Stew Leonard Jr. to Win Previdi Award

Stew Leonard Jr., the president and CEO of Stew Leonard's, will be awarded the Cecil J. Previdi Award on Dec. 17 as Danbury's leading entrepreneur of the year.

Leonard follows a distinguished list of previous award winners, who include Frank Kelly, former CEO of Danbury Health Systems, Joe Engelberger, founder of Unimation, Albert Salame, a Danbury property owner and businessman, Paul Scalzo, president of the Scalzo Group, Jerry Leitman, former president of Fuel Cell Energy and Richard Steiner of the Berkshire Corporate Park, among others.

The award is given in memory and honor of Cecil J. Previdi of Danbury, who took a small stationary store and turned it into a nationally recognized printing company using modern management techniques and equipment.

Leonard said he hardly deserves to stand in the company of these entrepreneurs.

"I grew up with a bunch of cows, and to compare me to a guy like Joe Engelberger, I don't know. He's a high-tech guy and I'm a low-tech guy. You've got one guy with a circuit board and another guy with a bunch of tomatoes," Leonard said.

Engelbeger is the founder of industrial robots, and is listed among the top "1,000 Makers of the 21^st Century" by the Times of London. Engelberger created the Unimate robot, which appeared on the Johnny Carson show with Engelberger in the 1960s.

Stew Leonard's has earned its own accolades, including one of the top places to work for nine years in a row from Fortune Magazine, a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the grocery store with the highest sales per square foot, as the Disneyland of Dairy Stores by the New York Times, and as a fun place to shop due to the presence of Twinkie the Kid, the Farm Fresh Five and the Chiquita Banana.

"Clearly this guy is an entrepreneurial genius," said Danbury Attorney Paul Jaber, who is on the Previdi Award selection committee, and was a close personal friend of Cecil Previdi. "He is head and shoulders above everyone else out there."

Jaber said Stew Leonard Jr. is an entrepreneur in the tradition of Previdi, who died in an airplane crash in the 1980s.

"What we try to do is keep looking for new ideas every day. You're like a sponge," Stew Leonard Jr. said. "We're always trying to find the latest and the greatest."

To do that, Leonard said you have to get out of the business and see what other people are doing. That means visiting the poultry farm where the eggs come from, and visiting the range where the beef is raised. It means driving a team of workers into New York City to check out Eataly, a European-style food festival at 5^th Avenue and 23^rd Street.

"How can a business become like Stew Leonard's? The most important thing is to say, "Yes, we can do it," Leonard said. "People have a new idea, and the first reaction is all the negitives."

Leonard said get past the negitives and start thinking, "Let's figure out a way to do it."

He said he heard once success is 10 percent idea and 90 percent effort.

He's working on an idea for Stew Leonard's to become a supplier of cheesecakes to Rao's, one of the most exclusive restaurants in New York City. He said there are all kinds of reasons why it won't work. Stew's doesn't deliver. The packaging will be a problem, because the cheesecake isn't for retail sale in a store. He said he doesn't know how much to charge for a cheesecake that will be sold in Rao's.

"There are lots of reasons why you can't do it," he said, but said in addition, imagine the sign over the cheesecakes in the dairy store that says, "Exclusively sold at Rao's." He said that's a good reason to overcome the obstacles.