Women in Business Month
Cathy Hayward-Hughes Photo by Lydia Love
Work Ethic Results in $3.5 Million Company By Tara Nelson
C
athy HaywardHughes has come a long way from working on fish processing boats as a teenager in Southeast Alaska to running a $3.5 million frozen foods shipping company just north of Ferndale today, Crystal Creek Logistics. Hayward-Hughes earned her degree in industrial technology from Western Washington University and since then she has more than 30 years of experience in operations management. But it was the work ethic she learned while slinging fish as a child that spawned her success. Hayward-Hughes was born and raised in Kenai, Alaska, pop. 7,000, a village that had few income opportunities at the time other than fishing. She began 52 | BUSINESSPULSE.COM
working at age 12 on processing boats and got her first foreman job at the age of 18. No one questioned her age as long as she could do the work, and the work was no problem for HaywardHughes. Her family owned and operated a 37-foot commercial troller during the summer months. She described her fishing crew experiences as “fantastic” because they exposed her to young people who were in college and had dreams. “It was the heyday of crabbing in Kodiak, Alaska, during the early 1970s,” she said. “You could go to any packing plant and get in line, and the foreman would grab a few people from the line each day. If you survived four days you were considered one of the old crew. If you survived a season, you were an expert.” Back on her family’s boat in the summer, her father would pore over job applications, taking time to show Hayward-Hughes and
her sister how to review them. A record of success was important. In those days, resumes were typed by hand on a typewriter and her father would hold each sheet up to the light to look for corrective fluid and over-struck typos. He would reject those, figuring if someone would send in a sloppy resume, they’d take the same sloppy approach to their work. “Kodiak was my training ground,” Hayward-Hughes said. “It was full-on real life, with ups and downs, unpredictable events, and constant excitement. This was training like no other and it made it possible for me to excel at each job and then move on to a better job as rapidly as possible. My dream was always to have a job of my own.” Fast forward a few decades and she not only has a job of her own, but a company of her own to boot. Her office is filled with lush green tropical plants and Buddha heads, lending to the calm, cool-headed workplace culture she encourages. Hayward-Hughes had started fulfillment work, shipping for other companies, while vice president of operations at SeaBear Seafoods in Anacortes. When the company found itself with more capacity than needed, instead of letting that capacity sit idly Hayward Hughes saw an opportunity to ship products for other companies. Not only did the move help cover SeaBear’s base costs, it allowed them to build a yearround employee base that supported the holiday spike in sales. A few years later, she and a consultant she met at SeaBear, Mike Bradburn, teamed up to open Crystal Creek Logistics in 2007. His experience lay in business development and real estate. Their first major client was Vital Choice, a local wild Alaskan seafood and organics company that ships frozen food through e-commerce, and they rode Vital Choice’s wild success to their own. Crystal Creek now employs up