Forbes - Small Giants: Greater Omaha

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october 24, 2017

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HenryDavismade a billion-dollar fortune by carefullygrowing his family’s small-scale slaughterhouse into one of the country’s top suppliers of high- qualitybeef. It’s always beenqualityover quantity, andGreater

Omaha’s customers like it thatway—evenwhen they can’t get all the meat theywant. ACut Above BY CHLOE SORVINO

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SMALL GIANTS: GREATER OMAHA

SMALL GIANTS: GREATER OMAHA

G reater Omaha’s story starts with an immigrant in search of a better life. Davis’ grandfather, Herman Cohen, fled the Russian empire to America in 1905 at age 11 to escape discrimination and pogroms. Cohen served in the U.S. infantry in World War I and reentered civilian life with $100 in his pocket. In 1920, he moved to Omaha, keen on investing in beef. At the stockyards, Cohen would pick a single steer every day, butcher it himself and then sell the beef, while a partner sold the hides. The small operation grew slowly to a few animals a day. Cohen’s youngest daughter, Florence, mar- ried Davis’ father, Pennie, who joined his father-in-law’s busi- ness in 1945 and soon became president. They kept it simple, butchering the meat into hindquarters and forequarters sec- tions only, which would be sold to a butcher who would cut the meat into ready-to-cook sizes. It was a good time to be in the business, as America doubled its beef consumption in the prosperous years following World War II. Families spent near- ly one fourth of their food budget on meat in 1950, according to the American Meat Institute. Davis was born in 1951 and witnessed the glory years of Omaha’s beef industry. He grew up walking through the live- stock auctions on the exchange floor and attending meetings with his father and other Omaha slaughterhouse managers. When he was 4 years old, Omaha beat out Chicago to be- come the nation’s top spot for beef processing. He later spent summers at the plant doing everything from buying cattle to butchering meat on the assembly line. By the 1970s, Omaha had lost its edge. Slaughterhouses hightailed it out of the city to be closer to rural feedlots. Davis joined the business full-time in 1973 after graduating from the University of Denver with a degree in business and a minor in computer science. At the time, Greater Omaha had 40 employ- ees and processed 232 steer a day. “We were too small to have roles. Everybody did everything,” Davis recalls. As a young exec, Davis had big ideas. He purchased the company’s first computer, a Polymorphic System 8813, for $5,870 in 1980. There was no software available to help the slaughterhouse track receivables and project future sales, so he wrote it himself. “We had a good business model back then, and I wasn’t going to change my business to fit the software,” Davis says. As he started to write the code in a Unix shell script, which the company still uses today, Davis focused first on building software that would analyze >Page 1 Page 2-3 Page 4-5 Page 6

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