Breaking the barriers
By Bruce Erskine

Entrepreneurs hear inspiring life story on women's day

Women are well-suited to become successful entrepreneurs because they are the most experienced consumer, says author and former corporate executive LuAn Mitchell-Halter.

"At the end of the day, I am the ideal consumer," she said in an interview Monday in Halifax, where she spoke at an International Women's Day luncheon hosted by Mount Saint Vincent University's Centre For Women in Business.

"I am the woman who is in the grocery chain shopping. I am the one who's bringing it home and I'm not a bad cook," said the former head of Saskatoon-based Mitchell's Gourmet Foods Ltd., a business started by her late husband Fred Mitchell and which she took over after his sudden death in 1998.

"So when it came to formulas in the lab, about doing private labeling for industry, there was a lot we could talk about."

Ms. Mitchell-Halter, named Canada's top female entrepreneur for three straight years by Chatelaine magazine, is the author of Paper Doll: Lessons Learned From a Life Lived in the Headlines.

The former beauty contestant, who sold her interest in Mitchell's Foods to Kitchener, Ont.-based Schneider Foods in 2002, acknowledged she had much to content with in establishing herself in a male-dominated industry.

"My particular circumstance was quite interesting because that's quite male-dominated, meat packing," said the mother of three, who called her business experience, which included negotiating a strategic alliance with Schneider after her husband's death, a journey by fire.

"People didn't look at me, who was in the Miss Canada Pageant...and say, hey, I'll bet she's a good meat packer," she recalled. "I had to break a lot of barriers."

How she accomplished that breakthrough forms much of her book and was the subject of her address to an almost exclusively female audience Monday.

"I think it's about opening our eyes," she said. "It's going to be pretty tough if we stay in a certain rigid box position. But when you come to realize that this isn't just a woman in a male-dominated industry, this is an ideal consumer, then we've opened a whole new box of goods that we can dig into. It's just phenomenal what men and women can do together in this world and specifically the business world."

Ms. Mitchell-Halter's prescription for business success has several key components.

"One is make a plan, but make a realistic plan," she said. "The second one is go gut - go with your instinct, stick with your instinct. And thirdly, find the seed for good in everything. There's a lot of doom-and-gloomers out there, there's a lot of people who will tell you it can't be done.

"But if you're feeling passionate that it's your place to go into, to give that gift to the world, you've got something that you bring, then you uniquely do not need to call 80 of your best buddies to say, hey, do you think I should do this?

"If you're really feeling it, you're going to have to do those things, you're going to have to go gut, you're going to figure it out," she said, adding she also addresses practical business considerations in her book and in her talks.

"I talk also about specifics, like how do you approach a bank, how do you go for corporate leading. There's a lot of nuts-and-bolts things that I think we can learn from each other and I want to put my hand out and lift people up."

Self-employed women in Atlantic Canada earned more than $440 million in income in 2001, said Joseph McGuire, minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities AGency, a sponsor of Monday's luncheon.