The company our father built was on the brink of collapse. In 2011, one of us ended up in a hospital emergency room, convinced it was a heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack, the kind that comes when you believe you’ve just lost the thing your father dedicated his life to.

J&C Tropicals, the Miami-based tropical produce distributor our father Jorge founded in 1965 after arriving in the U.S. as a Cuban exile with nearly nothing, was six months from closing its doors.

We had overextended the company we inherited, farming in Florida and Costa Rica, operating a packing house, running trucks and managing a logistics subsidiary. Then, a bad year for both farming and distribution hit all of it at once.

What happened next shaped everything about how we run the business today.

The Hard Reset

The most consequential decision we made coming out of the crisis was structural. We exited farming entirely and repositioned J&C as a pure distribution company. No farms, trucks or packing houses. We source fresh tropical produce from growers across Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, then move it efficiently to retail customers across the U.S.

It’s very simple and meant to scale.

We paired that with zero-based budgeting, calculating costs from scratch rather than adjusting last year’s numbers. The only question worth asking was: What do we actually need to survive next week? We did that until weeks became months, and the habit of questioning every cost before accepting it became part of how we operate permanently. Knowing exactly what you are and where your boundaries lie turns out to be a competitive advantage. Deliberately shedding complexity is a strategic act.

We had also been watching the demographic shift our father predicted decades earlier become a retail reality. When Adrian moved into sales around 2000, we were almost entirely dependent on wholesale terminal markets, a brutal, low-margin environment. National retailers were sourcing tropical produce through layers of intermediaries, paying steep markups and getting inconsistent quality. We started going after those accounts directly and landed top retailers.

When we began distributing dragon fruit 15 years ago, almost no one in the U.S. mainstream market was paying attention. Today, we are the top dragon fruit distributor in the country, moving an estimated 7 million pounds annually. The best time to own a market is before everyone agrees it’s a market.

That same instinct to build systems around what the business actually needs, rather than what’s conventional, shaped how we think about remote work.

Remote distributed work has always been a business requirement for us. It was baked into the model from the start. Our suppliers in Vietnam, logistics partners in Costa Rica and retail teams in Texas aren’t going to relocate to Miami. We never had the luxury of putting everyone in the same building and creating culture through physical proximity. We had to build something that worked across distance.

The Operating System that Made it Scale

We now faced a tough operational reality: sourcing from 10 countries, managing six remote teams and serving major national retailers with supply chains that required precise traceability from farm to shelf. Gut instinct and informal communication weren’t going to hold it together.

Around 2015, we discovered the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) and Ninety.io, a management framework built on the simple idea that every business, regardless of size or complexity, runs on the same six components:

• Vision. Does everyone in the organization know where you’re going and how you plan to get there?
• People. Do you have the right people in the right seats?
• Data. Are you running the business on a handful of objective numbers rather than feelings and opinions?
• Issues. Do you have a disciplined process for identifying and solving problems before they compound?
• Process. Have you documented and systemized your core operations so they’re repeatable and scalable?
• Traction. Do you have the meeting rhythms and accountability structures to execute week over week without losing momentum?

For a company stretched across a dozen countries and time zones, the last piece was transformational. EOS introduced us to a weekly meeting rhythm that keeps every team aligned on the same priorities, tracking the same numbers and resolving issues before they build up. We now track over 60 KPIs across the business, which gives us the kind of visibility we never had when we were running on instinct.

The result was a shared operating language across the entire organization, which turns out to be the thing that makes distributed teams actually work.

What We’ve Learned About Return-to-Office

As corporate America wrestles over return-to-office policy, the numbers suggest we’re not alone in finding that the remote model works. According to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, 98 percent are supporting some version of remote or hybrid work. Notably, 84 percent of employees at these companies say they can count on colleagues to cooperate, compared to 65 percent in typical workplaces, and productivity runs nearly 42 percent higher. The difference is the infrastructure around how people work together.

That has direct implications for hiring as well. RobertHalf’s January 2026 research found that 55 percent of job seekers rank hybrid work as their top preference, and only 25 percent would even consider a role requiring five days in the office. For us, the way we work is a recruiting advantage. The talent we need to source from 10 countries and serve national retailers doesn’t want to be tethered to one building, and we’re not asking them to be.

With the EOS, we were able to build clear accountability, shared visibility into priorities and consistent communication rhythms. Those are the conditions that produce the highest output teams, regardless of where people sit. Leaders who treat return-to-office mandates as a culture fix are trying to solve the wrong problem. The most useful question is: Do your people have what they need to do their jobs well, wherever they are?

We’re now tracking toward $80 million in revenue this year, with $100 million in sight, distributing more than 70 tropical fruits and vegetables from 17 countries to Publix, HEB, Walmart, Aldi, Safeway and Costco. The rebuild produced something fundamentally different from what we had been before. It’s now a leaner, more focused and structured organization. It’s the kind of distributed operation the original business was never designed to run. Our near-failure forced the clarity that had gotten lost in growth. For executives navigating complexity and distributed teams in 2026, that might be the most relevant lesson of all.