Sask. called good place for business
By Heather Polischuk

LuAn Mitchell-Halter told a group of Credit Union managers Friday that many people wan to learn how to start and manage their own businesses.

She's been a beauty queen, an entrepreneur, a best-selling author, a public speaker, a wife and a mother.

But one of the things LuAn Mitchell-Halter is most proud of its being from Saskatchewan.

"It's true there's a certain chemistry here," she said Friday. "We're tough. We might not be not be perfect but what is perfect? I don't know, I can't define perfect. But it's pretty damn good. And we need to build on our strengths."

That was one of the messages Mitchell-Halter shared with Credit Union managers, as she delivered the keynote address at the association's annual meeting at Regina's Delta Hotel.

Mitchell-Halter talked about her life, from her first marriage to Fred Mitchell, president of Intercontinental Packers and Mitchell's Gourmet Foods prior to his 1998 death after years of battling cystic fibrosis.

Mitchell-Halter, now remarried, called Mitchell her "mentor," explaining how she worked to keep the business going after his death.

"I just felt like, I can't believe this is happening," she told the crowd about her husband's death. "I felt ripped off and angry."

After that, Mitchell-Halter took over as chair of the board and formed an alliance with Schneider Corp., to whom she eventually sold her remaining shares. Shortly after the alliance was formed, Chatelaine and Profit magazines honored her as a top woman entrepreneur.

It was a long way from the first time she stepped into a Credit Union at age 22 to ask for a business loan.

"I walked in there scared out of my wits," she recalled. "I'd just turned 22 years old and I asked for a bank loan. I'd put together a business plan with projections and all the proper formulas…but really probably wasn't the top candidate to get a business loan. But they did give me that loan.

"I don’t want to say I got lucky, but in some ways I did because they listened. They heard me. They heard and saw the potential in what I did."

Mitchell-Halter said she now uses her experiences to try to help others achieve the same sort of success.

"I believe there are a lot of young people who would like to do it, but they don't know how," she said. "So I try to go out now; I teach the tools on how to draw up a proper business plan. Not just young people but any walk of life, because people are starting now even going back to university at age 70, it's happening."

She also spreads the word that Saskatchewan is a good place to set up a business.

"I am a woman who did business in this province, not outside of the province and came home. I did it here, I built it here," she said. "I think we're bursting the bubble on some of the old idealisms. They're old-fashioned and they're not accurate. And then there are people like myself. We've broken the mould with an army of people from Saskatchewan."