How Angela and Justin Quinton used their $100,000 TELUS Challenge prize money to dramatically lift productivity at their Lethbridge, Alberta soil and feed testing business.

Angela Quinton isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Not ankle-deep-in-mud dirty but more comfortable taking chances in business, which helps set Angela Quinton apart as she and husband Justin Quinton run Sandberg Labs, a soil and feed testing lab in Lethbridge, Alberta. “It’s a little scary at times. But you have to be willing to take risks. What do you have to lose?” Quinton told TELUS Talks Business.

If you feed and water your summer lawn and garden, you have an idea what the Quintons do.  A farmer seeding his fields for a bountiful harvest can’t control the weather. But if the soil is not sufficiently rich, the farmer must make it so. That’s where Sandberg Labs comes in. Today’s farmer needs soil testing for crop production and want a quick, reliable and detailed report on their samples, complete with findings and fertilizer recommendations for a maximum yield come harvest time.  Although many Alberta soil testing labs have been increasingly bought up by big multinationals and turned into testers oil patch samples, the Quintons bucked that trend.  “We’re committed to staying with agriculture. Everyone needs to eat,” Quinton explained.  

But the challenge was, as local farmers showed up on the doorstep at Sandberg Labs for soil and feed testing, the Quintons had to turn them away.  Having invested their life savings to buy Sandberg Labs from its founders two years prior, the Quintons found themselves owning a dinosaur, with outdated equipment and a cramped workplace. “We were running at full capacity as it was. We’re passionate about agriculture, and decided we needed to step up and serve the new customers. But we didn’t have it in us to do that,” Quinton recalled. 

But thanks to the $100,000 TELUS Challenge, a partnership between TELUS and The Globe and Mail newspaper to help small businesses meet their goals, that’s history.  The Quintons last year sat down one weekend to pen an 800-word entry into 2011 TELUS Challenge contest.  They focused on their changing industry, and what made Sandberg Labs different from the competition as it pursued innovation and customer service, while others bowed out.  “Here’s the problem. Here’s what we want to do. And here’s what’s keeping us back,” Angela Quinton recalled, summing up her Challenge entry.

(Photo: from left to right, Blair Kellington, TELUS, Justin & Angela Quinton, Sandberg Labs)

Among their first moves in using the grant was purchasing new equipment to increase the speed, volume and accuracy of soil crop sampling. Before, much of the soil testing at Sandberg Labs was done manually, and was chemical-intensive. “So we’ve been able to bring in more customers without a lot of difficulty since acquiring the equipment,” Quinton explained. The lab’s capacity has now significantly increased as it today runs 144 tests a day, instead of 10.

Using the $100,000 prize money on new equipment purchases and other productivity gains has the Quintons and Sandberg Labs well on their way to doubling the company’s overall revenue line to $1 million by 2015.

There’s also benefits for the local environment. “We can help farmers optimize their production and help with the environment. When they test, they are certain of what needs to go into the soil. So they’re not adding more fertilizer into the earth than they need,” Angela Quinton argued. What’s more, Sandberg Labs is a better place to work in as an employee, and be serviced by as a client. “It’s a much more pleasant place to work. We take customers on tours of the lab, and we see where their samples go, and it’s as if lightbulbs go off and they say that makes total sense,” she added. 

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based writer and business correspondent for TELUS Talks business.

For more information on the #challengecontest, visit: www.theglobeandmail.com/thechallenge. The deadline for submissions is May 28, 2012.

In addition to the annual The Challenge contest, TELUS hosts a year-long series of Challenge events that feature speakers, information sessions and vendors. The objective is to help small companies overcome business challenges to achieve their goals.  Yesterday’s event at TELUS house Toronto was standing room only and focused on how innovation can grow your small business.

(Photo: standing room only crowd at TELUS Challenge event yesterday, TELUS House Toronto)

After winning $100,000 to transform her agricultural testing lab, Angela Quinton on Thursday recalled the moment a business grant changed her life, as if by Godsend.

Quinton remembered standing in her office at Sandberg Labs in Lethbridge, Alberta with a stack of unpaid bills in her hand, and looking skywards for help, before a phone call to indicate she was a contest winner came. “I was actually praying, saying ‘Oh God, we need somebody,” she recounted, while attending a standing room only TELUS Challenge event on innovation at TELUS House Toronto yesterday.

Sandberg Labs had been chosen over 800+ other entrants to win the Challenge contest, an annual competition by TELUS and the Globe and Mail newspaper to identify and help a small business achieve its goals. The $100,000 prize, combined with new technology and innovation, boosted the sampling capacity at Sandberg Labs so it can better meet business demand from regional Alberta farmers and feed manufacturers.
“We’ve been able to bring in a lot more customers, without a lot of difficulty, because we got new equipment,” Quinton insisted.

(Photo: Angela Quinton, Owner, Sandberg Labs, winner of the 2011 TELUS & Globe and Mail #challengecontest)

Innovation

  But Sean Stanleigh, editor of the Report on Small Business properties at The Globe and Mail newspaper, while finding inspiration from Sandberg Labs wringing impressive growth from innovation, adds this is not a familiar story for Canadian mom and pop operations. “There’s no bigger buzzword in small business than innovation,” Stanleigh told the TELUS Challenge event attendees. While talk of innovation is heard all the time from politicians and business leaders, what’s missing in the debate is identifying which SMBs are truly innovative, where they are and what public and private financing can make them still more productive. “I think of innovation as a process, one that requires many steps,” Stanleigh added.

The first step for Sandberg Labs to innovation involved not just telling the TELUS Challenge judges about one or two business problems that needed quick solutions. Quinton recalled instead sharing the overriding challenge and solution for them – an inability to meet increased business demand, and the promise of technology and innovation to surmount that hurdle. “Here’s the problem, here’s what we want to do, here’s what keeps us back from doing that,” she said of the thought and structure behind her winning 800-word submission, which she completed with husband and business partner Justin Quinton.

(Photo: Sean Stanleigh, editor of the report on small business properties at the Globe and Mail)

Being able to see what others cannot see is also the story behind another young Canadian entrepreneur,  Armen Bakirtzian, co-founder and CEO of Avenir Medical. His Waterloo, Ontario-based company has developed a medical device, PelvAssist, that allows orthopedic surgeons to line up hips during replacement operations.  Bakirtzian, who also addressed attendees at Thursday’s event, said 95% of orthopedic surgeons still eyeball alignment when replacing hips.  And if they get the alignment wrong, the result could be expensive follow-up surgery. “So we provide them (surgeons) with the tools they need to put the implants in correctly,” Bakirtzian, whose company has received start-up financing and mentorship from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF), explained.

Mentorship

To encourage still more young entrepreneurs to launch new businesses, TELUS and the CYBF have partnered to raise up to $150,000 to help another seven young Canadians get their business ideas off the ground and to market. “TELUS is built for business, the Canadian Youth Business Federation is built for starting businesses. So together, we share a passion for where young businesses can go,” Vivian Prokop, CEO of the CYBF, told the TELUS Challenge event after accepting an initial cheque for $21,000 from Jim Senko, Vice President of Small and Medium Business Marketing at TELUS.

(Photo from left to right: Armen Bakirtzian, co-founder and CEO of Avenir Medical, Vivian Prokop, CEO of the CYBF, Jim Senko, VP of Small & Medium Business Marketing, TELUS and Hugh Johnson, VP of Sales, TELUS)

That’s much-needed support to help close a yawning financing gap for Canadian small businesses, the G&M’s Stanleigh told the TELUS Challenge event. “The Canadian economy is full of emerging technology that needs capital for commercialization,” he argued.  Stanleigh also recommended SMBs develop a comprehensive growth plan that fully outlines how they intend to reach their business goals, and to connect with business advisors, mentors or anyone else who can point the way forward. Hence the rationale for The Challenge, an annual contest that invites Canadian entrepreneurs to share their business challenge to possibly win a $100,000 business grant.

Overcoming Challenge

Hugh Johnson, TELUS Vice president of Sales, agrees a winning Challenge entry needs to fully outline how an SMB is strategically planning for growth.  “Marketing is only one piece of the puzzle,” Johnson insisted.  He urged Challenge contenders to show creativity and a case for innovation as they explained in 800 words why they should receive support to get their business to the next plateau.

The G&M’s Stanleigh agrees, as he defined innovation for SMBs as an ability to spot a business challenge, find the solution and new customers, and to reach them as fast as possible. “Coming up with new ideas is half of the battle. You also need to implement the ideas,” he argued.
  
Back at Sandberg Labs, Angela Quinton insists her recent business transformation after winning the Challenge contest has made all the difference. “We take our customers on tours of the lab and say, this is where your sample goes and this is what happens, and it’s like little light-bulbs go off and they say, yes, that makes total sense,” Quinton said proudly.

Etan Vlessing is a Toronto-based writer and business correspondent for TELUS Talks business.

For more information on the #challengecontest, visit: www.theglobeandmail.com/thechallenge. The deadline for submissions is May 28, 2012.

As we've discussed in Send in the Cloud: A limited series to help you develop a cloud storage strategy, the Cloud - and by extension Cloud Storage - offers numerous benefits. But they don’t come without risks.

Whether it’s long term archiving, online backup, live web content or other content delivery, whatever the use-case for cloud storage in your business, the potential should be weighed against the possible downsides. I know it sounds corny (and probably dates me) but to paraphrase the Joni Mitchell song, if you take a balanced look at both sides of the cloud the net result will help you determine if Cloud Storage yields a possible and better alternative to the status quo or your company’s traditional course of action.

In our final instalment in this series next week I’ll offer an extensive checklist of considerations for you to use when looking for a Cloud Storage service. For now, let's consider a selection of the high level promises and pitfalls of Cloud.

Financial and operating flexibility VS total cost of ownership (TCO)

Whether the cost savings that cloud technology and service providers alike claim are attainable is too complex to calculate and grasp. Whatever the promise of TCO, it is certain that renting infrastructure capacity through the Cloud via a pay-per-use model eliminates the need for upfront capital investments and provides the financial and operating flexibility many organizations seek. The challenge (and associated risk) is that increased consumption of cloud capacity may reach a point where the overall cost and complexity to manage the cloud reaches a state where the financial case is harder to make.

Rapid scalability VS control

Cloud storage provides unlimited and available capacity for an organization to consume as it needs to grow. If such growth is pursued in an uncontrollable fashion, both storage volumes and costs may surpass the original intentions and budget of the initiative this service was originally designed for. While cloud storage may be the most suitable and cost effective storage alternative you have for the particular application, it is not free. An extreme use of a cheap service will have an impact on your bottom line; therefore planning and controls are required.

Accessibility VS Security, Privacy and Compliance

Cloud storage is predominantly an Internet-accessible and device-independent service that delivers unsurpassed accessibility to the applications (or devices) that store or consume the data.

Depending on the infrastructure supporting the cloud service, and the mechanisms to support protection of the data both in transport and at rest (e.g. encryption or obfuscation), it may be exposed to unlawful access.

Depending on the location of the cloud storage service or the provider's jurisdiction of incorporation, your data may be subject to regulations that are not in line with your responsibilities to your stakeholders, including employees, customers and the Canadian law (mostly privacy law).

Flexibility VS Freedom

I would argue that one of the most promising traits of Cloud is flexibility. The flexibility to consume as much service as needed and easily upload data to a storage cloud service is what makes it so appealing.

Users should, however, realize that in some cases the systems supporting the service are mostly designed with one thing in mind: to to get you in, not to get you out. Data objects that are added to the cloud service either on a gradual basis or through one time bulk migrations does not mean they are easily extracted and migrated off the cloud service when you expect to exercise your data freedom. Lock-in should be a real risk worth considering.

I hope this gave you a taste of both perspectives and that you'll come back to read the complete list of Cloud Storage considerations.

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

Questions about the cloud and whether it's right for your company? Ask them here via comment.