Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of stories about local entrepreneurs.

By Molly Lovell

Staff writer

Husband and wife team Sheila Speckin and Kim Knight run Maine Buck Nuts out of North Dam Mill in Biddeford. The Saco residents began making the nuts in 2007 at take-out stand they ran on East Grand Avenue in Old Orchard Beach, a completely different venture than what they did in their previous life – Speckin worked in real estate and the corporate world for several years while her husband owned a camera shop.

How did you start out?

We had a little take out place in Old Orchard and we started making the nuts just because it was something different. We used to get them in Boston, but there was nowhere here that you could buy them so we started to make them and bring them around to little businesses and said, here’s 20, if they sell, you can pay me. I was no sooner back to our little place at the beach and people were calling and saying they needed more. I said “well gee, we’ve got something here.”

How did you come up with the name?

There were little bags and we sold them for a dollar. We said, “Well, we’ll sell them for a buck and call them Buck Nuts.”

 This will be our third summer and by the end of that (first) summer we needed another certified facility that’s health approved and everything, where we could make them and kind of take it to the next level. So we were looking around and we met Doug Sanford who owns the mill here. He’s a wonderful person, very accomodating, he is really warm to small businesses. What we saw here is that, we have 1,000 square feet now, we’ll soon be expanding and because the mill is so flexible, we can expand to 2,000, 3,000 – how ever many square feet we need without really moving. And we wanted to keep it local. We found the mill to be nice, here they have a conference room, copy machines, fax machines, all of those common things that if you had your own business, you’d have to go buy all of that. Whereas here, it’s kind of a community, we all look out for each other. We also needed something with a loading dock because we were starting to get larger orders. So this has been a perfect fit for us.

Has the economy affected business?

It has in a way. For a small business, the way my husband and I look at it is, if we can be successful in this economy, imagine what we can do when the economy gets better – and we have been very successful. We’ve gotten about 400 new accounts in the last two years. But as far as the economy, how it’s affected us, we had to update and improve our packaging because we’re getting into the gift industry now and we’re continuing to evolve as a company. We found in order to get into the gift industry your packaging really has to look top notch, so we’ve invested in better packaging that would be more accommodating to the gift industry. We’ve also had to become really aggressive with our pricing, looking at volume and looking at competition in the marketplace.

What’s your background?

We’re learning this from the ground up – we’ve never done this, it’s new for us. I was in real estate and the corporate world for years and my husband owned a camera store. So this is second marriage for both of us and we said, “Well, what do we want to do when we grow up?” We decided to really venture out, use our creativity, do something fun, and we’ve met the most wonderful people.

How do you make the nuts?

Our product is considered a premium product. By premium I mean it’s not just your run-of-the-mill peanuts. There are premium cashews, pecans, almonds, pistachios, macademias. We have a machine that roasts them and frosts them. So we use all natural ingredients and as much as we can possibly can, we buy local – have a local artists draw our logo and we have a local printer do our printing. So, we put them in a batch, into this machine, and while it’s cooking we add different flavors. We have a spicy, wicked hot flavor, we have a sweet and salty, honey mesquite then we have a cinnamon nutmeg. It kind of evolved from someone saying, “You should make a, spicy one that goes great in a bar with a beer or something.” A lot of the bars carry our products. They thought, well, sweet doesn’t really go with beer, so we would continue to go around to all the people in the mill and say, “Try these, what do you think? Too spicy? Not spicy enough?” until we got the recipe just right.

How long does it take to make a batch?

We can make four pounds every 10 minutes. We can do up to a ton a week, as our need progresses.

Preparation and making the nuts is part of it, but we label all the bags, make sure all the nutritional information is on all the bags, that they’re all properly sealed. We have a certain schedule, we’ll bake one day, we’ll bag one day, we’ll sell one day, we deliver one day, we process online orders one day.

Do you employ other help?

We’re very, very grateful for the success that we’ve had. We’ve been grateful to find some wonderful sales representatives that are helping us to expand our marketing area into New England. My husband and I can only do so much on our own. We also partner with the Transition Program at Thornton Academy.

They’ll come into the mills – there’s a lot of other businesses here that do this – for example, the woodworker will show them how to make cabinets. What we do is we have a gal come in a couple days a week, just for an hour. I show her how to do QuickBooks. I show her the importance of measuring because if it’s way over you go into your profit margin. I show her basically every single step of the way of what needs to be done. Sometimes she’ll come in and we’re just putting stickers on bags.

How does a small business owner thrive?

We thrive by having the support of other local businesses, brainstorming ideas, customer loyalty, and we feel we thrive by offering 100 percent satisfaction. We give personal service. We’re not just a voicemail type of company – people call and get a person.

We recently joined on to an alliance called the Maine Food Producers Alliance, and what they are is a group of small businesses that are specialty food producers, companies like Stonewall Kitchen, Borealis Bread, Denny Mike’s Barbecue Sauce – all companies that are Maine-made products, all coming together for a common cause. For example, someone needed bar codes. How do you buy a bar code? How do you find a bar code? So we all get together with this alliance and we share ideas. It really helps. Small businesses are very open to sharing ideas.

That’s given us the opportunity to participate in the Boston Food Show. It’s a national food show where it’s everything from restaurant equipment to different food. We really want to get into some of the larger stores and the larger markets. We have a distributor right now who brings us to a lot of the mom and pop convenience stores. We also pursue new accounts on our own based on leads or based on walking into a store and saying, “Gee, we should be in here.”

Eventually our goal would be to be national, but for now we’re taking baby steps. We have a wonderful sales force that hits the New Hampshire and Maine gift market, which is a different market –different business wise. Our goal is to pretty much penetrate the New England market and basically cover it and take it to the next level, which would be U.S.

Can you buy the nuts at the mill?

We rented the space at the mill not necessarily as retail. What our goal at the mill was, was to have a place that was certified health wise to produce our product. At that time, we had a bout 70 accounts to serve, so as we grew at the mill we gained more accounts. Because it’s just the two of us, we really don’t have a retail front because we’re baking, bagging, selling. Our hours on the door are by appointment or by chance. If someone is here and they walk in and want to buy something that’s fine, but we’re not really a retail store. Because we’ve been designated as a Maine-made product, United Maine Craftsman and Southern Maine Craftsmen – what those designations do is they allow us to get in to Maine made stores. Online we have a list of stores in the area, and as locally as Stone Soup in Saco (they carry our full line because we’re designated as a Maine-made product) or you can order online and pick up at the factory.

Is there anything else you would like to add about your business?

We do wedding favors, we do private labeling. So, for example, Bentley’s Saloon, down in Arundel. They are a great account of ours. We asked the owner if we could take his picture and put it on a bag of nuts. So Bentley’s Nuts are at the saloon. We’ve done private labeling for country clubs, weddings, restaurants – people love to see their company name.

We also do other snack mixes. We offer a mix of sesame seeds, wasabi, almonds, peanuts – it’s a great bar mix. We sell it in bulk to bars where it has their company logo on the carafe. The idea is for every four pounds of mix they get a carafe. We’re trying every different way. People are telling us what is needed out there and we try to bend and make that happen.

How many hours a week to you work?

That’s one of the downfalls. We’re never not working. We put in about 40 hours here at the factory. Whenever we’re out we bring samples with us because you never know who you’ll run into. When we’re at home, we have our computer and do a lot of our bookwork. But it really depends on the week. Some weeks are more hours, some weeks are a little bit less. But I would say 50 to 60 hours. In order to make it work when you don’t have other people to delegate to, if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. They say, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” We don’t really look at it as work, we look at it as a personal challenge. The hardest part is turning it off. I have three children (a daughter, 23, and two sons, 16 and 18), and the toughest part is finding the balance between work and coming home and being able to shut it off to play chess with my son. I have to be able to make sure I can transition from work to home, so when you’re working at home, sometimes it’s hard. I have to be able to have the discipline to change my hat.

What’s your favorite part of the job?

 It think my favorite part is working directly with customers and shop owners. We have a good balance, my husband and I, because my favorite part is being in front of the customers and talking with people and negotiating sales. He loves to cook, so he’s basically the chef. He’s the one who makes the nuts. He’s also more creative as far as creating different labels and logos and expanding the colors, and making it whimsical and fun. It’s a nice balance.

Do either of you have a background in food?

I don’t have a food background other than I love to eat. He’s always loved to cook and. Our take out down at the beach was Nathan’s Hot Dogs and it was ice cream and lemonade, real simple stuff. When we bought all of the equipment at the beach the company we bought some of it from had this nut machine. My husband is high energy and said, “Let’s try this.” So we tried it. So we’ve since grown and purchased a larger machine. The first machine was only two pounds every 20 minutes. We also have two hot dog carts – one in Saco at Madden Redemption, we’ll be there as soon as it gets warm enough, and we have a second cart at Home Depot in Biddeford. For that business, we have people that help us. We were doing it ourselves but we got to a point and said, “Ok, the nuts are taking on a life of its own,” which is what we really wanted.

It’s really hard to do one job. Unless you make a really nice income to make ends meet here. We had to look at all of the different businesses and say “Which one can we put most of our energy into and have it go more than just a few months?”