Ever dreamed of doing something completely different on your farm – and then told yourself, “Don’t be a fool, stick with what you know?”
Petra Cooper had that dream. She was once a big-time corporate executive. Today, she’s running an artisan cheese plant near tiny Picton in Ontario’s picturesque Prince Edward County.
Of course, this wasn’t an overnight transformation. Cooper knew zilch about farming and food production. But 18 years as an executive with McGraw-Hill and other book publishers taught her a thing or two about business planning, so she tackled the creation of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co. with the precision of a NASA space mission.
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Over the past few years, Cooper has attended cheese making courses, visited more than 20 cheese makers in Ontario, Quebec, the United States and Europe, and studied the heck out of consumer trends in gourmet cheese sales.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of knowledge that Cooper has painstakingly built. Businesses call that proprietary research and go to great lengths to keep what they know a secret.
But not Cooper. You want to know about her market research, sales and production targets, business plan or building design documents? Just ask.
“I tell everybody what I’m doing,” Cooper says. “I’m always willing to share what I’m doing and ask people for their opinion, advice or feedback. So I not only get a lot of information in return, but also a whole network of people I can draw on.”
Cooper never warmed to the corporate world’s obsession with secrecy and found it even less sensible in the world of small business.
“It’s all in the execution. The idea means nothing if you don’t execute well,” she says.
“And by telling people what I’m doing and asking for their advice, I feel like I now have a hundred advisers.”
Cooper and husband Shawn, also a successful corporate executive, have put a considerable part of their accumulated wealth into the $1.8 million facility, which is set to begin cheese production early next year. Naturally Cooper obsessed over her business plan, costing “everything right down to the cleaning fluid.”
Nevertheless, the business plan she started with is practically unrecognizable to the one she has now, largely because of information she’s picked up from others.
Take, for example, wholesaler discounts, something Cooper never considered until she heard stories about how other niche cheese makers had stumbled over this key issue.
“They get into the business and then realize they’ve got to get their volumes up,” she says.
“But if you’re going to wholesale your product, you’ve got to build a cost structure and a pricing structure that allows the wholesaler to take their piece, but still leaves you with sufficient profit.”
Those factors, in turn, influenced the size of her plant. And that’s just one of dozens of critical issues Cooper wrestled with – and drew on her network to help her with.
“I don’t sit in a room and think all this up myself,” she says, noting she also advises others on their business plans.
Your dream of doing something different is likely far less radical than Cooper’s. Maybe it’s built on leveraging a skill you have now into something bigger, such as a custom welding shop or an on-farm bakery. If you’ve shared your dream with anybody, it’s likely an inner circle of people you trust: your family, friends or accountant.
But why stop there? Why not talk to potential customers and suppliers? Or people in similar businesses who won’t be direct competitors? Or anybody else who might have valuable advice?
“Don’t be afraid to tell others about what you’re doing,” Cooper says.
“It’s pretty unlikely that someone will steal your idea, but you will find lots of people willing to help you.”
Of course, if you follow that advice, everybody is going to know what you’re up to. But is that such a bad thing?
Glenn Cheater is editor of the 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 at www.farmcentre.com.
