Matador Processors, Inc.

A Matchmaker's Dream Team
November 1992/Nation's Business

Her late husband, Clifton, "was a real entrepreneur," says Betty Wood. "We woke up in a new world every day." Clif and Betty Wood were a good match, even though she was 19 years his junior. "I never did have any children," she says, "so I devoted my life to business. We were both workaholics."

In the early '70s, they owned a business in Ardmore, Okla., that did data processing for small companies that didn't have their own computers. Back then, Wood says, "I was working 20 hours out of the 24. I loved it."

But her weight dropped to 104 pounds, on a 5-foot-9 frame; as she says, "That's pretty lean." Clif finally despaired of getting her to work shorter hours, she says, so in 1973 they sold their computer center and moved about 90 miles up the road, to Norman, Okla., just south of Oklahoma City, intending to retire.

But the food they found there led to a new adventure. "My mother cooked for me till I married Clif," Wood says, "and then he cooked for me till he died. I was just like a pair of suspenders in a nudist colony when it came to the kitchen."

Nonetheless, she knew what she liked, and she remembers her dismay at the food she encountered in Mexican restaurants: "I love a good chile relleno [stuffed pepper], and it was a disgrace the slop that was put before us."

Eventually, the entrepreneur's bug bit again, and Clif said, "Why don't we just make one?"

In 1975, the Woods made what she calls "kitchen samples" of chile rellenos, starting with three canned chiles, and took one apiece to three different Mexican restaurants. At each stop, they left with an order for a case of frozen chile rellenos.

The Woods had a friend who owned a restaurant, and his chef make the rellenos for them, following their recipe. "Clif and I would come by and put them in the trunk of our Cad, wrapped in a thermal blanket, and peddle them out of the trunk," Wood recalls.

The Woods moved into their own plant in Blanchard, Okla., southwest of Norman, in September 1976, under the name Matador Processors. By then, they had three employees and were selling their chile rellenos to 160 Oklahoma restaurants. The Woods went out on the road and sold enough cases to cover the payroll, then came back and worked, she recalls, "until 2 or 3 in the morning, to get them made. Like the old bootlegger that made the moonshine, we made by night and peddled by day."

Clif Wood died of cancer in April 1983, and since then his widow has prevailed in land-use disputes and many other legal battles with neighbors, minority shareholders, city officials, tax collectors, and federal inspectors.

Sheltered by its owner's willpower in those crises, Matador has thrived: its chile rellenos are now distributed throughout much of the country. This summer, Matador bought around 1.5 million pounds of newly harvested chiles, and revenues in the last fiscal year topped $3 million.

Most of the chile rellenos that Matador produces are for what are called food-services sales-they go first to food wholesalers and then to restaurants and large institutions, like universities and hospitals. Matador packs its chile rellenos for several national froze-food companies as well as for sale under its own name.

Wood, who is 63, plans eventually to transfer ownership of her company to her approximately 45 employees through an employee stock-ownership plan (ESOP). But for now, Wood will press forward. She could be speaking for all entrepreneurs when she says: "You've got to have a backbone of iron and the physical endurance of a mule to do something like this; but it can be done."

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