The Allaway family’s succession plan is a natural byproduct of their business plan and diversification strategy

                                                                                              _{^{PHOTO BY SANDOR FIZLI}}

On every plastic jug of Acadian Maple Products maple syrup, there’s a grainy photograph of the Allaway children—Cara and William, aged 6 and 4, respectively—collecting maple sap in their family’s backyard. The photo of the Allaway siblings was taken in 1982 in Upper Tantallon, N.S., where Acadian Maple Products is based. Today the now-adult Cara and William help their parents, Brian and Simonne, turn their family business into the province’s largest distributor of maple products. And just like the Allaway children, the business has grown up over time. In the early days, Brian replaced the original syrup pan with a 45-gallon drum for boiling down sap and ended up with more maple syrup than his family could consume on their own. “So I asked [the late] Jack Campbell, who was the owner of the Sou’wester Gift Shop, if he’d like to sell some that we would put in little jugs. About a week later, he called and asked if we had any more.” And as the company’s website states: “With this, Acadian Maple was born.” 

What differentiates the business from its competitors is that virtually from day one, it was a distributor rather than a producer. Allaway bought four one-gallon cans of maple syrup that first year and repackaged them. His wholesale success became the tail that wagged the dog and, despite attempts over the years to become a larger maple syrup producer, demand always outstripped supply.

As a result, Acadian Maple has now become the largest maple processor, distributor, and exporter of maple syrup in Nova Scotia. According to William Allaway, the company would happily buy more local maple syrup; however, many of the local producers have long-time existing markets, so it’s difficult to get more bulk syrup. For the European export communities where the Made In Canada label suffices, Acadian Maple brings in syrup from the three other maple-producing provinces—New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario—leaving the Nova Scotia syrup for the local market. 

Ironically, the business received a boost when Brian had a heart attack in 1987. “The cardiologist asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was a junior high school principal,” he says. “He told me to get a hobby that would take me away from work. I said, I know just the thing.” He and Simonne, also a schoolteacher, formed a joint partnership and in 1995 built a sugar camp in the Wentworth Valley in an effort to increase production. “The trouble was, we could never keep up with demand,” says Brian. 

Today Acadian Maple ships more than 75,000 litres of maple syrup every year. It kept growing, incorporating in 1997, adding new products, and struggling to source syrup. The tipping point occurred in 2002, when Brian and Simonne retired from teaching and William graduated from Mount Allison University with a degree in international relations. “William wanted to do something with the enterprise, to turn it from a hobby wholesaling out of our garage into a real business,” says Brian. “At the same time this property became available, and we bought it because it was close to home. It had a little building on it 20 feet by 40 feet. We hadn’t been in it two hours when somebody came wanting to buy maple syrup. Suddenly we were in the retail business.”

William came on-board full-time that year because he didn’t get into Saint Mary’s University’s MBA program. “They said I didn’t have enough work experience, even though I had run my family’s sugar camp and worked full-time at a ski hill,” he says. “But I’ve always been grateful that they turned me down. Now the only MBA I want is a Massive Bank
Account.”

Acadian Maple’s succession plan is a byproduct of a structural reorganization the company went through in order to grow the business. The impetus came from Cara, a chartered accountant who works for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Toronto. “She recommended that we go to an accounting firm, so on her advice we went to Grant Thornton,” says William. “After a couple of years, they said it was time for us to work out a succession plan. I must admit, at first I didn’t know what they were talking about. When it was explained to me, it made good sense.”

For William, the restructuring made sense not just in terms of his eventual inheritance but also more immediately in preparation to expand the wholesale operation and enter the export market.
“A business-continuity plan is the price of admission these days,” says William. “A lot of companies won’t do business with you unless you have one in place. It gives you a major competitive edge, especially with the big stores in Europe—they don’t want any liability. We have clients we have to fax certificates of insurance to every six months. They want to know that if the co-owners die in a plane crash, we can still fulfill their orders.”

Succession planning also eased the expansion process. “When we went to organizations like the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and the Business Development Bank of Canada, it was super easy,” says William. “We had our financial statements, our corporate structure—everything was in order.” Today the old building is gone, replaced by a larger two-storey structure that houses a packaging plant, demonstration area for some 200 tourist buses and several school tours each year, retail shop, and warehouse.

The expansion took about two years and required legal advice from the Halifax firm of Cox & Palmer and accounting expertise to create a family trust whose members control five corporate entities. Dividing the enterprise into different components insulates the export business from the retail business, in case one of them fails, while the allocation of shares and preferred shares among members of the trust makes for a tax-efficient transfer of wealth upon succession.

“It’s an interesting process because it makes you think about things that most people don’t want to think about, like what’s going to happen after you’re dead,” says Brian. “Maybe the rules were different 50 years ago and it didn’t matter as much, but now there are ways to do it well, and you have to find someone to do it for you. I’m not trying to anticipate everything that’s going to happen—you have to trust the organization you’ve set up to do it for you. As for the rest, it’s a big adventure.” Brian, who recently turned 65, says he has no concrete plans for retirement but is gradually withdrawing from his position as president and principal salesman. Simonne, 64, has already cut back on her workload since the company, which has 14 full-time employees, hired inside and outside accounting assistance.

CEO William says that the succession-planning process, which he calls “expensive but worth it,” showed the importance of this type of planning not just for heavy hitters with such last names as McCain, Sobey, Irving, and Jodrey but also for regular folks who are running a family farm or another type of small business.

The Allaways’ succession plan was the “icing on the cake” of a restructuring that is still working its way through Acadian Maple’s corporate system. “It takes a few tax years to flush out the old and install the new parts, but we’re working with all the pieces to move the company forward,” says William. The process has helped him focus on what the business wanted to do, as well as the family trust, and with the planning out of the way, he can concentrate on “filling the containers” with maple syrup.

Part of Acadian Maple’s diversification strategy is that it’s now acting as a house-brand supplier of maple syrup for grocery chains in Europe. It has also expanded its line of products to include maple-cream-filled chocolates and maple-chipotle sugar. Plus, it has expanded to other local delicacies such as Nova Scotia blueberry products in sauces, vinegars, and minces, while an interest in providing all things maple flavoured, including peanuts and barbeque sauce, has led it into other product areas. After experiencing supply problems getting maple-flavoured coffee, William has started importing and roasting their own line of coffees in flavours such as hazelnut cream through their subsidiary, New Scotland Trading.

Both Brian and William agree on the importance of corporate planning for tax efficiency, risk analysis, and succession planning. “It’s like life insurance,” says William. “You can’t put it in place too soon.” Brian adds that it’s important to take the time to do it right; over time, their management consultants and lawyers drafted a plan that was tailor made to the Allaway family and Acadian Maple. “There’s no such thing as an off-the-shelf plan,” says Brian. “We all had to sit down and discuss where the company was going to go. It was something we hadn’t thought about before.”