By Lavern Clarke, Staff Reporter 
The prestigious Gleaner Honour Award will be presented later this month. Today we profile Gary Hendrickson, one of the winners from the Hendrickson family in the Business category.
THE ENERGY radiates off Gary 'Butch' Hendrickson who, now just two months shy of 50, is about to diversify into the hotel business, having kept the family bakery at the forefront of the bread market for the last eight years.
Continental Baking Co. Ltd., (CBC), the "foundation" company of the family-owned National Continental Corporation group, is as old as its managing director, and both grew up together. National celebrated 50 years of existence in November.
Today, brands marketed by the bakery National, HTB and HoMade are household names for breads, buns, biscuits and snacks, which earn the company annual revenues of $1.5 billion.
"It's not huge, it's just steady," said Mr. Hendrickson of the bakery's turnover, having estimated that output from the plant has grown some 60 per cent in the six years that he has headed it, aided by upgrading of the technology.
"Some pieces of machinery are advanced but the entire plant is not fully there," he said. "The up-grades are ongoing."
Today, National/CBC, which gave Jamaica its first sliced bread, employs 621 people, runs seven ovens two for bread, two for buns and three for biscuits in a plant that measures at least 150,000 square feet and sits on 220,000 square feet of land.
'Butch' began working "structurally" in the business as a teenager, then as overseer of the ovens, but said he started getting real responsibilities two years later
at 16, when the bakery diversified into Hostess cakes.
His earliest memories of the bakery has nothing to do with business deals or building market share, but a story he tells in a most casual manner, of almost losing his foot in one of the machines.
"It was a combination of incomplete installation and my own stupidity," said 'Butch', who lost three toes in the machine, the timing of which was off. They were later stitched back on. "They're okay now. They even stink," said the forthright baker. He said plant safety, though always a priority, was not too much of a serious concern now based on the systematic upgrading of equipment overtime which makes it safer for workers.
'Butch' took over managing the bakery officially in December 1994, during a period when his father, Karl Hendrickson, decided to give up his day-to-day involvement in NCC and put his four children in charge of the different operations. 'Butch' got the bakery at 45 Half-Way Tree Road.
Today, the father of three two boys and a girl whose ages range from six to 15 years prides himself on still being able to do business on a handshake, as evidence of the trust built by the bakery with its creditors and suppliers. He maintains that trust, he said, by never taking advantage of their goodwill and paying their bills.
Educated at Jamaica College, St. Andrew, and later at the Miami Military Academy, 'Butch' Hendrickson then entered Fordham University, New York, where he majored in "fooling around"; he left without completing his degree. It is now one of his biggest regrets. The other was the failure of his marriage.
"Nobody squandered an educational opportunity as much as Gary Hendrickson did," he told The Gleaner. But he had something to fall back on, having grown up in the family business.
He returned to Jamaica in the mid-1970s but didn't like the political situation as it was then, and went back to the United States to Dallas, Texas.
His second and final return home was in early 1980 and he went straight to Yummy Bakery, Hagley Park Road, St. Andrew, a business acquired by NCC in 1979 from the Hughes who emigrated shortly after.
In 1985, he returned to Natio-nal/Continental. His next move in 1990 was to go into his own business, an air-conditioning company which remains a small operation. He returned to National/CBC in 1994 as managing director to find some of the same problems among them, acquiring licences to buy equipment and vehicles which served to slow the growth of the company. Things began changing in 1997, a period of accelerated depreciation in which businesses could write off their old machinery.
Noting that the operation was probably worth "a couple hundred million", Butch Hendrickson said replacement of the equipment could run to US$20 million (about $1.02 billion) and that two wrapping machines were acquired for £1 million ($82m).
The bakery operator had high praise for his staff. "I have excellent managers," he said, adding that employees in his company gets an annual 9.5 to 13 per cent pay raise.
"The way we did it, is that we went to the plant and stopped the waste. We now manage our output/man hours more efficiently."
Asked about his and the company's short-term outlook, Hend-rickson said that in three years, he plans to grow the bakery's output another 25 to 30 per cent. The company would continue to focus on quality in its product and customer service, he adds, as strategies to meet any competition that may flow from impending trade agreements.
For himself, he expects to sign the deal this month to take over a Club Med hotel under lease, pushing back his 1995 plan to retire in 2005, and vaulting him into a new project, but an area in which the family group has had experience and successes.
