William Allaway’s time management strategy used to be simple.
“For years, I worked just crazy hours. I’d go three or four weeks without taking a day off,” says the chief executive officer of Acadian Maple Products.
“Most days included a three-hour round trip to our packaging facility. I got through things with just sheer brute force.”
Acadian Maple is one of those extreme growth tales.
A decade ago, Allaway’s parents, Brian and Simonne, operated it out of their garage in Upper Tantallon, a short drive from Halifax. Today, it has 20 full-time employees, customers around the world and sales in excess of $2 million.
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Just like many farmers, Allaway did it all, or tried to, anyway.
“Letting go is very hard,” says the 33-year-old.
“I have a vision of how I want things done or how I want a particular project to turn out. When you give it to somebody, it doesn’t always come back that way.”
Allaway’s parents, retired educators, remain heavily involved in the business, especially on the retail side and in the visitor centre, which attracts 35,000 people a year. But it’s the son who’s led the expansion, which began, oddly enough, when Allaway was rejected for an MBA program in 2002 because he lacked business experience.
At the time, his father was considering buying a former coffee shop to house the thriving sideline business centred on buying, packaging and distributing maple syrup, mostly to small retailers.
While his parents envisioned adding a little store and getting their garage back, Allaway soon realized the potential was much greater.
But there was so much to do.
The coffee shop renovations required a business plan, financing and retail launch. Expansion meant more wholesale and sourcing more syrup, largely from other provinces. Co-pack opportunities arose and new products were successfully introduced: first jams, butters and candy, then cranberry and blueberry items and later coffee roasting and fudge making. There are now nearly 200 Acadian Maple products.
And that doesn’t begin to describe it.
Quality control? Allaway became a “certified quality assurance manager” after training in the United States, and he tasted every batch.
Chief food safety officer? That would be Allaway again.
Market development? Allaway has been to 18 countries from Brazil to Russia to a big swath of Europe.
Somehow he also found time to project manage a second 6,000 sq. foot expansion of the plant and store, and create the visitors’ centre.
And if there’s a breakdown on the line, Allaway will dash from his office to oversee the repair effort “because every minute you’re down costs a fortune and that’s money you’ll never get back.”
The range of his duties isn’t any different than on a farm: production, marketing, risk management, finances and financing, buying inputs, making the big calls on land and equipment purchases, and on and on.
The difference is that on most farms, you can pretend you can do it all. Allaway couldn’t.
Even if he worked every second of every day, he couldn’t simultaneously be at a trade show in Europe, fix the labelling machine and meet with bankers. So he had to delegate. And guess what? It wasn’t easy.
“Sometimes when you give something to someone, it’ll turn out better than you expected,” says Allaway. “But often that’s not the case, so it can be very frustrating. And it’s also very time-consuming.”
There’s the rub: saving time takes time.
“Right now, we’re reorganizing our warehouse and I’ll be spending two hours every day there for the next two months, where I used to spend 20 minutes,” says Allaway.
“But when we’ve got the new systems in place, I won’t have to spend any time there. So it’s no different than spending $40,000 on a labelling machine. Eventually, I’ll get that investment back and be more profitable.”
The same applies when passing authority to an employee.
“There’s an upfront cost to anything,” he says.
“The only way to do it is to give people parameters, let them do their own thing and see how it works out. That’s how you find out what people can do.”
Don’t have time to do it all on your farm? Then you probably never will. Either you delegate to family members, employees, or contractors, or you stick with the sheer brute force method and try to muddle through.
The former will require a major investment of time and at first you’ll likely experience more frustration than payback.
But consider the alternative: crazy hours, tons of stress and, in all likelihood, important tasks being neglected or rushed through.
“My time is a commodity, I need to use it wisely,” says Allaway.
Maybe it’s time to think about whether you’re doing the same.
