Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – What the Pandemic Made Me Do
During the pandemic I was watching as governments collectively lost their minds. And one of the things that really set me off was the fact that Walmart stores and Amazon warehouses could stay open and sell shoes while the local shoe stores had to close. At the time one of the shoe stores in North Bay was the oldest independent shoe store in Canada. Deegan’s Shoe Store in North Bay was open for 133 years as a shoe retailer before transitioning to antiques in 2022. It was the oldest independent shoe retailer in Canada and the oldest business in North Bay. The store was founded in 1889 and closed its shoe sales in 2022. This store lived through world wars and previous pandemics, and it never had to close before.
As small business entrepreneurs, the cards are never stacked in our favour. As I watched, I thought this is going to accelerate the move to online purchases and big box stores that were allowed to stay open, and I was right. Amazon sales jumped 38.6% in 2020. Amazon sales have continued to increase as does the consolidation of power which has led to the hollowing out of our downtowns. So, I thought in true entrepreneurial fashion that I could solve this issue. I think every entrepreneur is naïve, but they must be to believe in their story. I always tell my employees to glance once and a while at the big picture but to not stare at it too long because in the beginning it seems overwhelming.
Every business has weaknesses and sometimes your strengths can be turned into weaknesses, so I thought let’s use one of Amazon’s key strengths against them. Their strength was the detailed information they had on each and every product. I thought why not inspect those pages and find out what the consumer is looking at and then try to find that product locally and give them a local choice. In effect stealing sales away from Amazon and deliver it to a locally owned store. So instead of winding down, which Gina was preaching, I decided to create a new company even though I had seven companies on the go at that point. I said screw it and decided to start One Red Maple, recapitalize Nexco, create and launch a new game called Tripped and try to sell a movie script my son wrote. My wife (Gina) is the CFO of all the companies and because what we were doing with One Red Maple was somewhat altruistic (her weak spot) she agreed to help me out. Now both of us have never drawn a wage or any payment for our work in One Red Maple. It has been over four years now. One of my greatest strengths is my ability to persist and keep moving forward. All good businesses take longer and are harder work than you ever imagined, so persistence is useful.
One Red Maple was a single tree (David) going up against Amazon a gigantic forest (Goliath). I also joked that it also stood for one angry Canadian. I capitalized the company by leveraging $1.8 million in private equity to get loans and government grants and raised $4 million in total. One of my investors said that I probably had too much money for a start up, and in hindsight he was probably right. Limited resources focus the mind and keep you in bootstrap mode. On the other hand, it is very hard as an entrepreneur to turn down money, because money is your security blanket, it buys you time. But government money comes with timelines and at times you are forced to spend even when you do not want to because if you do not spend it in time, you lose it. However, in the long run, having the extra money allowed One Red Maple to pivot and I am not sure we would have made it without the extra funding.
the Facebook model, build the audience and the money will come through ads, which is a risky strategy. Actually, building any consumer app is risky. So, we launched in North Bay as our first market in August 2022 with the app and extension.
Once we started hiring people for One Red Maple life got really busy. One Red Maple was a monster in terms of the amount of effort required and the scale and scope of what we were trying to do. Work consumed my life and I pushed everything to the side. In late 2020 with all these businesses underway we realized something had to give. We decided to sell our three A&W franchises to our wonderful business partner to try to get our workload to a more reasonable manner. Gina managed the A&Ws, along with taking on the accounting function for my other businesses in February of 2021 because our bookkeeper had some health issues, so this move reduced her workload more than mine – but don’t get me wrong, she was also swamped. Besides One Red Maple the other business that required most of my time was iRing Inc. which developed software called Aegis that is used by mines to plan underground production drilling and blasting. We were global leaders in this space. I along with my two iRing businesses partners appointed our senior software development/mining engineer President of that company. He was ready to take on the role and I needed more time to focus on One Red Maple. I remember a discussion that I had with him one day I said, “One Red Maple is a monster and is going to kill me”. In the fall of 2022, we had the chance to sell iRing, which we did to Datamine who is owned by Constellation Software. Full circle I came down with covid the week before Christmas, so I was quarantined to my bedroom where I completed the sale of iRing. Due diligence is not a lot of fun in the best of times but trying to get all that done from my bedroom was miserable. I recovered by Christmas Day and got to spend it with the family. At this point I have now sold all the businesses that provided income to Gina and I and we were now living on savings. Three of the four remaining companies were in start up mode with no income – for a person that is used to funding new ventures out of another business’s cash flow this is stressful.
One of my good friends Mitch reminded me that I used to have another blog called Marks Music Picks about 15 years ago where I picked the” song the week”. He suggested that I should add a song to this blog that reminds me of the period I am writing about. Since music has always been one of my passions, I liked this idea. One song that brings back memories of this “screw it “ “just do it?” stage of my life was Vance Joy’s – Lay It on Me . I have always been able to add just a bit more into my day and thought I handled additional stress well, so I have always thought just “Lay It on Me” and I will get it done.
