When disaster hits, it's not just about weathering the storm—it’s about rising stronger on the other side. This episode is a powerful look at how to turn devastation into determination, featuring Ewell Smith’s incredible journey in helping the Louisiana seafood industry recover from Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Entire communities were torn apart, boats destroyed, and trust shattered, but Ewell shares how they came together, fought for support, and rebuilt their livelihoods against the odds. 

His stories of resilience, grit, and finding opportunity in crisis are a reminder that no matter how overwhelming a setback may seem, there’s always a way forward. Whether you're facing your own business challenge or just need a dose of inspiration, this episode will leave you feeling empowered to take action and transform obstacles into opportunities.

About our Guest:

As a certified franchise consultant, Ewell Smith guides career professionals, corporate refugees, and Veterans to business ownership. With over 17 years of experience leading major business trade associations, representing thousands of entrepreneurs, he is an avid ambassador of entrepreneurship. 

Ewell served as Executive Director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board for nearly 13 years, helping thousands of business owners flourish and also work through the challenges navigating disasters like hurricanes Katrina and the BP Oil Spill rebuilding billions in lost sales twice.

Ewell is theAuthor of Your First Franchise Roadmap and host of the Your First Franchise Podcast, he interviews franchisors and franchise leaders to share valuable insights.

https://www.yourfirstfranchise.com/ 

https://www.closethedeal.com/ 

About the Host:

Your host, Maartje van Krieken, brings a wealth of experience from the front lines of business turmoil. With a background in crisis management, managing transformation and complex collaboration, she has successfully guided numerous organizations through their most challenging times. Her unique perspective and practical approach make her the go to First Responder in the arena of business turmoil and crisis.

Podcast Homepage: https://www.thebusinessemergencyroom.com/

https://www.thechaosgamesconsulting.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maartje/

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Maartje van Krieken: Hi everybody. Thanks for tuning in. I'm here today with Ewell Smith. He is the former Executive Director of the Seafood Promotion and the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, and we'll hear more about his role there in later. Currently, he's a franchise consultant, and he has a book out that's called your first franchise roadmap. So also touch base on what you're doing these days a bit later on. Yeah. So you're very welcome. We've met actually through the franchising connection. And you're also a podcaster yourself. So always, that's always nice to have other podcasters in your podcast.

That's the close the deal. I'll show as well. Yes, this the close the deal podcast, or close the deal.com. Yes,

Maartje van Krieken: also worth checking out. But today we talk about my podcast, so we talk about business emergencies. So Ewell tell us about your scars from business emergencies.

Oh, wow. So you know, we had, we had a whole bunch of scars. And you and I, right before we started this, this show, we talked about the fact that we have a hurricane that's brewing up in the Gulf, head in our direction. So my job with the Louisiana seafood board, just call it short, the short name of it, my role is to Promote Market The seafood industry. That was a blast of a job. And I always the I found so much purpose in promoting the industry because it supports so much in this state. It's a huge industry. It's a two and a half billion dollar industry. But when August 29 2005 happened, everything we knew, not just the seafood communities, but everything, everybody from New Orleans to mobile the world, was flipped upside down when Hurricane Katrina came bearing down on us. And I tell people, what happened to New Orleans was really bad, really brutal. What happened to our fishing communities was indescribable. You saw what happened in Biloxi, where it was this is like somebody just cleaned, just took their arm across the table and just wiped everything off the coast. Our fishing communities wasn't quite like that, but they were beat up. I mean, everything was destroyed. There were 60,000 recreational vessels washed up on land. It was 3000 commercial vessels, which are practically ships, washed up on land. And between Katrina and Rita, we were the we were the first people to get to DC within two weeks of Katrina, while we were in DC walking the hill, we even beat the oil and gas industry to DC to walk the hill itself. And while our last visit was with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, they're the ones that monitor all the weather and seafood fisheries for the US. Our last visit was with them, and while we're in their office with the head guy, his assistant, comes in and lays a piece of paper on the table and says, I've got some bad news for you all. It's just me, my chairman, him, and that's it. And the bad news was, it was Hurricane Rita, and we're like, You joking, right? And sure enough, within about two weeks of us returning, that storm had brewed up, and they predicted it just the way. They actually got that prediction, pretty dead on. And sure enough, it hit the western side of our state in Cameron Parish, and it wiped out a community of 10,000 people. There was one building, one structure left an old courthouse, concrete walls as thick as your desk. And that was that was it. And that was our other fishing community. So between Katrina and Rita, we lost the nation, I should say, lost three of the largest fishing docks in the US. So how do you begin recovering from that, right? Well, the first thing, there's so many challenges with something like this. I mean, I could every fisherman has a story, every citizen, every person who lives in New Orleans or Biloxi, has a story, every multiple stories. I mean, I could go on for days with with fishermen stories. But so how do you recover? Well, we're trying to figure things out how to recover. We're up in DC, doing our thing to begin the process for legislative support. And you might remember this, when the Corps of Engineers finally figured out how they're going to get the water out of New Orleans, they called it dewatering the city, with the gigantic pipe that they put over the levee system here, and they dumped it into Lake puncher train. Well, that was a great solution, because it worked. But a professor from Texas at that moment with it, we're about three weeks in, I guess four weeks in, when that happened, I can't remember exactly. And the professor from Texas called our waters toxic soup. You. Yeah, so, so the few fishermen that had boats on the that could actually go out and fish, we'd now, then we lost our markets across the United States like that. People were just afraid to eat waters. Let me seafood from waters declared toxic soup, and that's before social media. So we had nutrient and Rita. And we learned a ton from, you know, PR wise, how to tell the story, how to begin telling the story. The messaging became so much more than promoting. It became, you know, we were working with before Katrina, we'd put chefs on TV to do the nice cooking demonstration that, oh, it's, it's crab season. Let's cook up some crabs, put them on TV and promote the industry. Promote the seafood, promote the fishing communities. After Katrina, those stories changed. We put the chefs on TV, promoting the crabs as we will come as we slowly came back. But they were also telling the story, helping us tell the story of coming back.

Maartje van Krieken: So who the source to crap from, and who the yeah to change what the industry

Yes, and I know you came from oil and gas. And I'll share one quick story with oil and gas. The Shell Oil industry reached out to me. See that was August, by October. I think it was October, October, November. I got a November, I got a phone call from from Shell Oil Company. But I didn't know who it was. They were very elusive. They used a PR firm out of DC to call. And so what would you do if we gave you all $600,000 to spit to invest into the industry, and how would you use it? And I didn't know who the other guy was on the phone. I'm like, Is this a joke? I almost hung up. I didn't believe it. And sure enough, it was for real. About two weeks later, I'm talking to a gentleman by the name of Fred Palmer from Shell Oil, and he starts explaining to me they want to trade. Glaviano was the president here in New Orleans, of shell and they wanted to reinvest into the city, to give back. And they did in a big way. And they invested in ice houses. We put the first on camera parish, because Cameron was like Biloxi. There was nothing left. There's that one structure left. There was nothing left, and without ice. Even know, some of the boats were still around, some so some of the boats survived. Not a lot of them were damaged, but some of them and a lot were lost. But there were a lot of fishermen that could still go out and fish, because they did have their boat. And it's then that side of the state they didn't have as much PR issue because of, you know, people weren't thinking toxic soup. One three hours away from the lake camp, yeah. So, long story short, they they helped us put an ice house in because ice is the fundamental thing. All commercial fishing in need. Without ice, nothing else happens. So that began the recovery process of that small town, and the entire town came out to see. So

Maartje van Krieken: you'll Can you talk a little bit about, do you know how that decision came about? Because what's interesting here is that that was, that's a major enabler, right? So it's totally the right, the right thing to put the money towards. So how did it come about? Was it because you guys were all so organized and you were able to verbalize what it is you needed, or

when there's crisis, there's opportunity. That's the first thing I'd say, you learn there's tons of opportunity. It's brutal, it's sucks when you're going through it, but there's so much opportunity. And I ended up at a luncheon, I ended up sitting between the governor, and I ended up sitting between the head person from shell out of Houston, and I really didn't know who that person was other than the title, but I didn't, so I'm just sharing the matter at that point. No, no, it doesn't I'm just sharing stories. And then that those stories I shared at the right time at the right place, led to a phone call, and then shell recognize it, because you think about the seafood industry, and this is, this is something people had a hard time understanding after BP, which we had to do a lot of education, the seafood industry and the oil and gas industry in the state are symbiotic. They rely on each other. If commercial fishermen are on fishing and maybe on an oil rig, if they're not on or rig, they're probably commercial fishing. So they really these communities in the stripping industries that want to help develop the oil and gas industry, bringing the pipe out into the to the waters, so it's a working coast. So all these people work together to build a business, to build an industry. So yeah, so the shell recognized that it was their turn to step up and lean in. And we're very grateful for that. Because, I'll be honest, it had they not stepped up and all the volunteers from around the world, I came to New Orleans because, I mean, everybody's houses were destroyed. Everything was everything was flipped upside down. Now, I mean, I we could do 10 hours on this now with still barely scratched the surf. Dollars, yeah, but for crisis communications, how do you recover? The first thing is, you run toward the the upper the challenge, and you just start beginning to take massive action, and you're not sure what you can do, and there was no playbook. We did not have a crisis playbook for this. I'll be quite candid,

Maartje van Krieken: but it's the story, right? The story. And because you don't know where to start, but if you start saying what you need or what you're trying to achieve, right, and put that out there, then at some point somebody is going to recognize and say, Oh, that's actually something I can do something about. Or if that's what you want, then maybe I can help, because I have this that or the other is that ripple effect is so important in recovery, and it's time and time, and you see it everywhere those market, yeah, getting out verbalizing what they need or where they're trying to get to, because they might not know what they need to to get where they want to go. But yeah, just sharing the stories, right? And that's what this podcast is also about too

I'll share one story we told over and over, and we did take the action right away. We knew to go to DC, and we knew we could start telling stories around that, but we still it was trying to wrap our heads around this. It was so massive as far to even comprehend. But there's one story we told over and over and over, and seeing all the all the major news networks picked it up, and it was a friend of ours, Captain Pete. He had stayed for Katrina, and he stayed like so many other commercial fishermen because they all knew how to survive off the land or water, and had been through, you know, decades of hurricanes, nothing like Katrina anyway. He stayed because he had built his house 18 feet off the ground to withstand hurricane forced winds and withstand a flood. He thought he was fine. He had his wife, his daughter and his mom with him, and their dog, and they stayed. What he did not anticipate was a tornado. So he was in his house. He watched his neighbor's house blow away, and it was in the middle launch second story of the house, long narrow hallway. Had been to his house, long narrow hallway, and they had all of them gathered in the hallway, and the roof opened up and peeled up, peeled open and picked them, all, four of them up, and dropped them in the water. Pete and his wife, Pete, I'm sorry. Pete and his mom floated across the street. He tied her to a tree to keep her head with cable wire from the TV keep her head above the water line. He didn't know where his daughter went. She got floated. She got wrapped in a carpet like a burrito and floated and hung her on top of it, an industrial chain link fence, which was high enough to keep her water, her head above the water. And his wife, he watched, flew by on the door and didn't know where she went. Fortunately, she was okay. All four of them survived, and it took them years to rebuild. I mean, he lost everything. This would just for context, just that one person, you can multiply times 1000s. He lost his home, his boats, his cars, his fishing gear, his livelihood. Everything was wiped out. He had to start back over completely from scratch, and start

Maartje van Krieken: starts over from scratch, being also severely traumatized. Right then, the whole emotional turmoil and the whole,

oh, you can feel it in the city right now. When they announced that we have a cat one coming here, even though it's a cat one, everybody just kind of went, you know, and if it's a three, we really, you can feel the PTSD in the

Maartje van Krieken: city. It was even on the anniversary of Katrina, right? Weeks ago, we had been having good weather, and somehow that day was pretty awful, right? It was windy and lots of rain and stuff, and it was already not a good day, but that kind of really didn't help either.

Yeah, you could feel it. So we go through all that process. We had trainer rear. Two years later, we had Gustaf and Ike, which were actually pretty severely devastating as well. Didn't make as much national news, but to our seafood industry, it was one two punch right at the middle of the state, hitting all the processors. We take out the processors, the fishermen don't have a place to bring the seafood, so we had to go through that. Now the city of New Orleans, after two years of going at it, going out, everybody kind of breathed deep and looked up and like, oh my gosh, not much has changed. It took us about four, four and a half years before we start really seeing change. And then in 2009 this was the turnaround for us, the mental turnaround. The Super Bowl was saints one. Saints won their season to go to the Super Bowl. And then we had the Super Bowl in February of 2010 Yes, in 2010 Drew Brees holds up this the trophy. And we are back. We are back. Mentally, the city's back. The tourism is coming. Has come back. Infrastructure still beat up the hell, but it's it was coming back. You could see progress now. And our fishing communities were back, pretty much full time, back, beat up the hell, but still they're back functioning. Okay, you know, starting to grow. Again, billions of dollars of sales coming back. And PR to do that and to turn around the negative perception, thanks to the toxic soup thing, it took us two years to turn that around, and that was a ton of messaging to educate people. So Super Bowl, we win in February and two months, February, March, April 20, the BP oil, BP Horizon explodes on a Tuesday. That Friday, I'm looking at this, thinking to myself, this is not going to be good, not knowing how bad it was going to get. I just knew it wasn't good. And that Friday, I'm at the gym late. I was off that day, and I'm at the gym at 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm watching, I'm on the machine, the elliptical, I'm looking at the TV screen in front of me, and they show the the rig sinking when that rig went down. I'm like, oh, that's that's really, really bad. So that weekend was eerily quiet. Nobody knew what to think that Monday morning, I called the governor's office. I called the secretary of wildlife and fisheries. This is a phone call. These are phone calls I won't forget. They told me to shut up. They were more they were more concerned about the oil and gas industry at that point, trying to pee and figure out what to do to appease them. And I'm like, This is bad. They're like, You be quiet that Wednesday. So Tuesday to the following, Wednesday, I get my car to drive to my office in WWL radio, the powerhouse am station. I turn the radio on, and the radio is going ballistic. The fishermen are going nuts because they see a sheen of oil across the Gulf as far as the eye can see. And my board at that point said, forget what the Governor thinks and forget what the Secretary of life and fisheries thinks, good to your job. And we knew what to do because of all the other insanity, even though he still didn't it was new, different circumstances,

Maartje van Krieken: you know, different story, same story, different story, right? Yeah, and get it out

there. Same principles, one toward the challenge and opportunities. Create them are present everywhere. So we get, we capitalize on every PR opportunity, and we really became good at telling the story. And I tell you what, what was different between the two from a communication strategy during Katrina, social media pay Facebook had not taken off yet, so that didn't exist. That was minimal with the BP oil spill. It was 24/7 TV and social media people putting signs up saying we're not serving golf seafood or Louisiana seafood all over the United States again. By the 87th day was the day they capped the Well, by that day, we had lost 98% of our market share a second time globally for our seafood, and that wrecked our fishing communities all over again, so and

Maartje van Krieken: they had probably shrunk right? And I'm out screaming that, just like in New Orleans, people didn't come back then, people ultimately chose to not rebuild their business.

No 19,000 commercial fishing licenses in 22,000 down. Knocked down the 16,000 after Katrina. Now that knocked out a lot of people who were not professional. They were more part time commercial fishermen. It did knock out a lot of old timers as well, yeah, but it knocked out a lot of people. And then BP spill happened. It knocked us down the peg, all the way down to 11 and 12,000 if I remember correctly, it's been a while. So yeah, so we had to get on the story part, and this is where we really knew something was we had to do something different. We got the BP because of the oil and gas relationships with Shell. We were able to get PP right away. And we got $2 million for crisis communications. And they allowed us, they gave us a check and said, Go to work. So we put the word out that we had money, because we're public entity, and we got RFPs all over the United States for PR, and everything was the traditional everything was traditional PR press release. And one guy named Dave Henderson out of DC, a former CBS news journalist, sent me an email, is the opportunities, right? He sent me an email, and read differently. He said, We want to create a newsroom for you, and you'll tell the story. You'll own the narratives and the way he wrote. It was so eloquent, and it's so different than anybody else. It wasn't a deck, it was just a single email. I minimized that email, went home, thought about it, called my chairman up the next day. I said, this is different. He's like, we got to do different. Call him on but we called him. We hired him that afternoon. Within two weeks, we had a newsroom up filled with stories and a news team doing videography, stories, B roll, all the things you need to do to tell the story that set the stage for our recovery. You.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, and it's another example of of you putting out what it is you need, right? And maybe not knowing exactly what shape, but then him latching on and saying, hey, I can do you want better? Yes, how about if I help you with this? Right? If you put out what it is you need or what you're trying to achieve, it allows people to help from their own strengths and capacity and capability, right? And and feed in, yeah, use that into your challenge to help you. And they will. People want to help.

It has to be in circumstances like that. I think you have to do something different too, because whatever was before everything, the rules change. Like everything changes. Everything changes. Everything's turned around. So we did that, and it worked. We ended up generating like, 3000 media interviews, and within a year, year and a half, which is insane, and then, not just with ourselves, but we would line up the points of contact, yeah, it was commercial fishermen. Would send the media to a commercial fisherman, whatever part of the state was in. It was a state was in. It was a seafood processor, but send the media to that. We did a lot of interviews ourselves as well, but we sent out interviews all across the state. We had an aunt. We created an army of people, and we created something else too. It was really cool. You need ambassadors to help you tell your story. You don't want to tell your story yourself, and that's what she'll so good at. You know, shell knows how to work with HEF well advocates to help. I'll tell their story. Well, we worked with, we created a chef's Council of, like, not, I think, a dozen chefs, I can't remember. I mean, non chefs from around the United States that became advocates for us, and we educated them on the seafood industry to be a spokes official spokespeople for us, and we put them out there as much as we possibly could and attach them to events. We'd send them places where, wherever we could to tell the story. We went and we took chances to try and think trying new things. Yeah, but that's the crisis communications piece, yeah, if that is a really 100,000 foot view, yeah,

Maartje van Krieken: and a whole lot of influencing skills and, right? I mean, this, these charter situations and events. We could talk about this for, yeah, for hours easily, right? So, yeah, we talked a little bit about that already that some of the fishermen, of course, didn't come back to the industry eventually, you also chose a different course. So can you tell a little bit about how you went from from doing all that to getting into franchising, and how you help people these days? So

I went to another trade association doing similar type of work up in North Carolina, another crisis during covid, keeping the logging industry going. Okay, telling their story. So continue the craziness. Oh, my God, this is getting old. So I eventually, I said I always wanted to be on my own. So I started looking at franchising for myself, because I was always intrigued. What was intriguing is the franchises, some of the industry, some of the businesses, not necessarily in the seafood industry, but some of the businesses in New Orleans that came back first were franchises, because they had the infrastructure of the support of their national office that brought in a team of people, whether it was Keller Williams or subway or or outback. I mean, Outback rolled in with 18 wheelers of equipment and trailers and, I mean, it was like an army of people to come in and help, and that always stuck with me. And I watched al Copeland as a young kid, the founder of Popeyes, grow that. And I just, I've always been fascinated by franchising. So I watched people today who get into their 40s and 50s, realize they start transitioning careers, and they're like, they're looking at a couple things. One, they're not too far down the road from retirement, and they're like, Man, I really kind of want to do something I enjoy. Or they've gotten squeezed out ageism. People realize ageism becomes very, very real, or it's just time, or they're looking at their retirement, they're like, oh my gosh, what I'm doing now is not going to get me to where I need to be. Well, I'm

Maartje van Krieken: working for a boss. Inevitably tends to get old at some point. Yeah,

and they want to be their own boss. So those are the big variables. Being boss is a big, big deal. People want to take control their time and look, it's not easy. Look, none of the what we went through working for somebody else or or representing an industry, or working with somebody else is not easy, either, and there's a risk with that, and there's also a risk with going on your own thing. So that's what I help people today with now, is exit the corporate world or transition out of it or work. Some people will transition, get into a franchise and can eat their job. And then I also work with veterans as well, which I love because that the veterans piece. One out of seven franchises in the US is owned by a veteran, and there's a good reason for that. It's called systems and processes. And people think, okay, how do I get into franchising? I don't know anything about whatever the widget is. Pick the widget, whether it's food, home, services, beauty, automotive, there's 300 different industries, whatever that widget is, they can be taught. If they've got that level of experience, 1520, years of work experience, they can easily be taught. 10 years they can be taught. So that's what the beauty of franchising, systems and processes, plus the playbook, and you got the support of the franchising system and the fellow franchisees of a particular brand to work together, to collaborate, to go through the challenges together. Yeah, you're not by yourself.

Maartje van Krieken: So if after hearing your talk, people are like, I want to know more about this guy, and I want to know more about franchising, or what what he can do, or where do people find you?

Well, they can go. They can find me at your first franchise.com, your first franchise.com. If they go to your first franchise.com, forward slash roadmap, they can grab a free copy of this book, your first franchise roadmap, and I'll send them a free copy of that if they want a paperback version. It's on Amazon. 100% of the proceeds this, what you learn from doing outreach and giving back is you give back. So 100% of the proceeds when people buy the book is going to go to make a wish to help those kids in need. Yeah? And it's just, I believe in it 100% because I've, all I've ever done is work with entrepreneurs, and now I help people become entrepreneurs, and that's what I've done myself past three years.

Maartje van Krieken: Very cool. Yeah, so we will also put all of you all's information in all the show notes. So wherever you're listening to this podcast, you can find in the comments information and yeah, we can easily talk another 1700 hours about all these subjects. But

yeah, and I appreciate you having me. This has been great. Thank you. Yeah,

Maartje van Krieken: it's probably not the last time the industries we talked about are going to get hit. I hope the one that's coming at us treats us gently. That's all we can do, right hope. And then we'll dive in the aftermath with whatever it needs. So before we close out any wisdoms to close out with any chaos theories to share with the listeners. Yes,

okay, so if you get okay, my chairman, one of my chairman, a few. Chairman, he said something that I've always stuck with me and another friend of mine who had gone through the hurricane in South Carolina years prior, had shared something with me. The gentleman from South Carolina came to New Orleans to New Orleans to see how he could help, because he had been through it. He lost his prayer plan. I can't remember what Hugo hit South Carolina. He lost his prayer plan. He came down. I toured him for two, two days. I tore him around, and we ended up in New Orleans by the harbor, where all the sailboats were, they were all piled up on top of each other, like dinghies, like three stories tall boats just popped on top of his job, and he looked at me, said, You'll I know it looks bad, but I promise you, in five years from now, you're going to be better off in that moment. I'm looking around, I'm like, You're out of your mom. The reality is, it does get better, and that was for Katrina. So when, when BP happened, we knew it was going to be bad, but we knew it were going to be okay. And going back to my, my other Chairman's comment, he's, he once said, It doesn't matter if it, if it hits you, if it's a category one or Category Five, it doesn't matter. It's how you respond that matters, because it's still real to you. No matter if it's a one or five, it's very real. But how you respond and you just you can't lay down, you got to get up and go forward, yeah,

Maartje van Krieken: and you can't prepare for everything, but you can learn from the stories, from others, and it means that you simply have more in your toolkit when the stuff does happen, and one step at a time, right? One step at a time make clear what you need or where you want to, where you want to go, and yeah, eventually it will be a scar, right?

It is, and you're further better of it. It's just awful going through it, but you do come out stronger, 100%

Maartje van Krieken: and on that note, thank you very much. You'll for joining me today, thank you for tuning in to the podcast, and I hope to see you back or hear you back here ne xt week.

Sounds good. Thank you.

Maartje van Krieken: Thank you. Bye.

Appreciate it.