Hush before the Boom

The buzz about guidance from Springfield-based Hush Advisors is anything but quiet among local business owners. Specializing in small-business startups, sales recharges, turnarounds and product launches, Hush opened it’s Springfield office in September 2012 – moving the company’s home base from Ventura, Calif. – and hit the ground running.

Helping more than 150 clients nationwide since 1992, co-owners Gail Peterson and Clay Borchers collected local clients Oakstar Bank, Great Southern Insurance and Harter House before establishing a physical presence in the Springfield market.

A 2007 California transplant, Peterson started out as a loyal Harter House grocery store customer and turned into the 1605 S. Eastgate Ave. store’s marketing guru.

“She was a customer I would talk to as she came through and over the course of conversations we started talking about business and my business,” said Randy Richards, owner of the Eastgate store. “She just has a different way of thinking about things and really opened our eyes in a lot of ways.”

Using her West Coast knowledge of coming trends, Richards said Peterson introduced the store – which is known for its fresh meat selection – to Kobe beef before others in the Springfield area. Made from wagyu cattle and harvested in the Kobe region of Japan, the thickly-marbled cut of meat has become popular in the Midwest in recent years.

“We are stuck here in the Midwest, sometimes we just don’t see these things coming,” he said.

Richards said Peterson also helped improve the store’s fundraising strategies through a September breast cancer awareness campaign for Mercy.

“She had a breast cancer awareness fundraiser a month before national breast cancer awareness month. She just thinks differently,” he said. “We took her teachings and applied them to an annual fundraiser we do with The Kitchen and went from raising $20,000 a year to $87,000 in 2012.”

The Hush way
Interviewing every potential client before accepting a job, Peterson frequently turns down clients who are not willing to go the distance, saying there is no magic bullet for business success.

“You have to break it down to the heartbeat of the people,” Peterson says of her business approach. “Employees and customers are all alike; they have to buy what you’re selling. People tend to forget relationships, but everyone just wants to know they are important.”

The owners begin each project by going undercover in the business to discover what’s working and what’s not. Rolling up their sleeves to help business owners,  Peterson and Borchers honestly evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities, develop a business plan, define their points of differentiation, hone products and services and shore up financials and staffing.

“We keep it simple,” Borchers said. “We will not work with complicated business matters that require a team of CPAs to figure out the solutions.

“It is not a never-ending process. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, all in a relative short time period.”

And paperwork isn’t part of the game plan, Peterson said.

“We aren’t going to waste a few weeks and give you an unusable 30-page report,” she said. “We don’t do that. We don’t spend time typing, we spend time teaching.”

In addition to Borchers and Peterson, the company employs four or five secret shoppers in Springfield along with a team of business specialists focusing on marketing, financial and management.

The company also has a staff of eight to 10 secret shoppers in Ventura and currently has a location under development in Las Vegas.

Hush recently completed a secret shop at the West Battlefield Store of Hy-Vee Food Stores Inc. Store Director Mike Hoppman said Hush’s detailed report analyzing the store’s internal strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats was superior to the typical one to 10 scale ranking by secret shoppers.

“There is no magic answer to making a successful business,” Peterson said. “A business is a business and it doesn’t matter if you are selling car parts or watermelons, they all operate under the same basic principles.”

Small-business startup guidance from Hush ranges between $3,000 and $5,000, Peterson said.

All recharge and turnaround operations – which typically last three to six months – are quoted on a situational basis.

In the works
While the Springfield office may only be four months old, the business partners have been working for the past four years on their largest turnaround to date, the former Old Lady Baltimore warehouse, now I-44 Cold Storage.

A 120,000-square-foot building equally divided between dry and refrigerated food storage, Hush currently manages the warehouse for property owner OakStar Bank, while building the business’ clientele list.

“This building was in limbo and empty for years after Old Lady Baltimore went bankrupt,” Peterson said. “The bank wants to make it profitable again, so they can sell it.”

The building, 4550 W. Farm Road 130, currently houses a little bit of everything from 1,000-pound totes of French’s ingredients to Associated Wholesale Grocer’s staging props for food festivals, product destined for area Price Cutter stores and thousands of pounds of cheese for Dairy Farmers of America.

Peterson said the company is also in talks on a project for a local gym, continues to work with Harter House and the West Coast office recently has taken on a notable photographer.

“Business success shouldn’t be some secret,” Peterson said. “It’s just common sense.”[[In-content Ad]]