because of a scanty local workforce – in order to focus their attention to their mostly automated production facility in Springville, Utah. Their eggs were, for a brief moment, sitting mostly in an already full American basket. With a weak Canadian dollar to start the year, the supply trail, as it were, between Utah and Western Canada seemed to be getting longer and colder with each passing day. For- tunately for Heggie and his team, the home front began to thaw. With the Loonie surging toward parity with the U.S. dollar in the spring of 2009 and average home resale prices up 5.0 percent and the volume of resales up 7.7 percent in The Great White North from the previous year, “It was a better opportunity to be looking into Canadian sales,” Heggie explains. “That’s when we changed and we put our focus more in the Canadian market than in the U.S.” The change he’s referring to wasn’t just a geograph- ic one; it was also opening two retail showrooms – a first for Kodiak Mountain Stone at the time – in Calgary and Lethbridge respectively. “Our communication within our company is great. We’re always talking back-and-forth and that goes a long way when you’re in sales – being able to call the factory and get ETAs and make specific inquiries to particular people about our products. That’s huge.” In order to convey to customers that Kodiak Mountain Stone and their retail representatives grasp the gravity of their motto, Heggie and CFO, Dave Olsen adopted one of Jobs’ most fundamental methods for growing a product and its presentation: continuing and mandated education with the aim of inspiring innovation. “We want our team to have the opportunity to continue to learn,” Heggie explains. “We have what we call our “Education Plan,” which we’ve modeled on the Google 20 percent rule – their engineers are encouraged to use 20 percent of the traditional workday to pursue pet projects. Our philosophy is our employees spend 20 percent of their time – outside of peak seasons, of course – reading or studying relevant materials to their particular position at Kodiak Mountain Stone.” This has been “a really good fit,” Heggie boasts. “For example, one of our sales represen- tatives spent a number of years in the stucco business. In fact, he owned a hardware store where he sold stucco, mixed paints, and interacted with his customers. Now we’re working with acrylic stucco and we need to match colours to match the dream. He knows the products and the distributors in the industry inside out and now This is where Steve Jobs comes back into play.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JUNE 2018
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