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Category:
Published: September 2007
Diane Curwick and Duane Lindsey's of Lindsey's Country Store reveal how their father's unusual family project grew into a booming family business.
Success Magazine: Diane and Duane, what does success mean to you?
Diane: Success means finding a good balance between a profitable business, and your personal and family lives.
Duane: It also means having a place where people come to enjoy themselves, and being known for quality.
SM: Farming is extremely demanding and time consuming. How do you find that balance you mentioned?
Diane: It was a lot harder in the beginning. When the store first opened, I was here all the time. I brought my children here from the time they were three weeks old. It was very difficult back then. Now, the business has grown and, because we have good employees, I'm able to take more time off. Our busy season runs from September to December. My family understands that they don't see nearly as much of me then, but I try to make up for it during the rest of the year. My kids have even started working here during the holiday season.
Duane: You have to make time to do things with your family. Now that my kids are grown, they can keep an eye on the farm, while my wife and I take two weeks and go away in early spring. The kids can contact me if there is a problem, and I can enjoy some down time, confident that the farm is in good hands.
SM: Your children are involved with the farm as well?
Duane: They are when they need to be. Everyone has their own responsibilities. My oldest daughter has two girls, so she's home most of the time with them. My next daughter delivers baskets for us occasionally, but she has a son, and another job. My two youngest daughters both have other jobs, but they're around when we need them. They all live on the farm, and they grow the vegetables that we sell here. It's truly a family run business.
SM: Did they learn responsibility and discipline through their farm chores?
Duane: Oh, definitely. They all had sheep and goats growing up. A couple of them had horses. It was their responsibility to take care of their animals. That's a daily chore; it doesn't matter if it's raining out, or 90 degrees, or zero. It still needs to be done. My kids know how to work, and that has followed them everywhere they go.
SM: When did your family purchase the farm?
Diane: My dad bought the 27-acre orchard in 1971. He purchased the 127-acre farm in 77. He was an engineer with GE, and eventually started his own engineering company. The farm was his hobby. He took on the orchard as "a family project," which really meant a way to keep his four boys out of trouble.
SM: That's a big project! When did you decided to open the store?
Duane: Immediately after we started harvesting apples, we opened a little farm stand. The first two years it was self-serve; the third, we hired employees. We bought a cider press and started making cider. Diane worked there until she left for college. After she graduated from Cornell, she started working for Agway, but she wasn't happy.
Diane: Daddy had been asking me for years to come back to the family business. He made me a deal, and I said "let's do it!" We built the current store on one of our old corn fields.
SM: Did you have a business and sales plan?
Diane: Not a formal one, but an informal one. When we initially opened, we intended to sell our natural meat and produce, the apples that Duane grows, cider and cider donuts, a few pies, and maybe some baked goods and jellies. That was our plan food would be our specialty. Then the plan expanded, because of what the customers were looking for. They wanted more gifts, more bakery products. We started out making apple and pumpkin pies. Today, we bake eighteen kinds of pies, fifty kinds of muffins, and all our pastries and donuts. We started with one plan, but business is market driven. You have to listen to your customers, and they lead us in a new direction.
Duane: No one envisioned that our business would grow as much as it did. The original kitchen was 12'x15'. As our business grew, we expanded it to almost six times its initial size. We're currently farming, plowing, or haying about 260 acres. We have a second farm, in addition to the original orchard and farm, and we lease land on top of that.
SM: Besides the apples, everything you grow, from your meat to your vegetables, is natural and organic. How did you decide to go into that market?
Duane: I don't know if it was a plan exactly. A lot of it is market driven. In the early 80's, we were heavily involved in the Green Market Program down in NYC, because there wasn't a big market here. We were doing seven farmers' markets in five days there, and there was a large demand there for the natural beef and pork we were raising. You can probably grow your meat a little faster if you add hormones and implants, but then it's no different than the meat at the grocery store. You have to come up with your own niche.
SM: The entrepreneurial engineer made a good decision. The family project has grown into a thriving business.
Diane: Years and years ago, someone told Dad that you can never go wrong buying property, because it won't depreciate. So, he invested in property. He's a very smart man.
Duane: But, it's a lot of work, and a lot of hours, for very little money.
Diane: Some people think that you own the land and the crops just magically grow. You think of all the expenses, the cost of the seed, of upkeep on the land, of spraying and fertilizer; it's a very expensive undertaking. Apples don't just fall into baskets on our front porch.
Duane: I always buy the best quality seed I can buy. On ten acres of sweet corn, I have over 1,900 dollars just in seed.
Diane: But, it's awesome sweet corn. Once customers try our corn, they won't go anywhere else. It pays to have the better seed, the better quality. We also grow a lot of unique varieties of apples that aren't available elsewhere.
Duane: Right now we raise about 45 different varieties of apples. In some of the varieties, we have up to five identifiable strains. This year, we have our first crop of Braeburns, and a new strain of McIntosh.
SM: Sometimes business consumes you, and sometimes business becomes part of you. Ninety percent of all businesses fail. Farms are going under left and right. You're thriving. What do you attribute that to?
Diane: Well, a lot of our success goes back to my Dad. He had a good vision. He knew to purchase the land when he did. Our farmland is on prime real estate; to purchase this land now would cost a fortune. He also instilled a strong work ethic in all of us with his family project. You talk about thriving. I feel like that is less about the business itself than how I am doing within it. Thriving personally, I attribute to being slowed down and getting my priorities straight. You really can be eaten alive, totally consumed by business, but there's more to life than that.
SM: How were you slowed down? How did it help you reconstruct your priorities?
Diane: Well, the first time, I broke my foot. I needed reconstructive surgery, and the doctor said it would take eight to twelve weeks to recover. I thought he was crazy. I expected to be back in two, but I wasn't ready. I was out for the entire summer, the full eight weeks. I had to turn a lot of the work over to my employees, and they did a wonderful job. I have excellent employees here. Their average time of service is about 8 years, some of them have been here for as many as 12. They know what to do; they took over, and they managed just fine. That was a real wake-up call for me. I realized I needed to get my priorities straight, and spend more time with my family. It helped me to see that I'm not needed here every hour of every day, and that I could take advantage of that. Unfortunately, I started to slip back into old ways. A year and a half later, I broke my knee two weeks before Christmas. I was here the next day, but I was in a wheelchair. I couldn't physically bounce back and forth like I usually do at Christmas. I was here every day, but I stayed in the back, making gift baskets and answering questions. The employees really stepped up and took charge. I was slowed down twice, and it helped me get my priorities straight. I am now willing to let God run my life, and I'm determined not to fall back into a mentality where I have to have my hands in every single thing. I run the store. I do all the book work and paperwork, and I manage the employees, but they're more than capable of handling the day to day responsibilities.
SM: Duane, running a farm is a lot of work. There must be times when you feel overwhelmed. What helps you to get through those times?
Duane: Having good help is very, very important. I have a cousin who helps on a daily basis, and we're involved in the H2A program. We have two workers from Jamaica who are in their seventh year with us. They're here from March until November. They work tremendously hard; I can depend on them to take care of whatever work needs to be done without much supervision. On a personal level, I truly enjoy my work. It's interesting. I don't do the same thing day in and day out; I'm not working in a factory making widgets. I do put in a lot of hours, probably about 65 hours a week, much more than that in the fall, but I work around home. If the family needs me, I'm available. It's been that way forever. There have been difficult times, but I don't spend my nights worrying about what's going to happen in the future. I try to maintain a positive attitude, and I think that makes a big difference.
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