Lucky Junki

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"Family, relationships," he says, hanging up his haircover and passing back through the looking glass toward his office. "No matter what business you in, no matter how big how small, that's all that count -- family, relationships."

By the late 1980s, after years of furious work and two near bankruptcies, Junki Yoshida's sauces were established as a regional favorite in the Pacific Northwest. He sold through the local supermarket chains, which were then still the backbone of the American grocery industry. Although he still practiced karate, he was a businessman now, with a wide circle of contacts, many of them in positions of power. When the fledgling Costco came courting, these friends urged Yoshida to spurn the advances.

Costco challenged the system by buying directly from producers and manufacturers, cutting out the jobbers and slashing the markups by which the supermarkets prospered. With its membership fee, warehouse stores, limited selection, and oversize packaging, Costco once seemed like a bizarre fad that would soon pass. If Yoshida did business with this upstart, he was warned, he would be blacklisted by the grocery establishment.

It was one of those watershed moments, when an entrepreneur must crunch the numbers, search his soul, and finally close his eyes and make a calamitous or evolutionary leap. Yoshida rejected the advice and gambled on Costco.

Selling through Costco meant reconfiguring his packaging, coding, and pricing, a huge undertaking for what was still essentially a mom-and-pop operation. But the basic nature of the business remained unchanged -- selling the sauce. At the time, the Costco chain consisted of only two stores, in Seattle and Portland. Each weekend for months, Junki and Linda would shuttle between the stores, hammering out the demos. To say that Yoshida was an effective salesman is like saying that Bob Dylan is a good songwriter.

"Junki reinvented the whole concept of demos," says Costco founder and CEO Jim Sinegal. "Before -- and for the most part since -- demos consisted of little old ladies handing out free samples, and the customer gobbling up the freebie and then looking for a place to get rid of the plastic fork. Well, Junki just blew that out of the water. He put on a show. He created traffic jams in the aisles. Most important, he wouldn't let a customer get away without a flat of sauce in her shopping cart."

"To my mind, marketing and sales are connected, two sides of same coin," Yoshida says. "I never understand why they separate. I think that a big problem with corporate world today. In my company, marketing people always sell."

At Costco, Linda cooked and served while Junki worked the crowd, doing his gonzo samurai routine, dancing, singing, yelling out "Hey, mama-san" to shoppers, donning cowboy hats, throwing lassoes, brandishing butcher knives, on one occasion even chasing a stubborn shopper out into the parking lot and escorting her back into the store to buy his sauce.

The shows were a hit, the sauce flew out of the stores, and Sinegal and Yoshida forged a lasting bond. Costco grew exponentially, and Yoshida hooked on for the ride. When Costco staged a grand opening of a store anywhere in America, the Yoshidas served as headliners. And when an outlet opened in England in 1993, Linda and Junki took their act to Europe.

Yoshida eventually reached another crossroads. The next step for his rapidly growing business was to sell through the mega-supermarket chains at a national level. But that required a capital investment -- chiefly in the form of fees for placement on supermarket shelves -- beyond the scope of his company. Yoshida had to either go public or sell the distribution and marketing rights to his sauce. He chose the latter, selling to Heinz in 2000. At around the same time, Yoshida's other business interests were starting to bear fruit.

He'd begun to diversify in the late 1980s, with an investment in geoducks. A geoduck is a type of large clam that lives in profusion in the mud flats of Puget Sound. It is popular in Japan, where it forms the base for many sushi recipes. Yoshida bought a geoduck harvesting and distributing company and started supplying customers in his native country. Business clicked along until fate intervened -- twice. First, a series of geoduck shipments arrived in Japan spoiled. Yoshida, whose b?te noir is disappointing a customer, was furious at the air freight company. The second episode was far more serious: A company diver died in an accident while harvesting geoducks under the sound.

"I always believe in karma," Yoshida says. "When that poor diver die, I understand that the karma no good for geoducks, and I get out. That another lesson I learn from my mother: When a business don't work, after you try like hell to make a success but it don't happen, then you just got to know to walk away."

The geoduck karma wasn't all bad, however. Studying the debacle of the spoiled shipment, Yoshida surmised that other companies shipping perishable goods to Asia must have had similar experiences. With remarkable acuity, the former gangbanger and current saucemeister recognized that the real opportunity lay not in geoducks, but in the supply lines delivering them to market. So Yoshida got into the global freight-forwarding business.

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