How the CFO of Luke's Lobster pries open the claws gripping his working capital

Yahoo

28-02-2025

This story was originally published on CFO.com. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CFO.com newsletter.
Steve Song, CFO of Luke's Lobster, has a role that requires a unique combination of industry knowledge, working capital expertise, vendor relationships and a love for the job.
The ins and outs of his company's business, like lobster migration patterns for example, weren't covered at Columbia or during his career in private equity before he took on the CFO role at one of the largest and most popular sea-to-table seafood producers in the United States. However, the operational and financial demands of this type of business require a high level of understanding of these crucial factors by financial leadership in order for the business to survive.
Now that he has just over nine years at the company, Song has led the way in growth from both a sustainability perspective and a financial standpoint. The company is a certified B Corporation, has won accolades including Whole Foods Supplier of the year in 2018 and has expanded a restaurant chain internationally selling Maine and Canadian lobster and other seafood products.
The working capital intensity of the business is paramount, and as Song puts it, 'Cash is king in this business.' Managing this structure and the outside influences that dictate it has created an environment that the former private equity manager says he could find 'nowhere on Wall Street' that matches the energy and passion he has for his job now.
Although the work is intense, Song credits his ability and tenure to having a hands-on impact on growth, combined with a stellar finance team and leadership group that has created a mission to not just sell lobster on a global scale but do so in a way that preaches an authentic and visibly impactful version of sustainability.
CFO, Luke's Lobster
First CFO Position: 2016
Notable previous employers:
Eden Capital Partners
Altpoint Capital Partners
Magnetar Capital
JPMorgan
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
STEVE SONG: The challenge with the global seafood industry is that there's always been a lot of distrust, mislabeling, shortcuts and people who don't always do the right thing, and as a company, we try to market ourselves in every aspect of our business as being genuine and authentic. Fortunately, the lobster industry in Maine and Canada has laws and regulations that prioritize sustainability that we use as a foundation, but the self-governing body of the lobster fishermen community is the essence of the industry and what allows us to scale the business sustainably.
Lobsters are caught on boats that are privately owned by independent fishermen, who abide by regulations on lobsters, like females with eggs are required to be thrown back into the water. If they are too small or too big, they are also returned because they have a higher potential to reproduce. Furthermore, in Maine for example, lobster licenses are only allowed to be held by private citizens, so although we try to get involved in as much of the supply chain as we can, our company does not own any boats or do any fishing ourselves.
This is where the business can get tricky on the finance side of things. The lobster supply chain can be incredibly capital-intensive, and cash is the oxygen to any business, so this part of the job is crucial for me. There's an industry standard that we abide by to pay lobster fishermen for their catch within three days, many of whom would want to be paid in cash if possible.
So even if our P&L says we're making money, we need lots of cash to keep the supply of products coming into the business. As most can imagine, our working capital cycle is much longer than three days. We have to process, package and distribute the lobsters, so that ties up capital because we are paying our suppliers in real time but getting paid by our customers at a variety of times, depending on how we distribute any given order, but at the very earliest between two weeks and a month.
Furthermore, we have to build up inventory at times when the lobster catches are lower volume during the off-season, which further ties up capital. Most companies who don't understand cash flow will focus on optimizing throughput volumes in their facility, but they can quickly run into illiquidity issues. For us, that would look like full freezers of inventory but no cash. That would be game over.
SONG: Yes. Some fishermen want actual cash, but our partners will take a paper check because they've learned to trust that we'll pay our bills. ACH has slowly become more acceptable among some fishermen, and some may be beginning to be okay with being paid on terms, but there is a historical nature of lobster buyers being nefarious and dubious and treating the fishermen poorly.
There is a collective mindset around them that they don't trust those they don't know, and that's partly why we've worked hard to create authentic relationships with these people and prioritize treating them right.
SONG: There is a lot within this business, and this is why I enjoy it because there are so many moving parts and elements. Forecasting is primarily focused on the seasonality of our business. The Canadian lobster season runs from May to the end of June then the Maine lobster season runs from roughly July to December.
So from May to December, we're paying out fishermen collectively about $1 million a week and building up inventory for the restaurants that are active all year round. Then during the lobster harvest offseason, around January to May, we sell down our stocks of inventory and use that cash to pay off our line of credit so we can do it again next May and grow the business from there each year. On the restaurant side of the business, our sales peak between Memorial Day to Columbus Day. That period accounts for about 70% of our restaurant sales for the year so there's that layer of seasonality that is slightly off-cycle to the live lobster harvest seasonality.
SONG: We've been fortunate to have partner banks that understand the cycle of our business and our working capital situation, so we've had a line of credit from two of the same banks for my entire time here. The relationship has been amazing. We've grown together as businesses.
We brought on some private equity nearly nine years ago to help accelerate the restaurant side's new location growth, only because the unit economics with return on investment are just so compelling so having equity fund that initiative made sense.
I think what's important here is we've been able to prove that as long as we smartly manage our cash, we can grow our restaurant business, which then accelerates the demand for more lobster and supports our grocery business, which then drives a need for us to buy more lobster, and so the business grows.
SONG: I come from a private equity background, so my playbook is about streamlining and making things more efficient. We've streamlined everything over the years — it's an ongoing process — from things like our data efficiency to technology to our onboarding time of new systems and people alike because early on, a lot of our processes were based on memory or intuition from the company's initial startup days.
For example, we had a restaurant location in Boston on Exeter Street, and sometimes we would refer to that location as Boston, sometimes as Back Bay, sometimes as Exeter, and it would confuse people as we brought new hires on board and created issues. So we gave all our locations a fixed number and set standard nomenclature across the business. I am very big on precise and consistent names for things within the organization so that our team can communicate more effectively.
That's just a basic example of a small detail on a long list of improvements that helped us get to today — we're now able to close our monthly books within four days with tight accuracy whereas it would be 20 to 30 days when I first joined.
SONG: Given my background, I took those responsibilities on as we had banks and investors requesting data in certain ways they're accustomed to. We have great accountants, but they didn't necessarily know how to project, budget and analyze and we already had them fully loaded up within the accounting function. I'm looking for someone who likes diving into haystacks in case there might be a needle in there and find some insights that will help us make smarter business decisions.
That being said, in recent years what I've done is I've asked my entire accounting team to level up and learn new skills because I think the traditional bookkeeper role is going to be obsolete in five years. Our team has been growing in areas like data analysis, team development, project management and presenting financial data to non-accounting people.
But there also came a point where I realized that if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, there was a bit of a skill gap here, so I am looking for someone who can be a potential part of the succession plan, and perhaps someone who also can teach me a few things too.
SONG: I tell our team candidly, I will help you go public, but afterward, you have to hand it over to someone else, because I don't have a desire to be a small-cap public company CFO right now.
I like growing businesses by working with our teams internally and I don't want to spend my days talking to research analysts who oversimply complex things into the same three KPIs and opine on the outlook of my stock price based upon my tone of voice on an earnings call.
I love our business here, the way we've grown it, and the people I've done it with. Our goal now is to continue to lead the way in providing the best lobster to consumers through all the different areas of our business.
Recommended Reading
How Chipotle's new CFO Adam Rymer is rolling out a plan for success