Featured Article from Montgomery Life Magazine
Trump Card
Bethesda Native Steuart Martens Tries to Parlay his "Apprentice" Celebrity
By James Eppard
Photography by Walter P. Calahan
On the 11th episode of the 10th season of "The Apprentice," the reality television show where bright young professionals pit their business brilliance and cunning against one another to be billionaire Donald Trump’s next protégé, Bethesda native Steuart Martens was sacked.
"There is no loser," Trump said, "but Steuart, you’re fired."
A crushing verdict for most. But not an altogether bad outcome for a 28-year-old entrepreneur who would rather not answer to a boss. Trump’s show—a single-elimination sequence of MBA-style cage matches filmed over seven weeks—ostensibly seeks candidates for grooming into Trump’s gilded empire. While being under the tutelage of The Donald would have been nice, Martens learned years ago that he’s most content when he’s the one running the boardroom.
He runs three companies in the D.C. area and has Trump-sized plans for all of them.
"I want to make a name for myself," Martens says.
That's a tall order for a scion of one of the Beltway's more established families and a descendent of the Steuart brothers, who introduced Henry Ford’s Model T to the area in 1916. Steuart Martens’ father is president of Martens Cars of Washington, which includes a string of Volvo and VW dealerships. His mother, Catherine, meanwhile ran Make-a-Wish Foundation of the Mid-Atlantic and is now a vice president at the USO.
I've never wanted to just get a handout," says Martens, a Walt Whitman High School graduate. "Ever since I was a kid, everyone was like, ‘Why don’t you work in the car business?’ I don’t want to be in the car business. I never wanted to do that. I always wanted to do my own thing.”
His latest thing is a partnership in a wine and spirits distributorship, Tradewinds Specialty Imports. He started it on a whim with a friend three years ago with the surplus stock of a closed wine store. The company’s offerings have tripled in the three years since it started, and now the company is looking at expanding nationally and well beyond just wines and spirits. Martens is also an early investor, he says, in On the Fly, a privately held fleet of organic food carts that were a harbinger of the come-lately food trucks that have descended on D.C. In October he plans to revive the Taste of D.C. festival, a huge food and entertainment block party that has been on hiatus since 2003. And following on his “Apprentice” experience, he’s developing a television show (that he can’t talk about) to pitch and sell to producers.
Balancing that kind of load requires a special kind of endurance.
Race Night
"If you can get through Rick's Monday night workout you can do anything," Martens says, recalling the brutal "Race Night" circuits Rick Curl of the Curl-Burke Swim Club put his swimmers through. Held Mondays to allow a week’s recovery before meets, the hours-long club workouts are full-out competitive sprints, over and over.
"He did that to us because once you get through one of those, you're like 'I can do anything,'" Martens says.
"I think that's one of the reasons I feel like I can go out and do just about anything I ever want to do."
Martens was a natural swimmer as a child, and an elite one at Whitman and Curl-Burke, one of the region’s top swim clubs. As a senior in high school in 2001, Martens swam in the Olympic time trials in Sydney, Australia.
Through swimming, Martens developed an early work ethic. Catherine Martens, a single-mother since Steuart was 10, woke him at 3:30 most mornings for the first of two daily swim workouts; his brother Campbell, four years younger, went along for the ride. Other parents would ask her how she made her son wake up so early.
"No," Catherine Martens said. "You don't make your kid do this. They've got to want to do this."
At 13, Martens was on the U.S. national team, training under Rick Curl. The sport fed the boy's competitive streak.
"First thing anybody will tell you about me is I just love to compete," Martens says. "I hate to lose." Even today, he swims daily and sometimes goes head-to-head with high-schoolers in their prime. And beats them.
"That's his makeup," Curl says. "It's more challenging, perhaps, than some of the adult squads. And he's all about the challenge, I think.”
At 14, his mother insisted he get a job and connected him to a catering company, which laid the foundation for Martens' interest in the hospitality business. Besides learning the ropes—everything from waiting tables to cooking—Martens picked up a few intangible skills, foremost among them dealing with all stripes of people.
"He learned that not everybody's always happy with you," Catherine Martens said.
"It actually worked out great," Martens says. "At 14 I was making $25 an hour. I had a good job. I loved that. I loved everything that I did."
Martens, who today still holds the Whitman record in the 500-meter freestyle (4:37.15), earned a swimming scholarship to Purdue University, where he was an academic All-American four years in a row and earned a degree in management.
"I knew I wanted to go into business in some shape or form," he says. "I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. How I was going to do it I didn't know."
Relighting The Fire
After graduating in 2005, he went to work for a financial services company selling insurance. He stopped swimming and settled into a workaday rhythm that made him feel lazy and physically ill.
"It was about six months before I realized I had no desire to do this whatsoever," Martens says. "I didn't have a passion for it. I didn’t like going into work every day. I also realized I don't think I can ever have a boss again, at least I don't want to have to report to a boss every day."
The epiphany occurred around the same time a triathlete friend pushed him to run a marathon and reignite his competitive pilot. He did well in the 2005 Marine Corps Marathon, then soon after entered a triathlon, a test of endurance composed of a 1.2-mile swim, followed by 56 miles on a bike and a 13-mile run. The swim went well, then he started to falter on the bike as he watched others race past. Near the end of the run he hit a wall.
"I just looked at the pavement and stopped, sat on the curb and started crying," he says. "I was in agony. I was defeated."
Another runner coaxed him to the finish line three miles away. Afterward, Martens was resolute. "Then and there I was like I am never going to let this happen ever again." He trained, in earnest this time, for his next triathlon and won. Then he won a handful of other highly competitive high-endurance races, including the Great Chesapeake Bay 4.4 Mile Swim.
He had quit his insurance job without a plan, but knew he wanted to be in business. He fell back on his experience in catering and went to work for a food-service company in research and development, creating new recipes for high-end chefs. The CEO saw potential in Martens and financed an off-shoot business, CSI Express, a food distribution company that Martens would run as a partner. Business was good and Martens would eventually sell his stake—along with his share of an Internet sports blogging venture—when the Tradewinds opportunity arose in 2007.
"I got the entrepreneur bug," Martens says. "I said, 'I know how to do this now. I can start this from scratch.'"
From there, his was the same shirtsleeves story as any aspiring start-up: "When I first got started, it was me and another guy and we just kept knocking on doors, knocking on doors. At first we were sales guys, then we were logistics guys. We were accountants. Everything. Slowly, we got people to take over those things."
In every venture, Martens says, he's had skin in the game: "My own money or sweat equity."
"The Apprentice"
A year ago, his girlfriend in New York suggested he attend an open casting call the next day for "The Apprentice." He went, made it through several rounds of mock boardroom inquisitions and ultimately made the final cut of 16 candidates who would square off over seven sequestered weeks of filming the show last spring.
Martens was a semifinalist when he got "fired." In sending Martens off, Trump declined to call him a loser and called both the candidates before him "two good guys." Knowing all that can happen on reality TV, this was a good ending. Having been contractually kept in the dark about how her son would fare, Catherine Martens said, "The thing that impressed me the most was his integrity was still intact."
Now it's back to business and growing the company. The Trump experience taught Martens the value of branding and staying focused in the little things, something Martens says was never his strong suit.
"Before I went on the show, I just pumped all day long," he says. "That's how I got things done—super competitive, an endurance swimmer, you just keep going, right? The show really taught me to focus. If I'm focused I can do so much more over a period of time. On the show, if you miss one thing … you're off, you're gone, you're kicked out."
Today, the little things include hosting tastings at shops that sell his company's wine. "I like going out there and hearing people's reactions to our products," he says. "I think it's important. I don't care if you're the CEO of Verizon or my little business, it's important to see what your customer's reaction is."
On a recent Friday night at finewine.com, a wine shop at the Washingtonian Center in Gaithersburg, Martens poured an assortment of Spanish wines from his Tradewinds portfolio. Shop owner Cecile Roesch-Giannangeli said Martens brings a novel element to an event, a "bit of fun" to pique the interest of would-be customers.
On top of being charming, handsome, personable and semi-famous, she said, "People react well to him. There's a little electricity. Whether it's short- or long-term, he’s got it. And he's leveraging it."