Larry Peter bought Petaluma Creamery in 2004 and grew it to 1,400 stores, but unsustainable payroll costs forced a shutdown threat. His cousin Daniel, a Salesforce MVP, replaced their paper order system with AgentForce, letting one salesperson manage the entire revenue pipeline. Sales jumped $300,000 in a year.
The only way we're going to save this creamery is by Salesforce and agent Force. Because I tried every way I could to try to save this place. My name is Larry Peter, and my dream was to own a dairy and live off the fat of the land. I had no dream of ever being able to buy three city blocks. I had to figure out where to find the money to buy it. By November 29th of 2004, I bought the creamery. So we have about a thousand acres that the cows roam on. When I started the creamery, by 2005, I was literally bringing 19 to 21 loads of milk in a day. So I was running right around over three truckloads of cheese a day, and I still wasn't making it. I was having a hard time. In 2009, I literally went up to Colorado. I knocked on the door, I went to the main office at Chipotle, and I said, I grow the feed, milk the cow, make the cheese. I ended up with three distribution centers, and by 20, 20, 21, I was doing over 1400 of those stores. I can't afford the $300,000 in payroll. And I literally shut the place down because I was gonna sell. I was lost. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was still doing the farm and milking the cows and doing that. So I literally went looking for a cousin named Daniel Peter.
I'm Daniel Peter. I'm the chief technology officer at the Petaluma Creamery, Also a Salesforce MVP hall of fame member. So I've done all kinds of roles in the Salesforce ecosystem. I've worked for Salesforce customers, ISV partners, SI Partners. I've done consulting. When Larry came looking for me, showed up on my doorstep, my first reaction was I didn't even know who it was. I saw this car kind of sitting in the street looking at me and I'm like, oh, my gosh, what's going on here? Who's this? Oh, that's Larry.
I was sweating bullets because I didn't know if he was really going to come and help me. And then I didn't have money to pay him, and he knew that. But thank God he was on a sabbatical and he wanted a change in life.
It seems a little strange looking at an artisanal kind of cheese making business. Should this be a high tech business? Sort of like old school meets new school. But actually it makes a lot of sense because for it to continue to exist, it needs to adopt lower costs of operating the ROI on using Salesforce for order management was really about us. We're building back our whole revenue pipeline, only having one salesperson doing it. So normally to do something like that manually, you need much more people.
I used to have the numbers in my head, so I knew every number, and I'd call people, and I knew what days I was going to, what stores.
We didn't even have a digital representation of an order. All we had was paper orders. We did have an invoice in quickbooks, but we had no order.
We got rid of all the old stuff, and he just started putting everything on a system.
There's so much we can do with salesforce to make this place run better, give better customer experience.
Daniel can come in here, put everything online, push a button, and we see what day we owe the customer, what day we call the customer, what day the customer is going to call us. What he can do in 30 minutes, I couldn't do in three days because he can figure it out. I know I'm not a tech guy. I'm a guy that ran a $50 million company, and I couldn't turn on a computer. I did everything in my head.
Basically, the idea was we don't want any friction. When a customer calls us and they want to order something, we want it to be as close as having that order almost right itself as can be now.
Agent force does it all. Over a year, we've been on agent force, and agentforce tells us what accounts we go to. It tells us what day we're delivering, who we're delivering, what town we're going to, what company's gonna need more cheese, more time. It tells you 100% you need to call, it's ready to go. So you come in, you push a button, and. And you can see all the accounts that need cheese are out of cheese. So it really a big support. Just by going on agent force, my sales went up $300,000. Really, the best advice I could do is ask for help. Don't think you can do it on your own. Ask. Ask for help. Call salesforce, Call the people that know the programs, invest into the program, and you'll be here next year in business.
This opportunity here with my cousin Larry is something with deeper meaning. You know, you can see his passion for what he does and his appreciation for how I can help use technology to help him achieve his dream of turning this place around and saving not just the creamery, but it's actually the dairy industry in this area. And it's the history of petaluma.
Also Daniel is the life of this creamery. He come and helped me put all this back together. What about your relationship with Salesforce makes you smile? It makes me know that I'm going to own my pillow again that I sleep on. And it makes me know that I'm going to be successful and everything I work for, I'm going to have a. I'm going to have a good night's sleep again. It's all about putting out the best product you can, and it's all about the integrity of what you do in your life.
