Most people wake up in the morning and their first thought is: “Shower or jog?” or maybe “Coffee at home or latte from the drive-thru?” Charlie, my entrepreneur husband, wakes up (usually before 4 am), jumps out of bed and the first thoughts in his usually jam-packed day are: “What to do? Where to go? Who to call?”
People often tell me that Charlie is one lucky son of a gun. There may be some truth to that, but as one of my favorite high-school history teachers wrote in my yearbook: “I won’t wish you luck, because talented people always make their own”. That saying always stuck in the back of my mind, and the more I watch my husband, the more I know it's true. What looks like an ‘overnight success’ actually represents 40-odd years of dedicated focus and total personification of the mantra: Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. In fact, what on the surface might look a lot like luck is more realistically a case of preparation meeting opportunity, through sheer hard work and determination.
Case in point: During the first 2 years of building our business, we each worked at full-time jobs, in addition to having our 2 toddlers in tow. On top of that, we were full-on commuting machines, driving 3 hours back and forth between our ‘day jobs’ in the city and the orchard, moonlighting in order to bring our ice cider venture to fruition.
We had also hired a young couple to take care of the orchard and farm at that point. To help balance our bank account, rather than using the property as a second home when we were in the country - as we had originally intended - we asked our first employees to live in the farmhouse. This defeated the entire purpose of buying our 'get-away farm' in the first place. Additionally, we had already sold our house in the city to finance everything in the country, including our new business. As a result, we now had nowhere to live! Funny how things work out. So, we ended up renting a house in Montreal while doing all the initial start-up of our ice cider business. We thought the move to renting would be the only real change to our lifestyles - boy, were we wrong!
The amount of work seemed to grow exponentially with each new day. The little details were incredible and plentiful – partly, because we had taken on a business that involved all aspects of transformation: from tree to apple, to pressing, fermentation, blending, bottling, corking, labeling, marketing and distribution. The learning curve was huge.
I remember very clearly driving down to the farm with the kids safely tucked in their car seats every weekend to see how things were progressing. In the short time we had for each orchard visit, with the kids running around the property, we reviewed the work being done, did what we could while there, and, made plans with our cider maker and the couple we had hired to manage the orchard and on-premise tasting boutique. Weekend visits quickly became twice-a-week trips. Twice-a-week visits morphed into more regular visits. We had no choice given all the work that needed to be done and given the fact we were still living in the city.
Only at this point, in our first year of production, did the amount of work that was going to be involved with getting this startup off the ground truly start to hit home. It didn’t matter; we were all-in at this point. As we held our collective breath to see whether things would take off, despite the uncertainty and grind, we shared a very palpable excitement about what lay before us.
Starting any business is a lot of work, with incredible demands on all resources - time, money and emotions - especially when your husband is still working another job, you are working on your PhD, and you are simultaneously taking care of your two young children.
Our original, naïve vision of overseeing the ‘birth’ of this company, from the distant, manageable and balanced perspective of 'Weekend Warriors' - spending a couple of days a week on the farm to guide and direct the various steps and stages of preparation and planning - could not have been more wrong, or misguided. Nope. Luck was not going to win the day. Bring on the elbow grease.
