By McPherse Thompson, Staff Reporter
The prestigious Gleaner Honour Award will be presented at a special function at Knutsford Court Hotel, St. Andrew, on Monday. Today we continue profiles of category winners. Karl Hendrickson is the head of the Hendrickson family, winners of the business category.
ANYONE WHO has spent the last half a century developing a business in Jamaica and still continues to do so, should have a great deal to say about the challenges associated with the economic and social crises during the period, as well as accomplishments that impelled one to persevere.
But Karl Reginald Maurice Hendrickson, the unassuming, reserved and retired head of the National Continental Corporation (NCC) Group of Companies, prefers not to be self-congratulatory about the empire he has created out of a small bakery started by his parents in rural Jamaica, and which he eventually diversified and expanded into what is today one of the island's leading conglomerates.
He does not whine about any difficulty he has had to overcome and suggests up-front that his achievements were of the past, emphasising instead that the businesses were now the purview of his four children, to whom he bequeathed the enterprises when he retired in the mid-1990s.
Today, the NCC Group controls a bakery off Half-Way Tree Road, St. Andrew, as well as Caribbean Broilers and Feed Mills, The Courtleigh Hotel, Knutsford Court Hotel, The Ruins, and Sunset Beach Resort, all legacies of the indefatigable Karl Hendrickson, who turned 73 years old on January 8, but whose business acumen can be traced back to the work ethic instilled in him during his early childhood when his parents operated a bakery in St. Elizabeth, and subsequently in Mandeville, Manchester.
Starting even before his teenage years, the young Hendrickson, along with his younger sibling, worked in the family baking business, increasing his hourly input as he grew older, in between getting an education at the secondary level in Jamaica and subsequently at the tertiary level abroad.
He recalled that he arrived in Kingston around May 1952 to start the bakery on a piece of land his parents acquired at Half-Way Tree Road and that it was opened on or around November 12 the same year. That was really his foray into business, and he never looked back.
With the backing of a close-knit family, Mr. Hendrickson was responsible for growing the business, using the 1950s and the 1960s to expand internally and then diversified into manufacturing, printing and other enterprises, some of which survived, some of which he exited for one reason or another. In the ensuring period, the family opened bakeries in England, and entered into a franchise agreement which saw the company opening a biscuit company in Malta, but which was later closed because of his desire to concentrate on doing business in Jamaica.
Eventually, confident about the prospect of the local firm, the United States-based Continental Baking Co. took a minor stake in NCC. National was also a major shareholder in the defunct Daily News, whose plant was operated at Half-Way Tree Road. According to Mr. Hendrickson, the newspaper was shut down in the early 1980s largely because the advertising revenue could not support two daily newspapers then.
Mr. Hendrickson recalled the social and economic challenges of the 1970s, a period in which many businesses closed and the owners migrated, but, with his children either in high school or at university, he said, "I just stayed with it. I didn't feel I would give up. That was never part of my thoughts."
It was also the period in which Mr. Hendrickson was active in the public sector, serving as chairman of the Public Service Commission and the Jamaica Merchant Marine. Also, he served as vice chairman of JAMPRO, the government's promotions and investment agency, as well as a director of Air Jamaica.
"I was very glad to have been asked to serve," he said, but he never considered entering representational politics. "I am not sure I would be fit for it," he said. "That's not an easy job. In fact, it's a very, very hard job" and "I respect people who do that."
Asked how he managed to have been so successful and for his companies to have remained viable in an economic environment in which so many others had failed, Mr. Hendrickson said: "It was sheer luck and hard work," luck, especially because of the people who had been working in his businesses over the years.
During the last decade, NCC has expanded into the hotel sector, acquiring, among others, what is now The Courtleigh Hotel, Knutsford Boulevard, New Kingston; the Knutsford Court Hotel, formerly Sutton Place Hotel, on Ruthven Road; Seawind, now called Sunset Beach Resort and Spa in Montego Bay, and The Ruins in Ocho Rios, St. Ann.
Mr. Hendrickson said that as the head of the family business, he was "very happy" with the hard work and dedication of his four children, who have been working to expand the family businesses even further.
His advice to those who aspire to success: "You have to make up your mind and stick with it. There will always be bad times, but the good can outshine the bad."
Although Mr. Hendrickson says he has purposely chosen not to be now involved in the day-to-day operation of the businesses, "sometimes I'm involved in planning and assist if they (the children) want to make an acquisition." And "the family still consults me on some things," said the experienced entrepreneur.
Notwithstanding his non-interventionist attitude toward the operation of the businesses, his more than 50 years as head of a business that has transformed the family, and by extension the Jamaican landscape, has earned him the title of "The Chairman", a designation used mostly by workers at the businesses and even his children when they refer to him.
