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“Heinz and I founded Greenfield Hospitality Services Inc. on April 1, 1998. Our objective was to get out of the corporate rat race, and do more rewarding work on our own terms. We had envisioned working in our respective area of expertise: I was to focus on hospitality sales and marketing projects, whereas Heinz would focus on food & beverage consulting.
I was the first one to quit my corporate job. We stayed in Toronto, but the idea was that we’d eventually relocate to Eastern Ontario, where we had a vacation property. A big motivating factor was our daughter, who was then two. We wanted her to grow up in a smaller community where we could spend more time together as a family.
From the outset we didn’t want the company to bear our name. We chose the name “Greenfield” because it’s the name of the small hamlet where our country house is located. The village of Greenfield is so small it doesn’t even have its own postal address — our mailing address actually says, “Alexandria, ON.” We also liked the name Greenfield because green is the colour of health, growth, prosperity, and freshness – all the qualities we were dreaming to find in our new life in North Glengarry Township.
The big move took place in May 1999. At first we worked out of our house, because it was just the two of us. Heinz was consulting for Starwood Hotels, working on a centralized food procurement program. My main client was Resorts Atlantic, a consortium of independently-owned resorts in Atlantic Canada who needed to market their facilities to Ontario and Québec meeting and event planners. The work was steady and we were enjoying ourselves.
There was one major complication: our house was located in an area where we could only get internet dial-up service. My work required transfers of large files, and the whole process was agonizingly slow. In December 2000, we rented office space in nearby Alexandria, a town of 3,300 people, where high-speed internet was available.
In 2000, one of the activities I had planned for Resorts Atlantic was a lead generation campaign which included direct mail followed by a follow-up call to a list of approximately 2,500 meeting and event planners. It was a small program and I thought it would be rather simple to hire a company to make the calls for us. Well it wasn’t. I contacted 18 companies in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto looking for a “telemarketing support” service. Only two companies even bothered to return my call. One VP of a large call centre operation in Montreal laughed when I told him the size of the list we had to call upon; they could call on 2,500 companies in a day, he said! The other company was more sympathetic, but we couldn’t afford what they were quoting. Reluctantly, I scrapped that part of the plan.
But the following year, in May 2001, we hired our first four employees to start the Teleservices Division of the company. None of our employees had any prior experience in the hospitality or meetings industry, but I knew they could do the job with the proper training and guidance.
From that time on, we have not looked back. We continued to do lead generation for Resorts Atlantic for another two years, and also took on data cleansing projects for industry publications such as Rogers Media M&IT Magazine.
Soon the teleservices work kept us so busy we turned our attention to it full-time; Heinz stopped his consulting work to focus on our accounting and payroll (and thank goodness he did since I hate accounting!). We outgrew our first Alexandria address at 139 Main St. South and moved to our current building in August 2002.
Our first association project was for the Continental Automated Buidlings Association (CABA) in 2003. One of our agents called on Laura Chajkowski, the association’s meeting planner, looking to find out about her events for a hotel client in Toronto. Recognizing that we were calling from an Ottawa number, she questioned the agent who was speaking with her about who we were and what we did. We never introduce our calls as coming from Greenfield, though if asked we explain how the said hotel or CVB has hired us to work on their behalf.
When Laura heard that we did “data cleansing” she asked to speak with me. She was excited to hear that a company who understood the meetings industry was available to do this kind of work. She hired us to update a list of approximately 5000 potential sponsor and exhibitor records!
As we continued to work with more associations and various publishing firms, we decided to drop the “hospitality” part of our name. While it’s still part of our legal name, we now just go by “Greenfield Services Inc.”
We now have 19 people in Alexandria, and one more team member working remotely. We’re celebrating our 12th anniversary this year. We really are living our dream: living and working in a small community, helping clients grow their business right across North America. We’ve been so blessed.
Thank you for visiting our website.”
– Doreen Ashton Wagner (March 2010)
