The company our father built was on the verge of bankruptcy. In 2011, one of us was rushed to the hospital emergency room convinced we were having a heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack that occurs when a father thinks he has lost what he dedicated his life to.
JC Tropicals, the Miami-based tropical produce sales company that our father, Jorge, founded in 1965 after coming to the United States as an exile from Cuba with almost nothing, was six months away from closing.
We overextended the company we inherited, farming in Florida and Costa Rica, operating a packing plant, operating a fleet of trucks, and running a logistics subsidiary. Then a bad year for both agriculture and distribution hit all at once.
What happened next shaped everything about business operations today.
hard reset
The most important decisions we made through the crisis were structural. We completely exited agriculture and repositioned JC as a pure distribution company. There are no farms, trucks, or packing plants. We source fresh tropical produce from producers in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia and efficiently deliver it to retail customers across the United States.
It is very simple and is intended to be extended.
We combined this with zero-based budgeting, calculating costs from scratch rather than adjusting last year's numbers. The only question worth asking was, “What do I actually need to survive next week?” We continued doing that until weeks turned into months. And the habit of questioning before accepting any cost became permanently entrenched as part of the way we operated. Knowing exactly who you are and where your boundaries lie can prove to be a competitive advantage. Deliberately eliminating complexity is a strategic move.
We've also seen the demographic changes my father predicted decades ago come to fruition in retail. When Adrian moved into sales around 2000, the company relied almost entirely on the wholesale terminal market, a harsh, low-margin environment. National retailers sourced tropical produce through layers of intermediaries, paying high markups and inconsistent quality. We started tracking these accounts directly and acquired the top retailers.
When we started distributing dragon fruit 15 years ago, almost no one in the mainstream U.S. market was paying attention. Today, we are the largest dragon fruit distributor in the country, selling an estimated 7 million pounds annually. The best time to own a market is before everyone agrees that it is a market.
The same instinct to build systems based on what the business actually needs, rather than traditional ones, has shaped how we think about remote work.
Remote distributed working has always been a business requirement for us. It was baked into the model from the beginning. Our suppliers in Vietnam, our logistics partners in Costa Rica, and our retail team in Texas do not plan to relocate to Miami. We didn't have the luxury of putting everyone in the same building and creating a culture in physical proximity. We needed to build something that would work across distance.
An operating system that scales
We are currently facing harsh business realities. They source from 10 countries, manage six remote teams, and serve major national retailers with supply chains that require precise traceability from farm to shelf. Intuition and informal communication alone did not work.
Around 2015, we discovered the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS), a management framework built on the simple idea that all businesses, regardless of size or complexity, run on the same six components.
- vision. Does everyone in your organization know where you are going and how you plan to get there?
- people. Are the right people in the right seats?
- data. Do you run your business based on a few objective numbers rather than emotions and opinions?
- problem. Do you have a disciplined process to identify and resolve problems before they get worse?
- process. Are your core operations documented and systemized to ensure repeatability and scalability?
- traction. Do you have a meeting rhythm and accountability structure that you can implement week after week without losing momentum?
For a company that spans more than a dozen countries and time zones, that last part was transformative. EOS introduced a weekly meeting cadence that helped all teams align around the same priorities, track the same numbers, and resolve issues before they piled up. We now track over 60 KPIs across our business, giving us the kind of visibility we never had when we were acting on instinct.
The result was a common operating language across the organization, which turned out to be what really made distributed teams work.
What I learned about returning to the office
As corporate America struggles with return-to-office policies, these numbers suggest we're not alone in finding the remote model works. According to Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, 98% support some version of remote or hybrid work. Remarkably, 84 percent of employees at these companies say they can count on their colleagues to help them, compared to 65 percent in typical workplaces, and are nearly 42 percent more productive. The difference is the infrastructure of how people collaborate.
It also directly affects recruitment. RobertHalf's January 2026 survey found that 55 percent of job seekers listed hybrid work as their top preference, and only 25 percent would even consider roles that required five days in the office. For us, working style is a recruitment advantage. We source talent from 10 countries and the talent we need to serve national retailers doesn't want to be tied to one building, and we're not asking them to do that.
Using EOS, we were able to create clear accountability, shared visibility of priorities, and a consistent communication rhythm. These are the conditions that produce teams that perform at their best, no matter where people sit. Leaders who treat a return-to-office mandate as a culture fix are trying to solve the wrong problem. The most useful question to ask is, “Do my employees have what they need to do their jobs well no matter where they are?”
The company currently distributes more than 70 tropical fruits and vegetables in 17 countries to Publix, HEB, Walmart, Aldi, Safeway and Costco, with $80 million in revenue this year and on track for another $100 million. The restructuring produced something radically different from anything that came before. We are now a leaner, more focused and structured organization. This is the type of distributed operation that the original business was not designed to perform. We were so close to failure that the clarity we lost in our growth was lost. This may be the most important lesson for executives dealing with complexity and distributed teams in 2026.
