Pete Luckett could be a poster boy for entrepreneurship.
He’s not only created a multimillion-dollar business from scratch, but had a blast doing it.
The founder of Pete’s Frootique is a marketing whiz who lives by the motto, “if you can make them smile while taking their money, you’ve got it made.”
He learned the fruit-and-veg trade as a 16-year-old in his native Nottingham. Despite 30 years in the Maritimes, his lilting English accent is undiminished and his energetic enthusiasm never flags, which are two reasons why Luckett was able to go from an 1,800 sq. foot stall in a mall in Bedford, N.S., to a full-fledged grocery 10 times that size in just a decade.
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Appearances on local TV shows made him a household name, which led to a successful sideline business as a motivational speaker.
Luckett has travelled North America, talking about how to turn customers into “raving fans” and also about what he considers the basis of his business: a workforce that performs what he calls “the magic.”
“To attract customers, the first thing you have to do is attract staff and create a destination workforce,” he says. “Being an attractive employer should be one of the ultimate objectives of any business.”
For a long time, Luckett was able to manage that, along with everything else in his frantic work week.
“You’d be amazed how many plates I was trying to keep spinning,” he says. “I was working 70 or 80 hours a week and trying to keep in contact with everybody. It’s natural to get into that mode where you think no one can do it better than you.”
But eventually there wasn’t enough Pete to go around. The Bedford store grew to 125 employees, and that number doubled when he opened a second location in Halifax in 2004. So he hired a human resources manager and, to his surprise, discovered things didn’t go downhill.
“I’ve always been one for blowing me own trumpet, waving the flag, and doing all the stuff I do to attract attention,” he says.
“But over the last few years, the role of leadership has passed from me to an incredible team. They’re doing a much better job than I could ever do.”
Luckett had set the standard for enthusiastic, friendly service, but the HR managers had time to train staff and make them feel valued.
“There’s a lot that goes into it,” says Luckett. “There are books written about this, which I have since found out about. It makes me shudder when I read them. It’s challenging for a smaller business when you’re working day-to-day, trying to get things done, and running around putting out fires. It’s hard to have that big-picture perspective and not say, ‘do that. Do it now. Do it fast. And don’t answer back.’ ”
Stepping back allowed Luckett to buy a farm in Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Valley and start Luckett Vineyards, which has a store and bistro that employs 25 seasonal workers.
It’s more plates to spin, but personnel management won’t be one of them. He recently signed up two of his three year-round managers for government-subsidized HR training.
“It’s a week-long workshop worth about $10,000, and you can get it for about $400,” says Luckett. “Ten grand of human resources training is a giant lump of goodness, in my mind. I wish I could go.”
If your farm enterprise has you feeling stretched, you might want to follow Luckett’s example. Many entrepreneurs think personnel management can’t be delegated, even when they don’t have the time to do a proper job of it. Luckett disagrees.
“Every businessperson I run into says, ‘oh Pete, you can’t get good people,’ ” he says. “Maybe it’s true, but you can create and develop them. And that doesn’t happen by accident. There has to be a driving force that makes that happen.”
If you can’t be that driving force, maybe it’s time to develop one.
