Starting your own business while working a demanding corporate job might seem like it can never happen. Between family responsibilities and the security of a steady paycheck, it never feels like the right time to take the leap. For financial advisor Andy LaPointe, who spent 150 nights per year away from his family, the dream of entrepreneurship seemed particularly challenging.
Then, September 11, 2001, changed everything. Just weeks after giving a presentation in the World Trade Center, LaPointe found himself grounded in Kentucky, facing an eight-hour drive home. During that long journey, he and his wife Jennifer made a decision that would transform their lives—to build what would become Traverse Bay Farms, a gourmet food company that would go on to win 42 national awards.
Roots in Food and Finance
LaPointe’s connection to food started in his teenage years. With four uncles who owned Little Caesar’s pizza franchises, he worked in their pizzerias and commissary from ages 14 to 18. Working alongside his cousins, he discovered his interest in food service operations. After high school, his path took several turns. He earned his real estate license while studying at Eastern Michigan University, graduating with a finance degree in 1991. This led to fifteen years in financial services as a Registered Investment Advisor and Mutual Fund Wholesaler.
“Most people think running a business is like having a job in the corporate world. You start your day at 9:00 am, take lunch at noon and leave at 5:00 pm,” LaPointe explains. “That is simply not how running a business works.”
Building While Flying
LaPointe and Jennifer began by studying their local market. They walked grocery stores, visited street fairs, and talked with family and friends. In 2001, as the internet was gaining popularity, they focused on in-person research and testing. They discovered no company offered a complete line of gourmet food products in their region.
Their first product was cherry salsa, strategically chosen because their region of Michigan grows over 65% of the nation’s tart cherries and is known as the “Cherry Capital of the World.” This local connection gave them an immediate competitive advantage at street fairs, where free samples drew dozens of eager customers.
Instead of letting his corporate travel hinder the new business, LaPointe turned it into an advantage. He carefully planned his weekly travel rotation, using his corporate trips to visit food buyers in various cities. His pitch was deliberately short and simple: “Hi, Mr. Buyer, did I catch you at a halfway decent time? My name is Andy LaPointe with Traverse Bay Farms. Our all-natural products bring high margins and offer high-turn rates since they are made with as much locally grown produce as possible.”
Unlike most food industry companies that sent samples by mail, LaPointe delivered them personally. “During the follow-up calls to schedule a face-to-face meeting, some of the buyers would ask me if I drove to their office just to drop off a sample a few weeks back,” LaPointe recalls with a smile. “Of course, I had no reason to say I was already in the area for my ‘real corporate’ job.”
This personal touch gave him a distinct advantage, leading to face-to-face meetings with nearly all the buyers he contacted. He also used his corporate lunch presentations as opportunities, serving his products and turning attendees into potential customers.
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Learning from Early Challenges
The path wasn’t without its bumps, particularly when it came to their product packaging. Their original labels featured a dark color scheme of brown, black, red, and green—colors they thought would convey an established, premium brand. However, customers had a different reaction, finding the design “dark” and unappealing.
Despite this feedback, they pressed forward with a second-generation label design. But the criticism continued. When they learned about Entrepreneur Magazine’s nationwide contest for “America’s Ugliest Label Design,” they decided to enter. To their surprise, their label was placed in the top three, and as part of their prize, they received a professional label redesign. That winning design has adorned their products ever since, turning what started as a marketing challenge into an unexpected solution.
This pragmatic approach extended to one of the most challenging aspects of their business: working together as a married couple. They tackled this by establishing clear boundaries and roles from the start. Jennifer took charge of customer service and fulfillment operations, while Andy focused on sales and marketing. This division of responsibilities helped them maintain both their business and personal relationship, allowing each to lead in their areas of strength. They also put fundamental business systems in place, using QuickBooks to manage inventory and wholesale orders, while their website handled direct-to-consumer sales.
From Local Roots to National Success
Their breakthrough came unexpectedly when a journalist with Michigan roots featured their Michigan-grown fruit products in a well-known news outlet. “I still remember when my wife called and basically said, ‘I don’t know what is going on, but we have over 50 online orders this morning,'” LaPointe recalls.
Today, they’ve expanded beyond their original vision. Traverse Bay Farms offers gourmet food products, while their second brand, Fruit Advantage, provides fruit-based supplements. They manage two retail stores in Elk Rapids and Bellaire, Michigan, and their success has led to unexpected opportunities, including their products being featured at Oscar and Emmy parties.
Their Elk Rapids store, which they playfully refer to as “Northern Michigan’s Hollywood Hub,” displays numerous photographs of celebrities posing with their products at various Hollywood events. It’s a tangible reminder of how far their local Michigan business has come from those early days of street fair sampling and personal deliveries.
LaPointe emphasizes that digital presence alone doesn’t guarantee success: “The internet is not the secret to business success… A website is simply a requirement for doing business today; it is not the sole key to success.” His experience taught him valuable lessons: get detailed scopes of work before hiring professionals, maintain a physical presence alongside digital, prepare for flexible but long hours, test products with real customers, and look for opportunities in your current situation.
Andy LaPointe’s path from corporate employee to business owner shows that starting a business doesn’t require a dramatic leap. In their first year, they focused on market penetration rather than immediate profitability, tracking metrics like retail store presence, website traffic, daily online orders, and product turnover rates. His corporate salary provided the necessary cash flow to navigate early challenges while building their dream one small step at a time. Today, living and working from the same building in Northern Michigan, LaPointe has shown that success comes from turning obstacles into opportunities—and having the patience to let them unfold.
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