10-05-2025
Award-winning business owner inspired by her mom
May 10—CHAUMONT — Dogged pursuit of a passion and a mother's inspiration has led to a five-year-old business here being honored by the North Central Small Business Development Center.
This week is National Small Business Week. For more than 60 years, the U.S. Small Business Administration has celebrated the week, which acknowledges the critical contributions of America's entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Renee Adsitt-Pettey owns of Peak Performance Training, a third-generation, dog training, breeding and boarding business.
She received her award reflecting the spirit of the week on Wednesday when North Central Small Business Development Center officials visited her business, 10906 County Route 8, to present the Jefferson County Small Business of the Year award.
The award, presented a few days before Mother's Day, proved timely for Adsitt-Pettey. "My mom was my inspiration, as it's a family business, and I dreamed of being just like her," she said. "And now my daughter, Nicole, is following in my and her nana's footsteps."
"When we are looking at a small business to honor during National Small Business Week, there's a couple of things we try to identify," said Robert D. Griffin, Regional Director of the SBDC.
Businesses must be established for at least a year. "Another is how did they leverage our services to help them accomplish whatever their goal was," Griffin said.
The regional SBDC works with businesses in eight counties: Jefferson, Lewis, Oswego, Onondaga, Cayuga, Cortland, Madison and Seneca. SBDCs are a network of centers that are part of a partnership between the U.S. Small Business Administration, higher education institutions and state economic development agencies. In Jefferson County, the office recently relocated from Jefferson Community College to The NEST (Neighbors Entrepreneur Study Teachers) facility, Franklin Street, Watertown.
"We couldn't have been happier with the progress that Renee made working with us," Griffin said. "She's a model client. She listened to the advice we were providing, took the appropriate, informed action and made the informed decisions she needed to make to be able to successfully launch her business, which is now growing."
Griffin added: "But ultimately, she's the one who did all the work to get her business going and she's done a beautiful job with it. We're there to help be a guide and a resource partner in the process."
A family legacy
The roots of Peak Performance Training go back to Adsitt-Pettey's grandparents of Marilla, Erie County — Ben and Carroll Ann Lewandowski. Ben died in 2014.
"They bred and competed in conformation rings with Labradors," Adsitt-Pettey said. In a dog show, animals are measured by how closely they conform to the standard of their particular breed.
Tammy Adsitt, Renee's mom, and daughter of Ben and Carroll, said that Ben was an upland and waterfowl hunter and got his first Labrador in the late 1960s. "That was one of my mom's dreams," Tammy said. "She always loved Labradors. But her parents didn't. They lived in the city."
Eventually, Tammy's mother got another dog. "After four or five years of doing a lot of research and talking to people, they learned how to pair dogs together," she said. "My dad, who grew up on a farm, was the main person who helped with the whelping of the puppies. Their business began to have a good reputation for very conscientious breeding and not just to produce puppies to sell. They always wanted to breed to improve the quality of the Labrador breed."
Tammy, born in 1962, was around 5 or 6 when her parents began their dog business. She would help them with training and was given her dog, that had some training, to work with. She earned her first qualified all-age title at age 14.
Later, Tammy started training dogs for waterfowl hunting. She titled numerous dogs in all three stakes of the American Kennel Club's Hunt Test program, with several qualifying for the Master National event and one earning a spot in the Master National Hall of Fame.
Tammy spent nearly two years in California training with experts and she continued to seek more knowledge. "Usually, once a year, I would try to take a week and go and train with a different trainer somewhere in the country."
Passing on a passion
Tammy said daughter Renee developed a passion to train dogs at a young age. At age 9, she trained her first dog, Lazer, to earn his junior hunt test title, and later, his senior title. At age 12, Adsitt-Pettey competed in ESPN's Great Outdoor Games at age 12 in Lake Placid where she and Lazer placed seventh in the Big Air Competition. She earned a spot in the Master National Retriever Club Hall of Fame with her dog, Maze.
"I started training with my mom when I was really young and branched out on my own after high school," Adsitt-Pettey said. "When my grandfather died, my grandmother stopped breeding dogs and I took over the breeding portion, as well as the training."
Adsitt-Pettey and her mom became partners. "But on the book, we were separate entities," Adsitt-Pettey said. "We worked together on a daily basis."
A large part of Adsitt-Pettey's business while operating in Holland was from the Northern New York area, especially around Chaumont.
"Most of my clientele in our duck hunting is from this region," Adsitt-Pettey said. "We got involved quite a bit to go duck hunting with clients in this region."
One of those clients was Frank Pettey of Chaumont. "And that's why I moved to Chaumont," Adsitt-Pettey said. She moved here in 2020, and the couple wed in 2022.
"I love to duck hunt, and this is where you come to go duck hunting and this is where a lot of my clientele is, so they go hand-in-hand," Adsitt-Pettey said. "People were driving four hours from Chaumont or from this region to bring me their dogs and to come visit their dogs in training. Now, I'm in their backyard."
Peak Performance Training's three avenues of business are boarding, breeding and training. The boarding business is dubbed Peaks Paws.
"We never really did any publicizing or advertising or anything like that," Adsitt-Pettey said. "Business is brought by word of mouth: A friend of a friend has a dog, and their friend got a dog and their friend then got a dog and it just kind of snowballed. Most of my clients are now returning clients, where they get a second or third dog."
For the breeding aspect, not many customers are local. For that, she said many customers are from up and down the east coast. For boarding, full capacity is 40 dogs. "We try to keep around 25 to 28," Adsitt-Pettey said. The boarding business has three separate areas with a puppy nursery and outdoor/indoor kennels.
Adsitt-Pettey has trained hunting dogs from Malone to Oswego County. "It's a much broader audience than the boarding."
When interviewed last week, she had dogs-in-training from Virginia. "Our training is specialized for competing in AKC retriever hunt tests and for duck hunters. So, unless you are a local duck hunter and want your dog trained, I don't get a lot of local business."
The training is the most satisfying element of her business.
"Taking a dog from nothing to what they are capable of is definitely the most rewarding," Adsitt-Pettey said. "And it's hearing all the stories and what the accomplishments are and what they were able to do, because they have a trained dog."
"She's done a fantastic job, and the reviews have been excellent," Griffin said. "She's built a good rapport with her core customers, and they will continue to come back to her because she has built a business designed to satisfy her customers' needs in ways that others don't. A sign of a truly authentic entrepreneur is one that connects with their customers on a fundamental basis in ways that others do not."
For 40 years, the North Central SBDC has been helping entrepreneurs. It offers no-cost, confidential advisement services tailored to every stage of the business journey—from planning to succession strategies.
"Some businesses, all they are looking for are answers to simple questions and basic guidance," Griffin said. "Others are more robust. They need help with loan packaging, which gets into business plan development, financial modeling and loan packaging — that kind of thing. In some cases, the work we do with a client can be more growth-oriented: 'I've got an existing business and now I need to scale and grow.'"
Adsitt-Pettey worked with Pursuit Lending, a community-focused small business lender, to gain access to capital to increase her boarding capacity to satisfy demand.
"Some of the work we were doing with Renee was helping consolidate some of the debt that she had in order to improve her cash flow position and lower her overhead for operations, which was a smart decision on her part and understanding there was an opportunity to do that," Griffin said.
A new generation
The fourth generation of Peak Performance Training is in the wings. Adsitt-Pettey has a son, 8, and a daughter, 12.
"The 8-year-old is very much into duck hunting," she said. "He's not old enough to shoot yet, but he goes every time. My daughter really took to the training. She started training her own dog at 8. That dog is now 4. She's working on the highest level of retriever hunt tests, which is the master level."
The family personally owns six dogs.
"I have two beagles because my son got into rabbit hunting. The rest are Labs."
This Mother's Day weekend finds Tammy visiting her daughter's family in Chaumont.
"It's great to have my granddaughter take a great interest in it," Tammy said of Nicole and the family's canine-related legacy. "It's all good. And my mother is just so thrilled to see her great-granddaughter carry on the tradition. It's a wonderful thing."
