Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – In the Beginning

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If you remember from a couple of posts ago, I left Canadore and went to work as a Controller at a local engineering company – that job lasted one year. I lasted only one year as I decided to start three businesses at the same time. It wasn’t really planned that way but that is how it turned out. Northgate Shopping Centre (our local mall) was expanding and adding a food court. In the local newspaper there was an advertisement looking for applications for an A&W franchisee to go into the food court. I applied to become a franchisee in the winter of 2000. I thought this one was a no brainer in terms of risk as A&W was very successful in malls. In fact, malls are what saved their business when no one wanted to eat in their cars anymore and the drive-in restaurants started to close. Two things led to this change – cars got small as the price of gas went up in the 70’s and the interior fabric put on the seats of cars went from vinyl to fabric. These two changes almost ended A&W – in addition to the arrival of McDonald’s.

The Lever Brothers owned A&W through most of the company’s turmoil and in 1995 they sold the Canadian rights to a group of Canadian franchisees. From this point forward the franchisor was solely a private Canadian company with no relation to the US A&W – the Canadian A&W is run much better than the US counterpart. My favourite burger is the Teen Burger but the funny thing is I do not like rootbeer or onion rings. Gina has never liked hamburgers or rootbeer – (yes she’s picky – did I mention that we met working at McDonald’s as teenagers?!). The two questions I get asked the most are: what does A&W stand for? A is for Roy Allen who started a rootbeer stand in 1919 and his partner (and former employee) Frank Wright is the W. The first restaurant opened in Sacramento, California in 1923. The second question (or fake memory recall) was did the servers wear roller skates? It is a common belief that A&W servers used to wear roller skates while working but that is inaccurate as it was too dangerous. I think it was the movie America Graffiti that created this misconception as they had scenes with servers on skates at a drive-in.

Anyways my application for franchisee was in and we had to wait and see. While waiting I decided in the winter of 2000 to go back and finish the work I did previously on The Game of Things. This game started because a friend of mine Tom (Ted’s brother – also was present and a good friend as well) came up for our annual Christmas get together. Tom brought the concept of the game up and we played it that night. We laughed so hard tears were coming down our cheeks. At the end of the night, I said we should make this into a real game. We started writing topics but we all grew busy and so it sat on the shelf for a number of years.

The key part of the game is the topics, i.e. Things… you shouldn’t do in church. This is still one of my all-time favourites even though some of the big players we signed up with removed it from the list of 300 topics as they found it controversial. For inspirational purposes I perused a four-inch-thick Dictionary, one of those Webster Unabridged versions. I went page by page reading words to see if I could turn them into topics. At the beginning we thought it could be a people, places or things game but when we started generating topics it became clear that the things category was more robust so we focused on those. I told Ted and Tom at the time I was going to continue with the work and if they wanted to, they could join me. They did and we created about 3,000 topics. Now I was in North Bay, Tom Toronto, and Ted teaching in Yemen. To narrow down the list of topics from 3,000 to 300 we went through successive rounds. We had certain criteria that weeded out topics but in general the topics had to be open ended with many possible answers and not derogatory. It took us months to whittle it down to the final 300. At the same time, we were sourcing the box, cards, writing pads and pencils needed. We settled on the wooden etched box idea after our graphic designer showed us a wooden box. We loved the idea and came up with Things…Humour in a Box.

Now while all the above was going on Rob, a colleague that I did my MBA with mentioned he wanted to start an IT consulting company. I finished a semester early in my MBA as I took the last two courses in Reims, France. I told Rob after the MBA that if he wanted to do anything count me in as he was great to work with. So, Rob invited me and Bob who I had not met yet out to the cabins in Champlain Park where we spent the night getting to know each other and determining if we liked each other. Well, we had a fun night and decided we could work together. We were looking for a name for the company and again I decided to peruse the dictionary once more. I looked up the word strength because sometimes reading the definition of the word leads to other words. In this case it did not generate any ideas but I keep reading and found the word stroma. The definition of stroma is “the supportive, structural framework of organs, glands, and tissues, composed primarily of connective tissue, blood vessels, and nerves. It provides critical structural support, facilitates nutrient delivery, and plays an active role in immune responses.” Since we were an IT infrastructure consulting company, I thought it worked as an IT system is very similar. So, we went with Stroma Service Consulting Inc. In the later years I thought stroma sounded like a German beer.

Now every year four friend families with a total of 11 small children went to a family cottage for one week during the summer. It was a chaotic and fun week. In the summer of 2000, I get a call after a few previous interviews that I am the selected candidate as the franchisee of the A&W. I may also potentially be on a contract with Dell Canada with Stroma. A fun week turned to a stressful one as I needed to decide which direction to go in. At first, I said no to A&W but then I got a call from Mike, the Business Development Manager asking me to go to Orillia to see the new store. So off I went in the middle of my vacation. Mike convinced me that I could hire a manager to look after A&W while also pursuing my other business interest. So, I said yes and was now entering the financing/building/training stage of owning an A&W.

I did not get the consulting contract at Dell but a couple of month later I got a contract to be the project manager to refresh all the hardware and software on all the computers in the all the correctional institutions, detention centres, jails and parole and probation offices across Ontario. This was all coming together in the fall of 2000. It was the second time I said damn the torpedoes as I entered the busiest time of my life. Oh, I am also coaching hockey and soccer.

It was an exciting time and it definitely had Got My Mojo Working (Muddy Waters). I could not have done this without my wife having a steady job as an accountant at KPMG and supporting me as she carried many of the household burdens during all of this. She also did all the accounting for the A&W, while I did it for the other two businesses. I have never met A Girl Like You before (Edwyn Collins – who sounds like David Bowie).

Off we go about to start three businesses within a year.