Rusty McLear named to 'Business Excellence Hall of Fame'

MEREDITH — Before Rusty McLear came to town, there was no business case to be made for hotel rooms in downtown Meredith. At least, that’s what the banks thought.

“It really wasn’t a gamble,” said McLear, who owns Hampshire Hospitality Holdings, which he operates with partner Ed Gardner. HHH bought an asbestos mill that dominated the Meredith viewscape in 1983, developed it into the Mill Falls Marketplace a year later, and opened the Inn at Mill Falls in 1985. It was a significant investment into what was then a sleepy town on a quiet end of Lake Winnipesaukee.

“The banks thought it was (a gamble), because they expect you to do a study,” he explained. A study would have looked at how other hotels in town were performing. But there were no other hotels, so the study wouldn’t have found a reason to expect a return on investment.

“I took the opposite point of view," he said in an interview Monday. "Because there are no hotel rooms here, there is a great opportunity.”

McLear was proven correct, even more so than he could have imagined.

On Thursday, during the NH Business Review’s 16th Annual Business Excellence Awards Ceremony, McLear will be named as the 30th inductee into the Review’s Business Excellence Hall of Fame. It’s McLear's second major honor in as many years. At last year’s annual meeting of the New England Inns and Resorts Association, he was named to the list of Masters of New England Innkeeping, that association’s equivalent of a lifetime achievement award.

Edward J. “Rusty” McLear grew up in Albany, New York, and went to study psychology at the University of Notre Dame, but said he parted ways with the school after his sophomore year.

“They had a lot of rules. I wanted to have more fun than they wanted me to have,” he said, so he transferred to the now-closed Windham College, in Putney, Vermont, where he was allowed to indulge himself.

While still in college, McLear borrowed $1,000 from an aunt to open a restaurant. He ran out of money before he had bought anything for the walls, so he decided to name it “The Gallery,” and invited local artists to hang their works. He started the restaurant after he had worked at the Putney Inn and realized that, although he wanted to earn his degree, his future wouldn’t be in psychology.

“I not only liked it, I was good at it," he said. "I looked forward to going to work every day.” He knew he wanted to work in hospitality, but he also knew he would need to learn a lot more first. Then he heard about a man who had purchased the Shangri-La in The Weirs and was remaking it as the 170-room Brickyard Mountain Inn and Manor restaurant. McLear called the owner with a proposition.

“I’d like you to hire me, I will work for minimum wage but I want to be put in every position.” He got the job, and over the next three years learned everything there was about running a large resort.

He happened to be running the front desk on the day that Alex Ray, then a young cookware salesman, walked in. McLear tried turning him out because he didn’t have an appointment. Instead, Ray walked around the corner and snuck in the back door to make his pitch. That started a friendship, one which turned into one of the most fruitful business relationships in New Hampshire hospitality history.

After his time at Brickyard Mountain Inn, McLear started a real estate business, Old Mill Properties, through which he purchased an old building in Meredith and started a restaurant, Mame’s. He hired someone to run the restaurant but it wasn’t profitable. By then, Ray had become a restaurateur, and McLear asked him to partner with him to get Mame’s back on track. Ray brought in one of his managers, John Cook, who succeeded in saving Mame’s.

Then Ray fell ill and needed to divest in Mame’s. Rather than sell his share of the business, Ray insisted that it be transferred to Cook. That made McLear take notice, it was the wrong thing to do from a business perspective, but the right thing on many other levels.

Today, the Ray-McLear partnership has touched many parts of the state. Ray’s Common Man family of restaurants now numbers 16, many of which are featured eateries within lodging establishments operated by McLear.

McLear points to one of those restaurants which made a critical difference for the rebranding of Meredith from a blue-collar mill town to a tourism destination. In 1995, he purchased a drab office building on the tip of Meredith Bay and at the corner of Routes 3 and 25, and converted it into Bay Point, a hotel, with the Boathouse Grill (now Lago) on the ground floor and with lake views.

Prior to that point, his businesses were, “doing OK, it wasn’t setting the world on fire,” he said. He was able to book rooms for people who had a reason to come to Meredith, but there wasn’t yet enough of a draw for people to come just to stay there. But with Bay Point, “It gave us lakeside rooms with balconies, it gave us a lawn for people to sit on,” and things began to move for Meredith.

He took another huge step with the purchase of a lakeside Catholic church in 2003. Just a year later, Church Landing opened, which – along with his other Meredith properties – gave Hampshire Hospitality Holdings 171 rooms in town, which will welcome 80,000 guests each year.

Again, McLear’s business strategy runs against convention. Bankers asked, why own several lodging establishments all within the same small town? Wouldn’t they compete with each other? In fact, the opposite happened. For example, the year that Bay Point opened, Inn at Mill Falls bookings increased by 10 percent.

“That gave us the idea that this can succeed,” he said. “That gave us a critical mass.”

McLear’s interests extend beyond hotel rooms. He has an eye for design and architecture, and had a greater vision for the small gas station across the road from the Meredith town docks, which until 1999 was operated by Irving. McLear said he found out who was in charge of real estate for Irving, called him up and expressed an interest in the property.

“He said, ‘Son, we’re in the business of buying gas stations, not selling them.’ I said, I just want you to know that I bought all the land around you, the state is going to widen the road and when they do, they’ll take your pumps away,” he said, leaving the implication that he wouldn’t sell them any land to put in new pumps. Soon they were at the bargaining table, and today, McLear and Irving are partners in several ventures, such as the rest stops he and Ray built in Hooksett on Route 93 in 2015. They have plans for a similar rest area in New Hampton and McLear said there are ideas in the works for projects, which he cannot disclose yet, both within Meredith and elsewhere in the state.

McLear, who is in his 70s, lives in Meredith with his wife, Jodie Hebert, director of guest services for HHH. The two of them raised three children in Meredith and continue to work seven days a week in the Hampshire Hospitality Holdings office, tucked into a corner of the Mill Falls Marketplace campus.

He keeps himself busy with civic projects, too. He has served on the town’s Planning Board, started the advocacy organization Greater Meredith Project, and is serving on the committee that is trying to expand the town’s library, as well as another committee that is evaluating what the state should do with the property that formerly housed the Laconia State School.

“There’s always something to do. Sometimes it’s business, sometimes it’s not,” he said. He has that in common with Ray. And, like Ray, McLear said the projects that make him proudest are those with the most positive outcome, not necessarily the most profitable.

“We both like building where something good is going to come out of it,” he said.