What does it take to be an entrepreneur?
Cora Tsouflidou thought she knew what it took. And she knew that she didn’t have it.
But Tsouflidou went ahead anyway and opened a breakfast-only restaurant, the first of more than 70 in the Chez Cora chain.
“I thought entrepreneurs had special talents or a business background or a rich uncle or something like that,” Tsouflidou said. “Today I know that entrepreneurs are those simple people who are working everyday and never give up. They are working, working, working to master a product and make it better than anybody else.”
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Tsouflidou’s story is inspiring for anyone searching for what she calls the “inner entrepreneur.”
In 1987, Tsouflidou was an unemployed single mom desperately seeking an income to support her three teenagers. The Montreal woman didn’t have high hopes of success when she opened her first casse crožte Ñ a snack bar with limited seating.
“I started out very poor and today I say, ‘thank God.’ It was not a big problem for me to sign a lease for a restaurant because if it didn’t work, what could they come and take from me?”
Tsouflidou not only had to ignore her fears but also the pessimists, which were nearly everyone.
“At the beginning, people all told me that just having breakfast would not be enough to make it,” Tsouflidou said.
“They said that all the time. You know why? Because they had never seen anyone who had made it just by serving breakfast. But now that we have made it, everyone is copying us.”
It’s hard to imagine Tsouflidou copying anyone; at the heart of her philosophy is the notion that how you execute your idea is as important as the idea itself.
“Your product or service must have something different so that people will choose it over all others,” she said. “That is why I say you must find a product and stick with it and focus on it and develop it and practise it until it becomes the best one on the market.”
For her, that meant coming out of the kitchen to talk to her customers. “Tell me about your favourite breakfast,” she would ask. “Tell me what your mother did that made it special.” She received so many ideas, her menu bulged to more than 100 items and Tsouflidou started being called the “Queen of Breakfasts.” Business was so good, she opened a second location in 1990 and then a third, at triple the size, later the same year.
By 1994 she was franchising and after covering Quebec, advanced into English Canada. Naturally, she was told her concept would never fly outside Quebec, but there are now 20 Chez Cora’s in Ontario, the Maritimes and Manitoba.
Today, Tsouflidou is a frequent speaker at conferences, eager to deliver her uplifting “you-can-too” message.
Does that also go for farmers?
“Absolutely,” she said. “They already have all that it takes Ñ the patience, the courage, and the hard work Ñ to extend their work to a little business of selling their product or opening a shop or whatever they want to do.”
Farmers know excellence is the product of their efforts and passion and “that the owner makes all the difference,” she said.
“The person is the foundation of the enterprise. That is why a farmer is suited to business. If you take a government worker, it’s much more difficult to inject an entrepreneur into that guy because he’s not used to the results of his work depending on his effort.”
Tsouflidou pointed to one of her proudest accomplishments Ñ perfecting a recipe for chicken pot pie Ñ to illustrate farmers’ other natural advantage. “With the chicken pot pie, I tried to develop a taste that was exactly like our grandmothers used to have Ñ it is not a modern taste,” she said. “So I feel that when customers eat it, it wakes up memories. That’s why I say that food, the decorations, the concept must tell a story.
“So if I had lived close to a farm and had been able to get his eggs, then we could advertise and say, ‘we’re selling the eggs of Joe Smith from the other side of the river.’ It already gives them a value.”
Of course, she added, farmers will face the same difficulties as anyone else Ñ things won’t always work and the problems will seem insurmountable at times.
“You don’t have to be any particular type of person,” she said.
“But you have to have will power. Most of the people who don’t make it are the ones who give up.”
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.
