Craig Guttman had a problem. The president of Toronto-based Algood Casters, an old-school manufacturer of wheeled casters for home furniture, retail and industrial use, was starting to lose business to offshore manufacturers. A few years ago, he considered shifting production to China, but instead resolved to fight back. “I decided to put my efforts into this plant, to re-imagine what we do here,” he told me.
Guttman was just one of scores of gutsy Canadian entrepreneurs I met in 2014, all of them dealing with incredible challenges to making money and growing their organizations in a hotly competitive world. These roll-up-your-sleeve optimists are the backbone of the economy, our hope for the future, and incredible teachers and role models. So in a week traditionally devoted to glancing back and looking ahead, I thought I would share some great moments from the Class of 2014.
In my April column on Algood, Guttman summed up his biggest challenge: “We had been so busy making money we never stopped to look at what we were doing and what we could do better,” he said. “We had to learn to innovate again: not just to make product cheaper, but make it better, and get it to the customer quicker.”
By bringing sales, engineering, production and customer service together to eliminate roadblocks, install best practices and develop new materials and processes, Algood shifted from commodity producer to custom-product powerhouse. “We use to have long production runs, but not any more. You need flexibility,” Guttmann said. “We can now take bigger orders from customers, and smaller orders. That’s how you compete globally now.”
In January, I covered a crowdfunding conference, and relayed some great advice from Ben Grynol, co-founder of Winnipeg-based Top & Derby, an online purveyor of designer walking canes. While his company raised only $22,000 through its Indiegogo campaign, Grynol said the crowdfunding experience proved essential, by providing the proof of concept his startup needed.
He offered the following lessons for crowdfunding:
Establish partnerships Know who is going to produce the product for you.
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