From a garage in Mill Woods to a buyer meeting that went right

Marcus came to the open day in November with a stove in a shoebox and a tooling quote from a machine shop that was, in his words, “roughly a car”. He had been building in his garage for two years and selling at two markets a summer. He took a day pass, sat in the commons for six hours, and did not talk to anyone.

He came back the next week on pay as you go, took a dedicated desk in December, then moved into office 3-1, the one by the stairs with the south window, in January when the walls of his house stopped being enough. The thing he needed was not a desk. It was a room where a phone call did not compete with a dog.

I took a day pass, sat in the commons for six hours, and did not talk to anyone. Best first day I could have had.

The June business-plan masterclass gave him a model he believed. The July legal session got him incorporated. A member at supplier night in May had already pointed him to a machine shop in Nisku willing to run a pilot of two hundred stoves at a higher unit price instead of the two thousand the first quote demanded. That pilot of two hundred sold out across the summer markets, and a second run of four hundred landed in August.

In August a Calgary outdoor retailer asked to meet. Marcus booked the board room, plugged into the screen, and laid out his landed cost, his margin at wholesale, and the pilot’s sell-through. The buyer said yes in the room. Marcus says it would not have happened on a laptop at a coffee shop. Two more retailers are in conversation.