profit. It won't have the discipline, it won't have the rigor, it won't have the desperateness. There's a softness that doesn't fit in the commercial world. And it's why, as you can tell, I'm a commercial actor.

Clark Cogbill:

What do you expect Westrock to look like in five years?

Scott Ford:

My ambitions for this team are well-placed and embarrassingly high. I think we'll be the leader in this industry at least across North American, and probably over two if not three continents within the next 10 years, which is the timeframe. And I go back to something I learned a long time ago from one of my mentors, and it was a statement, and I just can't remember who the author was. Credit to him or her, I'm not stealing it as mine, I just can't remember who said it.

But it was most people over estimate what they can accomplish in one year, and vastly underestimate what they can accomplish in five. I'm a huge believer of that. And when I look at what we've accomplished in any one year at Westrock, I've been disappointed every year. Every year I'm disappointed. Every year we miss the mark. Every year we come up short. Every year there's a challenge that we didn't see coming. And every five years when I look back, we are so far beyond my wildest dreams of where we'd be in five years, that it's embarrassing.

And so I'm not going to embarrass myself by telling you, but I have huge belief in this team. This is the best team in the world, in this industry. Best team I've ever worked with. So they just need a little bit of runway to get it flying. Come back in five years and you check.

Clark Cogbill:

Okay. We'll be following closely. Well, I want to go back to entrepreneurship. It's so important to our economy.

Scott Ford:

Yeah.

Clark Cogbill:

As you know.

Scott Ford:

It's what we're good at. We're number one. People don't know. They go, "Oh, I wish we were the number one football team," and I go, hey, I love our football team. I'm a Razorback fan, I'm a U of A grad, but what are we really good at? What are we number one at year in and year out? Man, it is raising people that know how to run businesses, build businesses, and finance business. Look around us.

Clark Cogbill:

So what advice that you have now that you've done this and you've started a business, you've worn that entrepreneurial hat, what advice do you have to those who are trying to go from an interesting idea to a sustainable business?

Scott Ford:

Well, the same advice I give people, young people ... I'm now old. I remember when I was the young guy, just it didn't seem like too long ago. I was the guy getting the coffee and running to get the Telex just yesterday. Now I'm in my 60s and I have kids that are twenties and thirties. And I tell them, and I said, "Look, there's really two things you've got to get right. You've got to do life with life partners that are real. You've got to partner well. Your spouse, your close personal friends, people you go hunting and fishing, or go to the ballpark with, or go to church with, whatever. You've got to do life with people that are going to continuously support you and call you up."

The second thing you've got to do is you've got to have great mentors, because they have literally forgotten more than you're going to think about knowing. And be humble enough to seek them out and ask questions. That was the great thing, what did Joe Ford, Jack Stephens, Jack Leevy, Boone Pickens, what did they all have in common? I could sit with them and I could say, "May I have an afternoon," and they would answer questions for four, five, six hours in a row. You want to learn? Go ask somebody.

Clark Cogbill:

Scott, you know a ton of executives around the country, when you talk to them, what do you tell them about Arkansas that surprises them?

Scott Ford:

Well, when I run into folks that have actually traveled and are well-read and conversant across multiple topics, and have traveled around the world or traveled around the country, none of them are surprised. They know. They know Arkansas for some reason, and they say, "What is it in the water? Or what is it down there? Or what is that Arkansas effect?" They know. Outside of Arkansas, in the investment community, the fact that this is one of the great places in the world to build a business. They know it.

Driving down the street, pulling over at the gas station, having a conversation with somebody, they may or may not, you know Arkansas, they may go wherever they may go. Not my concern. The people that need to know, generally know about the positives of Arkansas, the businesses that have built here.

And frankly, and people say, "Are you ever going to write a book," and I go, "No, the only book that I know that's worthy of being written," and really, and maybe someday if I retire, maybe I'll do this. I would like to write the book about how Witt and Jack Stephens were the common financing denominator of Sam Walton, Joe Ford, Walter Smiley, Don Heissen, USA Truck. The group ... Mr. Garrison. Fred Smith at Donrey. The group that tapped into that network and all grew their business generationally at about the same time, and used the wisdom and the capital market's insights that Jack and Witt had developed. I mean, I was in the room. I watched them. I know what they really talked about. I know what they really asked about. I know what they dreamed about and I know what they were afraid of. I sat with him for 10 years and watched it.

The common denominator that those two guys were to helping people get the money and the insights to grow their business at critical times, not when the markets are flush, anybody can raise money when markets are rolling. It's when things are hard. Would you give someone a put option? Would you give someone, would you buy a convertible piece of paper at just the right time when it's hard to do it? And put somebody for ... would you invest common equity when it's really hard and it's not clear that they're going to win, but you're just going to bet on them?

Joe and I had people do that with us. Now, they made eight times their money in three years, but it was not clear they were going to get a single dime back and they put the money on the table, Witt Stephens put the money on the table and says, "I believe in you."

Jim Salan, Dallas, Texas, literally looked at my dad and I and said, "I don't understand the coffee business, but I love you, I'm in." That, you don't find in New York and LA. You find that where people really know each other and have a read on each other and can trust each other. Because at the end of the day, investing in business, growing business, it's about people. It's only as strong as the intimate bonds of friendship allow it to ripple out.

Clark Cogbill:

Well said.

Scott Ford:

That's not very popular, but that's true.

Clark Cogbill:

No, I love that. I've never heard anybody say the people that matter already know about Arkansas.

Scott Ford:

Yeah. Yeah. We don't have to apologize for anything. I never apologize for Arkansas. Not once. I remember I was in New York. I was walking out of the office building, going to get on the subway, going to see my wife and go visit with my parents, who were in town for the weekend, and this guy said to me, he said, "What are you going to do this weekend?" I said, "Well, we're going over to my parents' apartment and having dinner, et cetera." He goes, "Where's their apartment?" I said, "60th and Madison." And he goes, "I thought y'all were farmers in Arkansas." And I liked, I just looked at him and I said, "We are." He didn't matter. He didn't matter. I don't need to talk to him. He doesn't need to know.

Most of the other people I met were, "Tell me about Arkansas. I hear it's a beautiful place. I hear it's a special place. Tell me about it." Then I'll invest all the time that they want. But never apologize.

Clark Cogbill:

All right, Scott, one final question. How would you answer the question, "Why Arkansas?"

Scott Ford:

Why Arkansas? Well, for me personally, these are my people. This is where I'm from. My father grew up on a creek bottom eight, 10 miles from here. This is where we're from, and if you're going to be blessed with mentors and partners in life that allow you to get a skillset to grow and build a business that then needs to hire people, why would you go anywhere else if you're me? I can't answer it for everybody else, but for me, this is what we want to do. This is why we've walked the path we've walked, the journey that we've journeyed. This is a big return on all that pain and suffering.

For other people, Arkansas's a great place, it's got great law, it's great schools, it's got great civic mind. It's an easy place to do business. The water is perfect for people that want to come and build plants, make investments and grow their business. But for me, personally, it means something to me that we help this community continue to advance economically. That's how mothers feed their children. It's just that basic.

Clark Cogbill:

You've been listening to the Arkansas Inc. Podcast. We've had a fantastic discussion today with Scott Ford, Chief Executive Officer of Westrock Coffee. Scott, thank you so much for spending time with us today. If you want to listen or subscribe to the Arkansas Inc. Podcast, check us out on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and other podcast apps. To learn more about the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, visit our website at Arkansasedc.com. And follow us on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and YouTube. Thanks for listening.