GUAYAQUIL AND MOLIDOR

THE IGUANA MONUMENT
IN GUAYAQUIL

I took a plane from SLC to Atlanta, connecting to one going to Miami, which in turn was connecting to one going to Guayaquil. During those flights I had a notebook with me, on which I was writing down many of the things I needed to do in the planned three-day stay in my home town, including the questions I needed to ask while visiting the industrial facilities of the company I could potentially be working for in a relatively short time. My list included visiting to the school where my kids would have to continue their education (4th grade, 2nd grade and pre-kinder), the kind of housing I could get, the neighborhoods my family and I would be safe and comfortable at, and the pricing for the same.
It was kind of strange for me; I was coming to Guayaquil as a visitor for only three days. Instead of checking in at a hotel, I stayed with my sister Lilita, my adopting mother, my dearest friend and confidant. By doing so, I had a chance to see my nephews and my niece, who, as I have said before, were like my younger brothers and sister. They all were happy to see me and I was very happy to see them, we sat together while talking for hours and hours, it was a great family reunion after several years of absence, and they all felt very pleased that I had a chance to return. At this point, so did I.
The day after I went to visit Molidor mill, the subsidiary of Seaboard Corp for which the parent company was looking for a Comptroller. I met Joel Stuart, the general manager of the company, an American guy who had been in place for just a few months and had found very few reasons to trust the comptroller he found in place when he took over, so he decided to fire the guy and ask for a new one.
Molidor, as explained by Stuart, was a wheat milling company founded in the early 50’ by a Guayaquil businessman by the name of Francisco Illezcas Barreiro, who brought all the machinery and equipment from Italy, together with several Italian technicians and millers, and built a brand new mill in the Southern outskirts of Guayaquil, in what was called in those days the “Barrio Cuba” or the Cuban neighborhood, located at the Southern end of the city, which in those days was inhabited by 250,000 people.



THE MIGHTY GUAYAS RIVER
AS IT PASSES BY GUAYAQUIL

The business was a success right from the beginning, because it substituted the wheat flour imported mostly from Canada and the United States, with wheat flour “made in Ecuador” and benefited from certain tax protection accordingly. In 1965, the company had been acquired by Seaboard Corp., in a joint venture with Continental Grain, from the old Mr. Illezcas Barreiro who thought inadvisable to pass on the business to his son “Panchito” whom his father thought not to be “up to the task”.
The Two US companies bought the mill at the bargain price of $900,000. The mill had become a cash cow since the Americans took over, but still they did not pay enough attention to it until the early 80’s.
My meeting with Stuart was a very business like one, he asked the questions and I answered them straight forward, in our conversation we inadvertently alternated English and Spanish. Stuart, an American citizen was then 43 year old, he had graduated from Thunderbird,the American Graduate School for International Management and had served in the US Navy for some time, he had been unemployed and living in Miami for over a year, after being dismissed from a managerial position at ARMCO in Uruguay, for reasons he did not want to expand about, and I didn’t think it would have been polite to ask. It was a two hour meeting during which we talked about anything and everything, but concentrated on the idea of filling a position which was critical for the company in Ecuador, and for the parent company in the US.
Stuart spoke Spanish relatively fluent (he had lived in Colombia and Uruguay for over a decade), and didn’t seem to trust some of the people around him and wanted to have a new man take control of the company’s finances and the books as he thought that the recently dismissed comptroller had been, in his words “mickey mousing” with the very large cash balances of the company by favoring certain banks to others.


THE CIVIC CENTER AND THE
SURROUNDING PARK
ARE ICONS OF THE MODERN
GUAYAQUIL

After this introductory meeting, Stuart introduced me to some other people in his staff, including an Italian man (Cesar Innocenzi), whom I had known for very many years (he lived in one of the apartments in the same house where I lived with my sister Lilita when I was a bachelor), and who had been the Production Manager until recently, but had been displaced to accommodate an American miller in his position. I could see that his staff was made of long time employees, probably very loyal but unprepared to function in a modern business environment. The accounting books, for example were kept in a very old NCR accounting machine that had disappeared from the business world in the United States at least a decade and a half ago. Nobody in the company had ever seen a computer at work, and they had no idea what a computer was all about.
I could see that for all practical purposes, the company was living in the first half of the twentieth century and they all seemed to ignore what was going on in the rest of the world in terms of computers and computerized accounting and management information and communication systems. It was depressing, but, at the same time I saw it as a challenge, or I felt it that way, any way. Stuart and I seemed to have connected very well, he was happy to have had a chance to meet me and he said he would highly recommend that I be hired for the position of new comptroller of Molidor. He also told me he had interviewed a couple of candidates before, but he did not think they were prepared for the job.


THE NEW RIVER FRONT -
BUILT IN 2000, IS THE PRIDE
OF THE CITY

After these meetings, I was taken for a tour of the mill which is located on a 20 acre prime piece of land, right on the shore of the beautiful and mighty Guayas River, the river which brings me so many reminiscences from the time I was a little child crossing on the “Galapagos” vessel serving the railroad passengers arriving in the other side of the river and bound to Guayaquil.

Afterwards I was taken to the five story building housing the massive milling machinery built in the early 50’s but still noisily and efficiently running to produce 20% of the whole wheat flour consumed in the country in those days.
The mill manager was trying to explain to me all the intricacies of the milling process, beginning with the discharging facilities in the mill’s own dock, through which the wheat was unloaded from the vessels coming from the US; the conveyor line taking the wheat to the silos and flat storage warehouses within the five story building, to the complex grinding and sifting of the product in process, and the semi manual bagging of the flour and the totally manual bagging of byproducts. It was all new to me, and, in spite of the attention I tried to pay to the miller’s speech, I could barely understand it due to the hellish noise within the mill. That day I took a crash course in milling, and while I was doing so, I couldn’t help but remember the words of Don Robhom in KC, about a month before: “what is, young man, your experience in the milling industry?”.

I also remembered that my answer was short and precise “None”...

In my next posting: BACK TO SLC AND PREPARE FOR MOVING