Want to be a successful entrepreneur but don’t have a great idea for a service, product or innovation that will rocket you to the top? Don’t sweat it. Just go out and steal somebody else’s great idea.
Of course, steal is a harsh word. Don Triggs looks at it another way: “I’m forever grateful to my
competition.”
You may not recognize the name of this successful entrepreneur or his company, Vincor International, but if you drink wine, you’re probably a customer. One of every five bottles of wine sold in this country is made or distributed by Vincor.
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Sales have soared 13-fold to $650 million a year since Triggs led a management buyout 16 years ago, making it one of the 10 largest wine companies in the world.
Triggs could easily spend all day bragging of his accomplishments, so it’s worth noting when he credits his competition for his success.
“I’ve learned that you don’t have to have the best idea first; you just have to be the fastest to get onto a good idea when it shows up,” he said.
Triggs has been watching and learning from others ever since he left the family cattle farm at Treherne, Man., in the early 1960s. The globetrotting corporate manager was in England when he heard Labatt was selling the wine division he used to run.
Friends thought he was nuts when he rushed home to lead a highly leveraged buyout of the company. Back then, Canadian wine meant high tariffs and cheap plonk and with the free trade agreement about to fling the doors wide open to foreign competition, many figured the industry was doomed.
But Triggs knew otherwise. After all, his competitors told him so.
Niagara’s Inniskillin Wines and Sumac Ridge in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, which Triggs so admired that he later bought them, had already proven you could make premium wine in Canada. All you had to do was visit these up-and-coming estate wineries and taste their product to know they were onto something.
Getting onto a good idea isn’t that hard, but Triggs was playing catch-up and needed to go from plonk to premium in a hurry.
He responded by getting all grateful on his competition again, hiring a bunch of top winemakers from France, Australia, California and South Africa, who brought barrels of innovative ideas and best practices. Soon Vincor’s estate wineries, such as Jackson-Triggs, were winning prestigious international wine awards.
“I don’t think there is any substitute for being globally aware,” Triggs said. “The biggest service you do yourself as an entrepreneur is to get out in the world and see what all your competitors are doing, see what other producers are doing.”
But farmers don’t have the cash to go traipsing around the world hiring experts in this or that, you might say.
You don’t have to, said Triggs. He recommended volunteering for a farm organization that is active internationally or getting yourself
on an exchange trip.
Or you can do what John Gorzo
Jr. did.
In 1995, the Ontario vegetable grower decided the future didn’t lie with bulk production, but with specialty products with higher margins. So Gorzo went to California, the centre of the carrot universe, for the International Carrot Conference.
“No one was funding me, so I flew down to Vegas – because that’s the cheapest place to fly into – rented a car with unlimited mileage, and drove across the desert to check out this conference,” said Gorzo.
“That’s where I first heard about these different coloured carrots.”
It wasn’t long before he was growing red, purple, white and yellow carrots on his farm near Kettleby, north of Toronto. Since then he’s also added yellow, striped and white beets and black radishes.
Of course, grabbing someone’s good idea is just the start and Gorzo has worked hard at testing varieties and successfully marketing his produce to restaurants and stores.
His latest passion is globe artichokes, a crop supposedly not suited to Ontario. However, a test plot worked so well that last year Gorzo caught another cheap flight to Las Vegas and toured California farms in another unlimited mileage rental.
“It’s amazing what we found out talking to (artichoke) growers, researchers and seed company reps.”
And guess what? Upon his return this time, Gorzo was besieged by neighbours eager to learn what he had found out. They’re getting the idea.
The next step is to do what Triggs, Gorzo and other bright entrepreneurs do: get out in the world, find out what the innovators are up to and see if you can’t put their ideas to work in your operation.
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the news desk section at www.farmcentre.com. The views stated here are for information only and are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
