Silver Bullets |
Five fast growth strategies that have worked so far
by Michael McCullough
1. Insourcing Your Growth
Arte Roofing & Construction Inc. started out 30 years ago as a one-man business replacing and repairing residential roofs. It stayed that way until 2002, when founder David Shilmover’s son Boaz left the oil and gas industry to join the family enterprise. After “sitting in a truck for six months,” the young business school grad (now Arte’s CEO) put together a plan to become a leading building envelope contractor in both the residential and commercial markets.
Since then, the company has grown to upwards of 70 employees simply by expanding the services it offers and substituting its own vehicles and personnel for subcontractors. Using subtrades for flat-roofing a building in Calgary’s Beltline became a losing proposition when the job parameters changed, Shilmover explains. “When you have your own crews, you control the start and stop times.” Arte did the same thing with metal fabrication, establishing its own shop staffed by hourly employees.
The recession may have forced the company to lower its pricing, but the building slump has enabled it to staff up in a way it couldn’t during the boom. And Arte still has a long way to go before it fills out its self-mandated niche in the construction industry. “It’s almost as if we’re sitting in a restaurant right now, just looking at the menu,” Shilmover says. “Our industry – the subtrade industry – is full of a lot of unsophisticated players. So if you are sophisticated, you can walk into this industry and really grow by leaps and bounds. I don’t think we’re close to where we can be.”
2. Owning The Zeitgeist
Web development firm Lift Interactive Inc. has developed proprietary programs such as Parade, Inflight and Enterflight to help clients accomplish the basic task of website design and development, freeing up its staff to work on higher-end programming. Increasingly that high end means enabling clients’ websites with social media functions. “It’s an insane buzzword right now,” says Lift owner and creative director Micah Slavens. And people who use it don’t always know what they’re talking about. Nonetheless, as a business “you can’t ignore it anymore.”
One of the company’s recently completed projects is called AppBoy, developed for a subsidiary of TripleFive Group (best known as the owner of West Edmonton Mall). It’s a combination of mobile application, community and store where developers of wireless software can showcase their wares. “You can browse for comment, message people, create a profile, create a personal store with your favourite mobile apps on it,” Slavens says. The project was so advanced Lift partnered with a social media design expert from Boston and a Twitter consultant out of Italy.
“What happens a lot is somebody will come to us with the seed of an idea. So with AppBoy a developer came to us with the idea that, ‘I want people to be able to post an idea for an app and then be able to get them built somehow,’” Slavens says. More than just marketing, Lift helps strategize the business opportunity and bring partners together.
Being up on the latest in commercial web development helped Lift land more conventional projects for the General Electric Foundation Scholarship, Strathcona County, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees and Alberta Milk. At the lower end of the scale, the firm offers a subscription service costing just $9 to $24 a month for professional photographers to display and market their photographs. But the growth is going to come from emerging technologies nobody can claim to have figured out yet. Says Slavens: “It’s not just brochures anymore.”
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