Lisa Benusa is a force of nature, and fittingly, she credits as her mentor the land on which The Mill at Fine Creek sits.
The land? Yes, the land.
“It’s enabled me to grow and let me be person that I wanted to be,” says Benusa, a mother of five adult children who has relished cooking since childhood.
Those 15 acres are now providing temporary shelter to her children and grandchildren during the COVID-19 crisis, and Benusa’s team had provided pickup meals for clients of the Free Clinic of Powhatan for nine weeks.
Benusa even hosted the wedding of her son Colin, with just 10 immediate family members as guests.
In 2004, she and her husband, Tim, purchased the first 10 acres when their youngest was entering high school and then went through a yearlong zoning process to create the full-service event venue. “I knew in my heart that I could do it,” Benusa says. In 2010, her son Mark became a co-owner, and soon after that, they purchased 5 more acres where they built a brewery, a pastry shop and five guest cottages.
Many of Benusa’s team members have been with her since the start, and now their children are working alongside them. “Our biggest thing here is letting our staffers put their own families first,” she says. This can mean having a schedule where someone can be waiting at their children’s bus stop in the afternoon or have time to take care of elderly parents.
Benusa also wants her entire staff to have pride in their surroundings, because that enhances the events they host. “You are entrusted with a person’s dreams,” Benusa says.
