Doug Doucet and Donald Chisholm think they may have tapped into a potentially underserved hospitality market.
Doucet, the owner of Bedford-based RCS Construction, and Chisholm, head of Nova Construction and son of the well-known Antigonish County businessman the late John “Nova” Chisholm, are building a Microtel on a prime piece of land at Exit 32 in Antigonish.
Doucet said Nova Chisholm always hoped to develop that land one day and his son is following his late father's plan.
It’s within an eight-minute walk from the Saint F.X. University campus, exactly the market the hotel hopes to serve.
But it hasn’t been an easy decision to go ahead with the project in the middle of a global pandemic. In fact, Doucet told me in an interview that the partners pulled the plug on the Antigonish project for about six months and only decided to resume the project recently.
There were some changes made to the plan for the hotel too. Instead of 76 hotel rooms, he said it will be 56 rooms and on the second floor there will be 24 “micro suites,” furnished rooms ready to for students who don’t want the dormitory life or professionals who come to the university for an extended period and need a comfortable place to stay.
Building anything during the pandemic has been difficult said Doucet. Because suppliers had to slow down their operations or shut down while learning to deal with COVID-19 concerns, it had a negative effect on the supply chain.
“It’s been a tough situation with supplies and we thought about not going ahead with it (the hotel),” he said, adding that the new opening date for the Microtel at Nova Landing, as the overall development is called, will be June next year.
He said Chisholm plans to build a strip mall near the Antigonish motel including a restaurant with a drive-thru. The plan calls for both sides of the street to be developed, he said, and Chisholm is said to be looking at building a similar project in Prince Edward Island, but that’s not certain.
That’s not the only hotel currently being built by RCS. It is constructing an 82-room, Tru by Hilton Hotel for the Acadian First Nation in Yarmouth. And, he said, the construction company recently finished work on the Sutton Place Hotel, part of the Nova Centre in downtown Halifax, which opened very recently.
Starting with a little Luckett
Doucet is an interesting character. He grew up in Cape Breton, graduating from Riverview Rural High School in 1985. He dropped out of university and headed to Toronto to make some money.
Without any knowledge of the industry, he found work in construction. Doucet said after several years in the Big Smoke, he wanted to start his own company back in his home province. So he took what he learned on the job in Ontario and applied it to his own business.
Originally, the company was called Retail Construction Specialists but Doucet said someone suggested he might be too specific with the name, which would scare off business, so it was shortened it to RCS Construction.
The first retail customer was Pete Luckett in 1996 when he hired the company to renovate his Pete’s Frootique grocery store in the Sunnyside Mall. Then there were other jobs for a variety of retailers, such as Sobeys.
The list of major clients has grown over the years and RCS has also done work in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.
Today, RCS has a comfortable head office in Bedford, where 60 people are employed. In total the company has about 160 employees throughout Atlantic Canada. It has regional offices in Moncton and in St. John’s N.L.
A sister to the construction company, Mill-Right Woodworking, founded in 1999, is located near Doucet’s office. For the most part, he said the work at Mill-Right complements what RCS is doing.
When the coronavirus pandemic came along, Doucet said he panicked a little bit and worried what might happen to his staff if the construction projects dried up completely. So, he said, he hunkered down, worked seven days a week and lined up as many projects as he could find.
It has been a happy result for Doucet, who said his construction business is going full-out right now, as some of the projects expected to be cancelled were not.
Doucet said he has a knack for bringing people together to create business deals, he calls it his “passion,” whether he has a piece of the action or not. As it is, Doucet has his hand in numerous projects as a contractor, investor or both.
He and a small group of partners are involved in Tier Too Properties, which is described as a full-service property development company. It assists with site selection, project financing, design, construction and ongoing space management.
Tier Too Properties operates the Swiss Chalet restaurants in Dartmouth Crossing and on Kempt Road in Halifax, and the East Side Mario Restaurant in Bayers Lake Park.
Doucet described the economic downturn that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic as unusual. Some sectors are very hard hit, while others are weathering the storm quite nicely.
An optimist, he said he’s hopeful the economy will make a quick rebound, for everyone’s sake.
