A leisurely lunch in Collingwood’s downtown five years ago led to a major life shift for a local well-known business owner.
For this week’s edition of People of Collingwood we sat down with Craig Ashton, opera singer and co-owner of Collingwood Flowers & Home Decor and Craigleith Manor Bed and Breakfast.
Q: What is your background?
A: I originally came from Fergus, Ontario.
Q: How did you know music was your passion?
A: I always sang as a child. My family was always very musical.
When I was going through high school, they had these aptitude tests you would take where you answered lists of questions.
Mine came back as a landscape architect or an actor. So I applied (to schools) for landscape architecture.
I was very involved in the arts in school. I was in every band and every choir. One of my teachers said I should audition for music school. I said, you can do that? That’s a career?
I auditioned for Western and Laurier and I got in to both.
I didn’t get in to architecture school.
I went to music school and became an opera singer. I spent four years at the Canadian Opera Company in their training program. I moved to Toronto. From there, I did a bunch of musical theatre.
I think my parents were worried. My dad would always ask me, why don’t you become a teacher, because then there’s some stability.
He’s very proud of my accomplishments now. I remember saying to him once, stop telling me to get a job. This is my job. (laughs)
I did that for about 25 years, and then became an elementary school teacher, mostly Grade 6, and mostly music, drama and dance.
I got tired of living in Toronto and my husband and I decided to open a bed and breakfast.
Q: How did that conversation go?
A: We had a conversation on a ferry boat from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. We met a couple who had opened a bed and breakfast in Nova Scotia. We knew them from Toronto. We struck up a conversation.
They told us all about it. During that vacation, I said to (my husband) Guy, would you ever want to open a bed and breakfast?
He said no, not at all.
The next vacation we went on, we were at a cottage in Huntsville. When we were ready to leave, he said he wanted to stop at a house in Gravenhurst to check out a bed and breakfast there.
I said, 'what?'
He told me since I’d brought it up, he’d been thinking about it ever since.
So, we went and looked at it, but then when we were driving home we came via Collingwood. We had lunch here on the bay.
I told him, I sort of dig this place. I loved the feel. I felt at home here. I loved the feel of the downtown, and the water. So we started looking here and found something a few months later in Nov. 2014.
Q: Since you and Guy hadn’t run a bed and breakfast before, how were the first few years trying to get your footing running a new business?
A: We’re sort of the perfect pair because he is great at marketing and cooking. I’m great at designing and making things look pretty. We went to Kitchener-Waterloo and took a course that was a bed-and-breakfast boot camp. It was over three days and they just told us everything. We went full hilt after that.
Q: You’ve had some great success since, being ranked Number 1 on Tripadvisor for South Georgian Bay bed and breakfasts. How does it feel to have that kind of success during your first five years in business?
A: I think we might be in the top 25 in Canada.
It was a dream, for Guy. He worked very hard in his life. I think it’s a very taxing business so it’s great all his hard work that went into this was paying off. We have slumpy periods, but overall we’re doing really well.
Q: When did you decide to open the flower shop?
A: I had still been commuting (from Collingwood) to Toronto to teach. I would either commute or stay over in friends’ apartments or in AirBnBs. It was getting really tiring for me – the dual life of going back and forth.
The previous homeowner would help us with (Craigleith) from time to time.
One day, he just said, do you want to buy a flower store?
I said, “Ha, you’re such a joker.”
Later that day, Guy asked me if I did want to buy a flower store. We looked at the pros and cons. This was an established business (formerly Smart’s Flowers) and we would keep all the staff. It would be a means for me to get home and stay here.
So, we did that.
Q: How have you liked it?
A: It’s been great. The biggest transition was getting over the image from Smart’s Flowers to Collingwood Flowers, especially with members of the community. Smart’s had been around for 42 years until the owners retired so people were used to it. I saw the benefit of changing the name just to make it something of our own.
Q: How has Collingwood been for you over the past five years since moving here? Does Collingwood stand apart for you in any way from other places you’ve lived?
A: I think of how vibrant this community is, being four seasons a year. I also think about the community itself and how they’ve embraced us and our businesses and me as a performer in the community, and how great that’s been. It’s sort of exceeded our expectations.
We did worry with the bed and breakfast that there wouldn’t be enough business throughout the year, but it really is a four-seasons-type of place with tourism. With the flower business too, we have Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day... those are the types of things that keep us going too. We do hundreds of orders around Christmas.
Q: What does the future hold for you?
A: Well, at our age, I think about what we’re doing to retire. Guy definitely thinks about that. Our life in the bed and breakfast world is definitely timed.
We’ve talked about retiring to Europe and just having a place there where we could rent out a room. I do have dreams about that. But I also think it would be totally fine to scale down our home and stay here as retirees.
We’ve definitely got a lot of friends here, which makes that inviting.
For our feature People of Collingwood, we’ll be speaking with interesting people who are either from or are contributing to the Collingwood community in some way. This feature will run on CollingwoodToday every Saturday. If you’d like to nominate or suggest someone to be featured in People of Collingwood, email [email protected].
