John Picard’s early entrepreneurial career wasn’t exactly a bowl of cherries. Rather, it was one disheartening setback after another.
Picard’s father, Jim, was a Canadian peanut pioneer when he began growing them on his corn and soybean farm near La Salette, Ont., in 1979 with the idea of selling to big processors.
The Picards eventually discovered that American peanuts sold at half their price and responded by creating their own line of Ontario peanut products.
However, few retailers were interested in stocking product from a small, unknown company, so Picard decided to sell direct and opened his first store in 1982, the same year frost wiped out his crop.
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Picard survived all that. The first store did well enough to justify opening a second, but he needed more sales, so in 1990 he went for broke and opened a third in Oakville, a prosperous Toronto suburb.
“The thought was that we were ready for the big city,” he said.
“But we didn’t have the product line. There wasn’t enough in our store to attract people. We tried getting in cheeses and other products, but the business model just wasn’t complete. It didn’t work.”
Picard quickly cut his losses by closing the store and selling the property, but it looked like a dozen years of effort was about to end in tears.
“It was getting tough to keep current. We were at the point where guys were coming around to appraise equipment,” he said.
“So I went to my lender and laid it out for him: here’s where we were at and here’s Plan B. I argued it was a good plan and that increasing my loan was better than a fire sale. Luckily, I got the money I needed.”
The Oakville experience laid bare Picard’s fundamental problem: he needed a much bigger product line.
He used the additional line of credit to open a processing plant in a nearby town and began creating a dizzying array of peanut offerings.
Along with in-shell, salted and beer nuts, he also made honey roasted, hot and spicy, chocolate-coated and barbecue varieties, as well as chip nuts, which have a crisp potato coating and come in 16 flavours.
Picard’s Peanuts also offers cashews, raisins, coffee beans, pecans, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and 15 kinds of peanut brittle.
The concept has worked like gang-busters and Picard’s eight stores now attract more than a half million shoppers annually.
So is the lesson here that you need to learn from adversity? Partly.
When Picard saw how cheap the competition was, he began buying their nuts. Valencia peanuts grown on the Picard farm still have a place of pride in his stores, but he’s also happy to sell Extra Fancy Virginia peanuts and Brazilian cashews.
The years spent driving from store to store with a van load of nuts gave Picard a crash course in retailing, both in terms of what sells and what separates good retail operators from poor ones. These lessons are put to use every day in his stores.
The most important lesson from what he calls “the interesting years” was learning how to shake off disappointment and then refocus and reinvent.
“It took us more than 10 years to learn how to grow peanuts and then how to sell them,” he said.
“But if you’re in business, you have to deal with disappointment all the time. What’s important is that when you run into a wall, you have to bounce off and keep moving.”
Picard started watching the TV showDragon’s Denwhen his kids told him he’d get a kick out of it. For him, the most fascinating bit is how people react when the hosts stomp all over their fantastic ideas.
“When one of those guys tells someone their idea stinks, my reaction is, ‘so what?’ When something doesn’t work, forget about it and ask yourself, ‘OK, what’s Plan B?’ That’s why I say when you hit the wall, bounce off and keep moving.”
Setbacks will happen, whether you’re blazing a trail like Picard or trying out a new crop or financing an expansion. When they do, you’ll have a choice: refuse to recognize the flaws in your original plan, brood about how unfair life is or get moving on Plan B.
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