It is past noon and the bidding for grey sole at the Portland Fish Exchange is underway. Wendi White, general manager of the Exchange, sits on a metal folding chair in the passageway behind the glass wall of the bidding room, where a couple dozen men wearing caps are watching a screen in front that flashes information about the next lot of fish up for bid. Clipboard and fish list on her lap, pencil in hand, White looks like a fan keeping score at a Red Sox game.

Workers at the Portland Fish Pier had begun to unload 135,000 pounds of fish from 15 to 20 boats at midnight that day. White, who tends to work 60 hours a week, started a few hours later.

"I started throwing fish at 4 o'clock this morning," she says. She doesn't have to be at the auction Ð an independent auctioneer runs it Ð but she likes to be there in case any problems crop up. "I like to be visible to the customers," she says. "This is really what we're about."

White, 35, a petite woman with shoulder-length curly auburn hair, is wearing pearl earrings, L.L. Bean boots and a zippered jacket made of green nylon stuff a shade or two lighter than Army green. When she poses later for a picture, she clasps her hands behind her back and stands military erect-at attention, perhaps a habit left over from her days at Annapolis.

It's easy to take notice of White. Surrounded by the fishermen, fish dealers and bidders Ð mostly men Ð wearing jeans and the obligatory caps, it's tough for her to blend in, though that's what she aims to do. When she was first hired in 1998, she was viewed as somewhat of a novelty, she says. But that was more due to the misperceptions of people who knew nothing about the industry.

"Women are not new to the fishing industry," White says. They are especially prevalent on the business side, she adds, and she names several of them: Barbara Stevenson, Cheryl Leeman, Linda Mercer, and Judy Harris.

It was for her business smarts and credentials that White was hired for the job in 1998. She was one of 90 candidates, the rest of them men. She knew nothing about fish. She knows that while she was the right person for the job, her hiring came as a surprise to some who expected the exchange would be run by someone already within the industry.

White was midway through her second tour with the U.S. Navy when she decided to apply to business school. It had been a couple of people in Watereloo, the upstate New York town she grew up in, who inspired her to go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. It was her father, who ran his own small business, who made her think about going for her master's degree in business administration.

She earned her degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and was immediately hired by Ernst & Young, an accounting and business consulting firm in Boston. She worked on the consulting side of the firm, and over the next few years reviewed the inner workings of dozens of companies, focusing especially on the intersection between personnel and technology. The basic business processes are pretty much the same for a candle company or a grocery store, she says. "It's about work flow, what it takes to get something done within a company. So when I came to the Fish Exchange, I wasn't intimidated by the fact that I didn't know anything about fish."

When she saw the newspaper ad for her position one Sunday, it gave her pause. "If I could see past the fish part of it, it was a perfect fit for me," White says. Fish are scaly and smelly and wet and cold Ð not particularly glamorous. But what fish lack in glamour, they make up for in complexity and drama.

"It's a very complex commodity," White says. "It's exciting. There are no two days the same."

White calls the Portland Fish Exchange one of the top five exchanges in the world. The 23 seat holders on the Exchange represent the gamut of the industry. They buy for the small local retail markets; the in-state and out-of-state processors who supply the large-scale buyers like the supermarkets; and the brokers and wholesalers who deal with other fish markets, such as the Fulton Fish Market in Philadelphia.

"This is really the bottleneck point, and it goes everywhere," White says.

The Exchange services about 300 commercial fishing vessels each year. Located on the Portland Fish Pier, the Exchange handles 20 to 30 million pounds of fish annually. The fish are sorted, weighed, labeled and iced again for display prior to the daily auction Sundays through Thursdays. During peak season, the Exchange employs 50 people.

The Exchange was founded in 1986. Fiscal year 1999 was one of the toughest years, says White. Poor landings coupled with a competitor who drew customers away from the Portland market contributed to the difficulties.

"There were vessels that would go straight down 95 south and found a place to sell their fish," she says. Today, the Exchange is gaining market share, says White, by giving its customers what they want Ð accountability for the product and timeliness in getting it to market. There were times when a boatload of fish might have been lost or not unloaded on time. But not today.

As manager, White says she has been most effective at putting the right people in the right places and giving them the support they need.

"I'm pretty persistent," she says. "I push slowly."

At Annapolis she learned how to keep her wits about her in volatile situations, she says. Business consulting taught her how to ask the right questions.

Men have a certain pecking order that she has never quite decoded, so she ignores it and sticks with what she knows. Today, whenever a problem comes up, she asks: "What went wrong; how do we prevent it from happening; and how do we fix it in the future?"

Bernie Monegain is a frequent contributor to Points East. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

Published August, 2000

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