Ridiculous Value

Trigger warning: this article may be offensive to the sensibilities of some meat-based readers. To protect your meat-feelings, please stop reading im-meat-iately.

Some background. I have been working with an organization called IRAP (the Industrial Research Assistance Program) since 2016 when I began focusing on TCG Machines full-time. To steal the tag line from their website, “IRAP provides advice, connections, and funding to help Canadian small and medium-sized businesses increase their innovation capacity and take ideas to market.” That sums it up pretty well, and as someone trying to get a product-based technology company off the ground, the advice and funding IRAP has provided along the way has been critically important. Honestly, thank goodness our government has programs like IRAP, otherwise I have no idea how anyone could possibly bootstrap a start-up business. Anywho, my Industrial Technology Advisor (ITA) with IRAP, Peter Basnak (shout out to Peter, you are excellent), introduced me to CETAC West back in 2022 and since then he has been encouraging me to attend their annual “retreat”. Once I understood that this so-called retreat is a week-long event that would cost a few thousand dollars, I was a hard no. Time and money are two things that young businesses have very little of.

Well, fast-forward a couple of years, and I find myself with a fantastic team of people who I trust to steer the ship without me. The time had come to give the retreat a try. I have never attended a “corporate workshop” before, and - for me - those words have always conjured images of executives falling backward into each other’s arms, attending spirituality seminars, morning yoga, and people throwing around words like “synergy”. Well, I can assure you, this was not that. Over the course of five days, CETAC West’s Entrepreneur to CEO Workshop crammed about as much relevant information into the attendees’ heads as is humanly possible. It’s probably worth mentioning that the whole thing was hosted at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, which is a breathtakingly beautiful location and facility (were only there time to appreciate it!).

(left to right) Stan Pankratz, PhD, Rainforest Algae and Dan Kusler, P.Eng., TCG Machines

Essentially, the workshop consisted of several dozen “mentors” from various backgrounds, but with the common thread of having been instrumental in running or growing a successful business venture. Many were founders who had navigated their start-ups through those incredibly difficult early years, and who were full to the brim with good advice for us nascent entrepreneurs. Speaking of, the other contingent of attendees were the entrepreneurs, about three dozen of us from a diverse background of industries and encompassing every state of progress from early-stage concept through to international operations. The entrepreneurs were broken into four groups: Lions, Gazelles, Tigers, and Antelopes. Each day, we congregated for a blistering series of panel discussions, interviews, business case presentations, and finally we broke out into our groups for the nightly two-hour “Value Proposition Group Discussions”. The schedule started at 6:00 AM each morning with an “optional” walk around Banff, and ended at 10:00 PM each night, but many stayed up into the wee hours of the morning (Dan) because there were so many fascinating people and so much to discuss! Also, there was an open bar. Dangerous.

View from the Lions table

6:00 AM walk around Banff

There is no possible way I can encapsulate just how incredible the whole experience was in a short blog post, but I can try and explain what made it so unique. Entrepreneurs are a particular type of person; they are people who had an idea and believed in it enough to take an enormous risk to make their idea into a reality. They also tend to have more demands on their time than your average bear, which makes a week-long meeting of a large group of them a fairly anomalous affair. Ooh, unintentional rhyme. This made for a really exceptional experience, as (usually) there are not many people with whom I can commiserate when it comes to building and running a business, but there, I was surrounded by empathetic fellow masochists – er, founders.

To make things even more amazing, the cohort of mentors in attendance was mind boggling! There were real luminaries in attendance who were incredibly generous with their time, and not because of any sort of obligation, but because they believed in what CETAC is doing and genuinely wanted to give back to the community of entrepreneurs in Canada. As just one example, I was able to sit down with Brent Zettl, the founder of CanniMed (the company which had exclusive rights to produce medical marijuana in Canada prior to legalization), over lunch and ask him all about his entrepreneurial journey. This is a guy whose company was acquired for $1.2 billion in 2018! He started up a new company immediately after that exit, Zyus Life Sciences, and they had just (literally the week prior to the workshop) received a patent from the US Patent Office for a cannabinoid-based pain relief medicine – the first ever of its kind. Was he out celebrating this achievement with his team or doing a press release circuit? No, he was giving advice to fledgling entrepreneurs like myself.

I’ll leave off by saying that we also (somehow) made time for some fun. In my group, the Lions, we had our company value propositions nailed down in the first few days, so we used our final group discussion session to coordinate a musical ensemble (score of The Lion King, of course) complete with synchronized interpretive dance. I believe our value proposition presentations were amazing. Certainly they were the most entertaining, if nothing else. I was selected from my group to present the value proposition for TCG Machines, which was (by the end of the workshop): “Our robots sort trading cards 500% faster than a human can with their meat hands.” A little silly? Yes. Mildly ridiculous? I’d say so. I think that’s our brand, though, so I am happy with it. Also, fellow Lion, Mark Arkell (Agri-Food Automation), used an AI image generator to create the horrifying picture which is the thumbnail for this blog (also used during our presentation). Thank you for that, Mark! Lions group value proposition discussion led by Jennifer Massig, P.Eng., MAGNA Engineering, and Kristy Dixon, Synauta, (standing back-to-back)

PS

I’ll note that Dan actually received an award for his inhuman stamina. He shut down the evening (i.e. early morning) festivities every night and was up for the 6:00 AM start every day of the workshop. He got a collective 12 hours of sleep over four nights.

I imagine we were the first ever proprietors of automatic trading card sorting machines to attend this workshop over the course of its 26-year history, and I will be interested to see if they invite us back. Only time will tell!

CETAC West 2024 Entrepreneur to CEO Workshop group photo

Some of the last entrepreneurs standing on the final night of the workshop (~2:00 AM), prior to getting up for the 6:00 AM morning walk