Eugenio Baeza built Bafar to $100 million in sales by 27, sourcing meat carcasses from Scandinavian auctions and buying 20 used refrigerated trucks in Colorado. He paid a 1 peso per-carcass import tax and hired senior HR from Ford to scale the operation to 1,090 employees.
And so we started bringing in all this meat. And all of a sudden we were selling $100 million, and we had 1,090 employees. I was 27 years old at the time. He brought in a guy named Tony Banno. That's exactly what his name sounds like. The little hat with the face of an Italian mafia guy. Imagine how he spoke. They come to me and say, hey, there's a huge auction of pork carcasses in Denmark, Norway and Finland. And we come to offer it to you. Imagine I had an office in a small house that used to be a pig farm. The floor of the patio was dirt. I had a small room. I was handling 30 trailers a month at the time. And these guys come to me and say, we need you to move 50 trailers a week. But how? I mean, I don't have the means, so we need you to do whatever it takes. Well, I did the math and said, let's see, the pig on the hoof is worth it. I'm going to buy the pig in a channel without the guts. And then Tony Banno tells me, you're going to buy it together. And I'm not doing it like that. Do you want me to move that? It's the only way. And he got mad and they went to the airport. There were no cell phones back then, so they gave him the 20 cents and called me from the airport's payphone. And he said, he jack, you got a deal for a brat. So, well, I go and tell my dad, hey, look, I want this. If we take the ball out of the box for three months, the others, because the contract was a year, the other nine months, we can throw away the channels, but if not, it's going to be in Japanese, quote. And from there I went to an auction in Colorado and bought 20 used refrigerated trucks and the messenger, the managers, all to bring us the trailers. And you became a trucker as you wanted. Yes. But now you own the entire fleet. And, well, it was a hassle. There a customs agent who helped us import them because it was a hassle. And then we started moving the carcasses. Back then, the tax law was that a cattle importer of any size paid 1 peso per carcass. Back then, accounting was wonderful. It was simple. You pay one peso and that was it. And then we started bringing in all this meat. And suddenly we were selling $100 million and we had 1,090 employees. I'm telling you that at that time, I was 27 years old. That's when I hired my boss at Ford for human resources. Pause, pause, pause. Eugenio, what does sales of $100 million do in the mind of a 27 year old when millions of dollars, you know, weren't what they are today? As you can see, I have little problem with risk. That's why BFAR's values are boldness, vision, integrity, perseverance. It's pretty simple. Vision, boldness, perseverance, integrity.
