Mac Hay, The Fishing Philosopher

Cori and I are driving down Commercial Street in Wellfleet on a late April afternoon when a figure ambles across the road in front of us. Hands jammed into his pockets and hat pulled low over his brow, his sinewy frame has a gait of someone lost in thought. “I think that’s him,” Cori said as we pull into the empty crushed shell parking lot of Mac’s Shack, quiet in the off-season. I step out of the car and approach. “Larry?” asks the gentleman. “Mac?” I respond. “Nice to meet you.” This strolling fellow is Mac Hay, owner and founder of Mac’s Seafood. His layers of fleece, jeans, two-day-old scruff, and most of all, youthful appearance run contrary to the image some have of the head of a corporation with over four hundred employees, five restaurants, five fish markets, a wholesale division, and a newly-acquired seafood wholesaler, The Lobster Trap in Bourne.

“Tensions are high,” Mac calmly states as we walk to his second-floor office above his wife Traci’s art studio behind Mac’s Shack. Why wouldn’t they be? In less than twenty-four hours, Mac’s Shack would open its doors for the nineteenth year, and getting everything just right to create that sought-after dining experience enjoyed by so many takes a lot of work by many hands. Perhaps his composed demeanor stems from the fact that he’s been at it a long time. That his phone isn’t lighting up with urgent calls, texts, and emails says he’s got the right team taking care of things.

Born and raised in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Mac’s grandparents – along with a group of friends – purchased property in Truro where Mac and his family would spend their summers. As the teenage years arrived, Mac went to work. “I worked at The Busted Shutter,” he chuckles at the memory. “That’s a name that’ll take people back a few years.” At eighteen years old, he took a summer job from Carol Larson at Harbor Freeze on the sand adjoining the Wellfleet Town Pier. Since the 1950s, Harbor Freeze had been a place families visited for that truly Cape Cod experience of fried seafood, ice cream, and toes in the sand. The next year, Carol had Mac managing the place. The year after, she offered to sell Harbor Freeze to Mac. At the tender age of 20, Mac opened Mac’s on the Pier in 1995. “She was ready to retire, and offered it to me,” Mac remembers. “When you’re that age, you’ve got nothing to lose.” When he puts it that way, he can almost make purchasing a dining establishment before he could legally buy a beer seem normal.

“I was a sophomore in college, and I had a total of $5000,” he explains. “I borrowed $500 from ten different people. I paid them all back double in two years. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any other shareholders.” The growth of the business has been fueled by his belief in it. “Whenever I got a little bit of equity in the business, I’d take it out and put it right back into the business.” It was his way to finance Mac’s Seafood while eschewing outside infusions of cash. “The beauty of starting a business when you’re twenty is you can live on five or six thousand dollars a year,” he chuckles. “And in the restaurant business, all my food was covered. I just had to come up with rent, and I split that with four or five roommates.”

“When I got into this business, I thought I’d open up, make a million bucks in two months, and take ten months off,” Mac laughs. “I thought this was easy street! Little did I know… ” The reality set in, and the true operating schedule and cash flow of a seasonal restaurant on Cape Cod revealed itself. “The mortgages pile up, debt starts piling. You learn what it takes to survive a winter. You get comfortable taking out a line of credit to make it to mid-July when you finally get in the black.” It’s something that would test anyone’s faith in their business plan. Despite having grown to the size the company is today, the conviction Mac has still needs to be rock solid. “I mean, you run more than half the year in the red. You have to believe that the future will happen yet stay so present to focus on what you’re doing now to not let that distract you.” And on Cape Cod, things are magnified. “Our highs are higher, and our lows are lower. There’s a great lesson to be learned in that. When you go through those lows, the highs are higher,” he says. “It’s a great sense of accomplishment when you get through a summer after a particularly brutal winter.”

While studying philosophy at Colgate, Mac looked to other methods of educating himself. “Colgate didn’t have a business management program, so I looked for ways of advancing my executive thinking,” he points out. Working at the nearby Hamilton Inn, or (after college) working winters on St. John, the Manhattan Ocean Club, and restaurants in the Boston area gave him crucial lessons that he brought back to his own business. “I was focused on recipes, and technique of food,” Mac says. “Then it dawned on me that kitchens are about systems.” The procedures with which a kitchen operates can mean the difference between chaos and calmness during the height of dinner service. Hay’s passion is food, and he will still gravitate to the back of the house and the cooking line where the action is. “When I’m engaged in cooking at the restaurant or at home, the rest of the world just melts away,” he admits. “It’s a focus, even if you’re cooking four dishes, you don’t need to time things because you know it, you just feel it.” He found out that his way of doing things was not so repeatable when it came time to train others. “I learned that I like to work outside the normal systems.” Trying to get his kitchen teams on board with his unorthodox methods proved to be challenging. The difficulty for Mac was how to develop systems that didn’t include him. Enter into the picture: a tick.

“When I was micro-managing every recipe, I’d tell them how or show them how to do something, but not write it down,” he explains. “I’d say, ‘It’s easy. I’ve done it a hundred times.’ Problem is it’s their first time.” It wasn’t until Mac contracted Lyme disease that he was forced to create systems with him removed from the equation. Ironically, this was the point when the business really began to grow. “I learned so much about the business when I was removed from it,” he marvels. Had everything continued to run through Mac, the ceiling for Mac’s Seafood would have been a lot lower. Mac’s executive chef, Scott Robertson, oversees the restaurants. Operations Manager, Jared Chianciola, and Chief Financial Officer Sam Bradford (Mac’s cousin) are two more vital members of the talented team he has assembled to bring Mac’s Seafood to where it is today.