Most business books promise the moon and deliver a PowerPoint. Terry Conway’s new release, Business is Simple: From a Family Cottage Business to World Processing and Markets, takes a refreshingly different approach — it actually tells you what happened, what broke, and what worked. Spoiler: a lot broke.

When Conway walked away from a comfortable seat as CFO of Perdue Farms back in 1981 to take ownership of a soft crab operation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he wasn’t inheriting a turnkey business. He was inheriting a mess. As he puts it in the book’s introduction: “What greeted me as the new owner was not a well-oiled machine, but chaos. Resources were scarce, decisions were based on limited experience, and crucial business functions needed to be built from scratch.”

Fast forward four-plus decades, and that scrappy little Chesapeake Bay cottage operation — Handy Seafood — pulled in $60 million in sales in 2024 and stretches across multiple continents.

So how does a guy go from soft crabs in Salisbury to running a multinational seafood brand? According to Conway, it boils down to three rules he refused to overcomplicate:

– Continuously develop superior products.
– Process at a competitive advantage.
– Develop leads for sales to close.

That’s it. That’s the whole framework. The reason it works, Conway argues, is that everything else — the international expansion, the regulatory headaches, the supplier wars, the family succession planning — has to serve those three priorities or it’s just noise.

Business is Simple is part memoir, part manual, and part globe-trotting survival story. Readers tag along on what the publisher accurately describes as “Indiana Jones-like” adventures: a tilapia farm in Costa Rica, a beachhead in Thailand, a crabmeat startup in India. There are competitors trying to box him out, government barriers trying to slow him down, and a handful of mistakes Conway is honest enough to own up to. It’s the kind of book that reads less like a lecture and more like a long, useful conversation with someone who’s actually done the work.

The target audience is wide on purpose. Entrepreneurs trying to figure out their next move, family-business operators thinking about succession, and recent grads who want to see what business principles look like outside a textbook will all find something to underline. “I hope this book provides the structure for your great decisions and helps scale your own extraordinary business adventure,” Conway writes.

A quick note on Conway himself, because the résumé is genuinely wild: He’s a Notre Dame grad with an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, a former Touche Ross adviser and Wall Street investment analyst, a guest lecturer at Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins, an Eagle Scout, a military veteran, and — because apparently sleeping is for amateurs — a Kona Ironman. He handed voting control of Handy Seafood to his five adult children in 2016 and now serves as Executive Consultant to the Board.

Business is Simple: From a Family Cottage Business to World Processing and Markets is out now from Publish Your Purpose (Release Date: March 15, 2026; ISBN-13: 979-8887972206).

Grab a copy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Simple-Cottage-Processing-Markets/dp/B0GM3FYY1P

For more on the author, visit http://www.terryconway-bis.com.