Setanta, can can visit Jackalope
Setanta wrote:While in the U.S., there are many must see things for you to cover, so many, that i despair of you accomplishing them all.
To start, as you will be in the west, you will need to see if you can sight
the wild and cunning jackalope . . .
You Don't Know Jackalope
Michael Barrier
Many small-business owners find themselves making a disagreeable tradeoff as their companies grow. The owner who loves working with his hands, for example, may find himself spending much of his time behind a desk.
Darby McQuade, though, has found a way to maintain a growing business and his love for prairie dogs, too.
McQuade, who turns 58 in October, founded a store called Jackalope, in Santa Fe, N.M., in 1976. What is a jackalope? Think of a jackrabbit with miniature deer antlers--but don't think too long, since they don't exist (or do they?). Jackalope specializes in handmade goods from around the world, Mexican pots foremost among them, but the inventory includes clothing, jewelry, furniture, tinware, and rugs. McQuade buys many of the products himself on trips to places like Indonesia, China, and Morocco.
In keeping with McQuade's own unique background--he abandoned a career as an investment banker to become a hippie in the 1960s--Jackalope has always been an amiably eccentric retail establishment. You don't go to Jackalope just to buy merchandise: You go for the whole experience. Thus, there is live music on weekends, a petting zoo, and 40 prairie dogs that inhabit a "village" at the center of the store complex.
Even so, McQuade has never been indifferent to business realities. He brought in a management consultant about 10 years ago to help boost his profits, and he hired a professional manager soon after that. In 1994, he began expanding by opening more stores. To protect the original store from debt, he created a separate company, Jackalope International; he opened the new stores by raising $1 million through a public offering limited to New Mexico residents (and thus not subject to federal scrutiny).
Three new Jackalope stores have since opened, two in Albuquerque, N.M., and one in Denver. The 60-employee Santa Fe store, which benefits from tourist traffic, had $7 million in revenues in 1999. The new stores, with about three dozen employees, had combined revenues of $4 million.
As sole owner of the original store and majority owner of Jackalope International, McQuade was CEO of both companies at first. Eventually, though, McQuade was thrown off the horse by ill health, and his general manager, Bruce Barr, had to take charge.
McQuade and Barr had trouble "adjusting to roles" during his recuperation, McQuade says. "We finally realized that Santa Fe is different; it's really a very personal thing for me. It's really run more as my personal creative expression." The other stores--without the tourist traffic and prairie dogs--are more traditional businesses.
"When I finally got back on my feet," he says, "I really wanted to do it my way" at the Santa Fe store. He says that while he's concerned about a worthwhile shareholder return on the publicly held company, he's the only shareholder in the original Jackalope store. His priorities for the original store, then, were different than those that would concern the newer stores.
His solution was to make Barr the CEO of Jackalope International. Based now in Albuquerque, Barr manages the stores there and in Denver, as well as Jackalope's Internet site
www.jackalope.com, and he'll run any other new outlets.
So the two companies are each blazing their own trails.
McQuade remains the CEO of the original Jackalope, and he manages the Santa Fe store himself--the way he wants. "We realized that this was a different business," McQuade says. "In the public company, there's a lot more emphasis on numbers." Of the Santa Fe Jackalope, says McQuade, "This is my show."
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