Berman: Resilience, dedication save jobs

This is a classic Detroit story -- a tale of hardship, pluck, endurance and pride, of friendship and survival.

Man goes on a journey, buys a struggling Oak Park hole-in-the-wall deli. After that first success, he doesn't slow down. Matt Prentice is a chef and an entrepreneur, so he cooks and builds -- a catering company, a steakhouse in Novi, the Coach Insignia atop the Renaissance Center, Shiraz in Bingham Farms, nine restaurants in all.

By 2008, he employs 550 people -- chefs, and maintenance people, sommeliers and servers, truck drivers and dishwashers, banquet managers and bartenders -- and he keeps thinking the economy will improve. But it doesn't. And he's distracted by a new project: creating an organic dining program at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital.

Meanwhile, the world of fine dining is in distress: The stock market has collapsed; General Motors files for bankruptcy. Nobody is planning fancy weddings or lavish Christmas parties. Tables sit empty.

"I should have cut back, a year ago, very very hard. I was thinking we had to come out of this soon. Instead, it got worse," says Matt Prentice. He had debt, a pile of it, by then and no cash to pay it back.

Changing the terms

Prentice has options, none of them attractive, but what keeps him awake at night is the trust of his staff, people whose faces he sees every day, some for decades.

After months of agonizing, the firm's assets in foreclosure, he and the bank work out a deal. A longtime friend, Stanley Dickson Jr., a Grosse Pointe lawyer and CPA, buys the restaurant company assets. Prentice gives up his stake in the business he began 29 years ago on Oct. 25.

Imagine this: He is 50 now, starting over -- still a CEO, but also an employee again, one among 550, leading the team he has so carefully pieced together over the years, but answering to the man, his friend, who owns the company.

The men worked out tough cuts with employees and creditors -- 10 percent cuts in wages, bigger cuts in benefits. They worked out new terms with landlords. They kept the company going, out of friendship and a sense of responsibility.

"Matt could make a lot more money than he is with me working as a chef, but he'd rather run an organization of 550 people," Dickson says. "Some things are more important than money."

'My fifth recession'

"This is my fifth recession and far and away the worst," Prentice says. It's a time when most of us are challenged to think about our lives and work in different ways, to recast dreams, to reach deep to choose what truly matters.

Matt Prentice chose to keep working long and hard, to save 550 jobs when another business owner would lock the doors and move to Scottsdale. He's the man on a journey, passing a stringent test of will and character in southeastern Michigan, 2009.

Laura Berman's column runs Tuesday and Thursday in Metro.