Make a plan, then plan again

Page 24

Smoking meat has long been a tradition for the Metis and in particular the Bennett family.

"My mother was an expert at it," said Art Yancey Bennett.

That's why the smoked meat business was an obvious choice for Bennett when he found himself without a job when the mines at Elliott Lake in northern Ontario closed a decade ago.

Armed with his severance pay and his life savings, Bennett bought a building and began to renovate it to turn it into a facility where he could apply the skills he had learned from his mother.

He managed to afford to pay for the building and much of the renovation work, but ran out of money before he could get his business up and running.

"The banks didn't want to even talk to me or even look at my business plan," said Bennett.

Eventually he turned to the Ontario Metis and Aboriginal Development Association for help and got the loan he needed and a lot of advice.

"The interest rate was high, but it got me the initial help I needed,'' said Bennett.

Now 10 years later, Yancey's Meats has customers from across North America. It employs five or six people in his high season in the fall and provides local Native fishermen with a market for the fish they catch in the Northern Channel of Lake Huron.

His products include smoked pickerel, pink salmon and sturgeon, as well as smoked pork and beef.

Describing himself as a sober drunk, Bennett credits his success to the determination he inherited from his parents.

"Trading is in our blood and Metis are survivors who never give up," said Bennett.

He's the town's former deputy mayor and his business is the second largest employer in Bruce Mines-population 600. He also serves on the board of the Canadian Council of Aboriginal Business and the National Aboriginal Economic Development Board. His smoked meats have won 19 awards from the Ontario Indigenous Meat Processors, his turkey kielbasa won the best of show trophy at a recent gathering of meat processors in Michigan.

The Bruce Mines area is a very popular tourist destination and a lot of visitors from the United States find their way to Yancey's Meats.

"Once they taste it, they are hooked. Some of my customers pay more for shipping than the cost of the product, but they like it so much, they don't really care," said Bennett.

It's been a long journey for a man who returned from a seven-year visit in Australia to work in the mines at Elliott Lake in 1978. A rigger by trade who built steel girders, Bennett found himself turning more and more to the bottle, he said.

He had worked his way up to shop steward and then onto the negotiating team of the Steelworkers of America union, but his drinking was getting in the way.

"Finally I acknowledged I had a drinking problem," said Bennett.

When Bennett overcame his drinking problem, he wanted to help others do the same, so when the union agreed to train him as a counsellor, he jumped at the chance and became a certified alcohol and drug counsellor who worked with his fellow miners who had developed drinking problems.

Life went well for a while, then a company executive warned him that things didn't look good for the Elliott Lake mines.

"He said, 'Art get out before the rush,'" said Bennett.

So in 1989, Bennett and his wife, who is a teacher, returned to their hometown of Bruce Mines.

With his wife's salary coming in, there wasn't a real urgency for Bennett right away.

"But I got bored," he said.

That's when he remembered the skills he had learned watching his mother smoke moose and deer to keep the family in meat through the winter.

"I realized I could turn it into a business," he said.

Even when he had got the business up and running there were some lean times.

"But people were very good to me. One customer paid me $10,000 in advance before he had even ordered his meat. He wanted to help me get over the hump. I got a lot of encouragement along the way."

The advice Bennett gives to any Aboriginal person wanting to go into business is to plan careflly.

"Plan and plan again. Know where you want to go,"' he said.