A fish tale of success - restaurant owner Charles A. Hardesty - Making It - Brief Article

In the early 1980s, Charles A. Hardesty sold shrimp out of the back of his pickup on weekends. Today he's the owner of two busy seafood restaurants in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"Yes, we've come a long way. And we plan on going a lot farther, too. We're not going to just stop here," says Hardesty, 44, referring to his latest venture, Forsyth Seafood Cafe, a well-appointed sit-down restaurant he opened in October.

His first business, Forsyth Seafood Market and Grill, rakes in about $700,000 in annual sales of fresh and takeout seafood and is growing at a rate of 15 to 20 percent a year. Hardesty expects the cafe to be just as successful.

Hardesty was born and raised in the coastal town of Beaufort, N.C., where his father and grandfather worked on commercial fishing boats. In Beaufort, Hardesty says, everybody, "one way or another, was connected to seafood. It was a way of life for most people."

Hardesty graduated in 1977 from Elizabeth City State University with a degree in industrial arts. Job hunting brought him to the Winston-Salem area, where he landed a position with a manufacturer of metal buildings. He rose to supervisor of shipping and receiving, but he was restless.

"Basically, the whole time I was there I wanted to do something for myself," recalls Hardesty, who yearned to start a business. But rather than quit his supervisor job. he would jump in his pickup on Friday nights and drive the 4 1/2 hours to the North Carolina coast. He'd purchase about 600 pounds of shrimp from suppliers and head back to Winston-Salem. After a nap at home, he'd hop back in the pickup, head for a local flea market, and set up shop in the parking lot to sell his shrimp -- all day Saturday and most of Sunday.

One of his customers was Bob Parrish, the owner of Forsyth Seafood, who offered to sell Hardesty his seafood market. Parrish's wife was ill, and the business, which was struggling financially, was consuming too much of his time.

But "I really didn't want to be tied down that way," recalls Hardesty. Still, he knew that if he was going to continue selling shrimp, he needed a home base.

His wife, Virginia, supported his decision, and in 1984 Hardesty resigned. With $18,000, most of it from a bank loan, he bought Forsyth Seafood.

His flea-market customers followed him to the new location, and sales took off. But Hardesty soon found that his coastal suppliers became less supportive. Hardesty, who is black, believes racial bias might have been a factor in the suppliers' changed attitude. "As long as I was doing it out of the back of a pickup, I was fine," says Hardesty. "But when they realized that I had a business and worked it like a business," he says, good deals on wholesale purchases "went out the window."

He also encountered resistance from local wholesalers, which forced him to continue to make weekly trips to the coast. With a larger truck, he was returning from the trips with thousands of pounds of seafood, and he was saving the business 25 percent by cutting out the middleman.

After 7 1/2 years at the original location, Hardesty moved to a new site in East Winston. The new building was large enough for both a fresh-fish market and a takeout grill. The market carries 15 types of fin fish and four to eight kinds of shellfish. The grill's acknowledged standout is the shrimpburger -- a bun filled with fried shrimp and condiments, an idea Hardesty imported from North Carolina's coast.

Customer frustration at not having a place to sit and eat -- and Hardesty's desire to expand the business -- prompted his search for a site for a sit-down restaurant. The lot and building he purchased for $225,000 sit on a plateau overlooking Interstate 40's business route and are close to downtown businesses. He pumped in $175,000 for equipment and budding renovations, and he hired 10 employees, doubling his work force.

Hardesty stopped making the trips to the coast, and he has mended fences with local wholesalers; now they give him deals because he places large orders.

Virginia Hardesty, who has helped with business plans and accounting in the seafood ventures, has taken a leave of absence from her job at Lucent Technologies to help launch the new cafe.

"I think the [local consumer] market is big enough," she says, despite competition from heavyweights such as Red Lobster, a national chain, and Libby Hill, which has 17 restaurants in North Carolina and Virginia. "People eat out so much now. I think there's a niche for everybody."

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