TEST of TIME

Milford Lirette Sr.
February 25, 2015
Sweet Revenge! After losing in the finals to Ben Franklin last season, Terriers score reception; win Division II Title
March 3, 2015
Milford Lirette Sr.
February 25, 2015
Sweet Revenge! After losing in the finals to Ben Franklin last season, Terriers score reception; win Division II Title
March 3, 2015

What makes a business long-lasting?


Adaptability and accountability are two of the most important elements common to local businesses that remain strong economic players, advisors, professors and economists maintain.

“Mostly they are able to adapt,” said Morris Coates, professor of economics at Nicholls State University “They are able to take into account what current and future situations are like.”

The Bayou Region has a documented history of business owners whose entrepreneurial spirit has catapulted their endeavors into entirely new industries. Long-lasting oilfield service companies are a prime example; many of them had to grow as the industry they served underwent modernization.


“It takes some ingenuity but also the flexibility to adapt to these new situations,” Coates said. “And also staying entrepreneurial, not just starting out and saying ‘let’s manage what we’ve got.'”

LOCAL GROCERY CHAINS

Rouses, Frank’s and Cannata’s – are among the businesses readers might be especially familiar with and patronize on a regular basis, and all three have demonstrated the ability to change, each in their own way.


“Cannata’s has been in business forever it seems,” Coates said. “Rouses has been in business many years and all are also among those success stories. At Rouses, they are doing all sorts of things like selling sushi, and you see the guy making it right there.”

Among the changes for Cannata’s is on-site meat smoking; Frank’s has over time expanded its food-to-go offerings, catering – in the literal sense – to the needs of families with bread-winners pressed for time.

Cutbacks in oil production related to the market’s price drop is one example of how businesses that survive take a bad situation and find ways to adapt, whether through management of personnel numbers or development of services that even in a downturn are necessary.


“That flexibility, the ability to adapt but also the keen sense of how situations have changed and what opportunities this change presents, being able to keep on serving folks out there realizing you are going to have to do things differently matter,” Coates said.

Some businesses are particularly volatile and their very nature makes staying power difficult. Restaurants are one example, he noted.

“That is probably one of the most competitive areas someone can get into.”


Coates said. “The problem with competition is it keeps your prices down and generally keeps your costs up. You are competing not just for customers, but the same workers and so forth. It is an easier industry to get into and that makes it more competitive.

“In my basic economics class, one of the things I talk about is competition and one of the primary markers is where it is real easy to get into and real easy to get out of, if things start going south bailing is not all that difficult. If you are not maintaining you don’t have to continue to pump good money after bad.”

J.J. Buquet’s family has run Buquet Distributing for nearly 62 years; its multi-generational success, he acknowledges when addressing business seminars and counseling individual business owners, wasn’t


easy.

He serves as president of the company with sisters Andree Buquet-Casey and Michelle Buquet equal partners with him.

That multi-generational businesses have, by their very longevity, proven their success is undeniable, Buquet said.


Strong roots laid by a founder are part of the key to continued success, he notes, and the manner in which future generations work – particularly how good they are at working together – is a big part of the formula.

“So many businesses fail in the first generation, or they fail to transition to the second or third generation,” Buquet said. “They get sold to bigger companies a lot or just pull out because the next generation is either not interested or more inclined to do a different line of work.”

Business owners who want to see the torch passed must instill early on a love of the business, and a place for kinfolk.


“It is preparing the business for the family and preparing the family for the business,” is how Buquet puts it.

Flexibility is also, in Buquet’s view, a “huge component” for continued success.

“There are businesses that have completely changed what they are doing,” Buquet said. “Change is the only thing that remains constant.”


Fishermen who built boats for their professions generations ago in some cases found ways to use that talent to serve the oil industry, creating work-boat dynasties.

“They adapted to where the market had a place for their skill set,” said Buquet, who has had to make changes in his own field, which started strictly as beer distribution.

“We have long been a wholesaler for Anheiser-Busch our industry has undergone a dramatic change,” Buquet said. “Craft beers now are 25 percent of the industry volume. We have lost business to wine and spirits as well. We now market ourselves as beverage wholesalers.”


Increasing the product line has been essential to success, he said.

For businesses he has witnessed that did not survive the transition, Buquet said, personality conflicts between family members or drastic changes in spending styles both personal and professional can contribute to failure.

Management can foretell failure.


“Transitions can be very tricky. Dad gets older and is driving around in a Cadillac and in the next generation everybody thinks they should, too. But it doesn’t always work that way,” Buquet said. And while having a generation to pass a business onto is a good thing, he said, the reality of several branches suddenly being involved can affect solvency.

“Dad passes away and now there are brothers and sisters, and you go from the guy who started the business and ran it for himself to co-owners managing a small council or a board.”

While that can make for disagreement, Buquet said, other situations have seen it prove out as a good thing.


“Often, family shareholders can be an inexpensive source of capital,” he said.

Overall, business experts say that the free-enterprise system is the ultimate determiner of how long a business succeeds.

“It is sort of a survival of the fittest or survival of the ones who have a better entrepreneurial sense,” Coates said. “Stuff that works goes past the stuff that doesn’t, which foes by the wayside.”


Those who may find the greatest success, the Nicholls professor said, are those whose very existence is a threat to the way things have always been done. Henry Ford, he noted, built his business by destroying the way businesses had manufactured products in the past.

For any business to succeed – for one year or 60 – the principles, according to Coates, have the same basics.

“You have got to stay a step ahead and if you don’t you get left behind,” he said. “And yoiJi business goes under.”


While some businesses come and go, others, such as Cecil Lapeyrouse Grocery in Cocodrie, thrive and grow. “Mostly they are able to adapt,” Morris Coates, professor of economics at Nicholls State University, said of the longtimers. “They are able to take into account what current and future situations are like.”

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