Fifty-five years
Bandages and barcodes. Preschools and oil sands. Restaurants, wine, telecom, utilities, tools.
Different industries, and underneath them, the same kind of problem: something built for one purpose being asked to do another. My work has mostly been finding that part and building a better one. Usually I got way better results than expected because I didn't do things quite the way everyone else does.
Johnson & Johnson · Beiersdorf · a Montreal private-label maker
From a sales territory in the Okanagan to running Band-Aid as acting product manager. A licensing plan for Beiersdorf that a later managing director adapted, finally realized some 40 years later. A unit cost system built on my own IBM PC.
Real Data Systems · Facet Decision Systems · ASP123
A barcode system for Whistler Blackcomb. Online community programs to deliver California General Plan outreach, and watershed management systems. Mobile dispatch before most people had a phone in their pocket.
Kraft Foods · Syncrude · BC Hydro · BC Gas · Grouse Mountain · Canfisco
Food, oil sands, power, gas, tourism and fisheries. Dozens of companies, and the same unseen opportunities turning up in all of them.
Thomas Pigeon Design · Pitney Bowes · Snap-on Tools
Packaging and design, office equipment, professional tools. At Thomas Pigeon, revenue went from $650,000 to $1.3 million in a year.
Beaver Interiors · The Keg · Victoria Station · FW Drapery
Drapery and interiors out of high school, then restaurants. My first company, in Kelowna in 1980, closed in that year's recession. I learned more from it than from most that worked.
The Wine Factory
Fifteen years owning a made-on-premise winery in one of the most regulated industries in the province. Small Business of the Year more than once, a downtown fire, a forced move, and profitable throughout.
Parkcrest Child Care Society
Founded it, chaired it for 22 years, and ran it as a profitable non-profit the whole time, with provincial licensing, five professional early childhood educators and more than 100 children a year.
George Brown College · Clearnet · Kenneth Gordon School
Teaching computer science to business students. Training more than 200 dealer representatives for a national wireless launch. And eleven years on the board of a school for children with learning differences, pushing a system to fit the child instead of the other way around.
BC Association of Professional Economists · Maple Creek Strata · Royal City Curling Club
More than sixty years on volunteer boards, from a professional association to a 27-unit strata to a curling club with 1,300 members.
Most problems get solved and forgotten. These ones are still standing.
1985
At Johnson & Johnson I put self-facing retail fixtures on pharmacy products for the first time. The idea was simple once you saw it. It's now a standard retail fixture in multiple departments around the world.
30+ years
A small child care program run out of a Burnaby church needed to stand on its own. I took it independent and built it into Parkcrest Children's Centre, which was Burnaby's largest preschool at the time. It is still open more than thirty years later.
2019
The rules governing made-on-premise wine were slowly being shaped against businesses like mine. I read where they were heading and sold The Wine Factory in November 2019. In BC the industry has kept shrinking ever since.
Product architecture, pricing design, IP and patent strategy, workflow design, and the coordination it takes to get a complicated project across the finish line.