Big Fish in Small Ponds With a civil engineer at the helm, Sahlman Seafoods makes a splash with its shrimp farm By Kimberly Link-Wills
T A shrimp jumps out of the water inside a large net used during harvest.
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ech-produced civil engineers are expected to be able to build just about anything. Marty Williams' job flow, from building houses in Florida to building shrimp ponds in Nicaragua, seems unusual even by Tech standards. But engineering a successful career as a shrimp farmer, he says, was just a matter of problem solving. And when the shrimp farm was financially afloat, Williams, CE 84, solved another problem — and dove into more uncharted seas — by building a factory and launching a bottled water and packaged ice business. But long before the shrimp farm idea was hatched, Harry Sahlman owned a lumberyard in Fernandina Beach, Fla. "He sold lumber to a number of the shrimpers to build their boats. They were hitting on hard times and couldn't pay him for the lumber. They said, 'We quit, you take the boats,'" Williams recounts from the stories he's heard. "He had these shrimp boats and didn't know what to do with them so he hired a captain and said, 'Go see if you can catch some shrimp.' That's literally how they got started shrimping." Sahlman Seafoods was born in the 1940s and soon employed Harry's three sons. One of those sons, Jack Sahlman, is Williams' father-in-law. As the company grew, the prime fishing grounds moved farther away from the shore of Fernandina Beach. Sahlman boats followed the
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Winter 2009
shrimp to Key West, then to Mexico and Central America and finally to Guyana, South America, where the company landed in 1958. In 1996, Jack Sahlman, then president of the company and looking toward retirement, asked his son-in-law, a Tampa home builder, to join the family business. "The building industry was slow, and I was getting frustrated with that. I guess I was looking for a change, but I never imagined I'd go into a completely different career — and certainly not the shrimp business," Williams says. He joined Sahlman Seafoods at an opportune time. "For 60 years the company had been all wildcaught shrimp. My father-in-law decided we should diversify and get into aquaculture — shrimp farming," Williams says. "There was a lot of construction involved in building the shrimp farm and building a processing plant. I remember telling my father-in-law, 'Look, that's my background, let me head up the engineering and construction work cause that's what I do.' "Nicaragua had a lot of available land. The government was pretty receptive to bringing in foreign investment. The shrimp farming industry there was pretty new," he says. Williams spent much of the next two years in Nicaragua. Often he was away from his wife, Lee, and two preschool-age daughters for two-week stretches.