The Litebook Company’s slogan says ‘a little lite goes a long way.’

But it’s much more than just a slogan to company CEO Larry Pederson. It’s his life story.

Pederson’s dream to be a doctor was shattered by his own battles against SAD, or seasonal affective disorder.

Yet, in a sense, through the Litebook Company and its Litebook product, the Medicine Hat entrepreneur has become a doctor – a “doctor” of light therapy whose products are used to treat SAD, winter blues, insomnia and other health problems resulting from light deprivation.

Larry MacDougal, Business Edge
Larry Pederson’s Litebook has helped change how society looks at seasonal affective disorder.

And he practises what he preaches, using his Litebook to prepare himself for his days marketing the product in 29 countries.

Indeed, the little ‘lite’ has come a long way.

1. What was the impact of SAD on your life?
“Growing up in Alberta, it’s something I’ve had most of my life, certainly since I was a teenager. Fall was always the worst time of the year for me. I used to hate it when the days got shorter, when the leaves fell off the trees and the skies got grey. As a kid, I did everything other kids did. I played hockey, I skied, I shovelled sidewalks and I had a paper route. But I hated it. I was miserable. But SAD really affected me dramatically when I went 400 miles north to Edmonton for medical school at the University of Alberta. My goal was to be a doctor, so I had to go to lab classes at 8 o’clock in the morning when it was dark, and I just could not do it. I could not function. I switched faculties to arts and ended up studying philosophy. Strangely enough, after graduating, I ended up working for the government as a film censor, sitting in the dark and watching movies five days a week.”

2. How long did you do that?
“I did that for two years and then I moved to California where I’d always wanted to live. I studied film-making at USC (University of Southern California) and was there for three years. I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. But then every Christmas, I would come back to Medicine Hat to visit my family and invariably I would always get sick. It was like I had the flu. I didn’t want to go anywhere, I didn’t want to see anyone, I had no energy and I would just hibernate. I was just miserable. I didn’t know what was wrong then, but now I know it was a lack of light.”

3. When did you start using light therapy for SAD?
“It was in 1994, when I came back from California to Medicine Hat to be with my father who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My father passed away at the end of October and I ended up staying to help my mother out. That’s when I really found myself going into a tailspin. My energy was down and I couldn’t read the Medicine Hat News. I couldn’t absorb the information. I couldn’t follow the plot of a video. I couldn’t concentrate. I craved carbohydrates and I started eating candy bars. I started to become suicidal and thinking very dark thoughts. I went to a psychiatrist in Medicine Hat who diagnosed me with SAD. I told her I didn’t want to take Prozac (an antidepressant) and she suggested light therapy. I was really skeptical, thinking it was hogwash, but I was so desperate for relief and help that I said: ‘Sure, I’ll try that.’ So I arranged to get one of these big fluorescent light boxes.”

4. How did it work?
“I sat in front of this thing for half an hour and I could feel my mood and my energy returning to normal.
I could feel something receding or draining out of my body, which I learned later was the melatonin level which was being suppressed by bright light. I felt like I was back in southern California. I thought: ‘Oh my god, this is unbelievable.’ After using it for a day or two, I stopped using it and the symptoms came right back, like boom! So then I knew it was working so I got back on it and I was able to get back to doing things like going to the ‘Y’ and playing squash. It stopped the cravings and my sleep was better. It was like night and day.”

5. When did you begin to look at the light boxes as a business opportunity?
“When I started telling people about it and they were saying that it sounded like them or their mother or someone, I realized there was a business opportunity. In the first winter, I sold about 50 of them in Alberta (as a distributor for Northern Light Technologies, a competitor of The Litebook Company). Every year, I’d sell more. For some people, $300 was a lot of money to spend on the light box, but they’d just thrust the money into my hands. You’d see them two weeks later and they would come up and hug you. They’d have tears in their eyes, saying: ‘Thanks for giving me my life back.’ ”

6. What motivated you to develop your own light-therapy product, the Litebook?
“I was frustrated with the product because it was big, heavy and cumbersome. It looked like the Russians built it in the ’50s. I looked on the Internet and couldn’t find anything smaller. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In January of ’99, I was on an airplane and I had an epiphany. It was like a thunderstrike, a bolt of clarity. I thought: ‘There was going to be this light, it was going to fit in my hand, it was going to fit in my briefcase and it was going to look like Sony built it.’ There was a stigma with SAD, where people would look at you sideways if you had this big light on. There’s still a stigma in this culture against people who are depressed. If you have a broken leg, it’s OK. But if you have a broken spirit or a broken mind, well, there’s something wrong with you. You’re mental.”

7. How did you finance the startup of the company?
“We went to local entrepreneurs in Medicine Hat – people who had started their own businesses, people who had rolled the dice. They related to the passion and the vision of forming a company. This was a high-risk investment. They’re local angels. The initial investment was about $150,000.”

8. How many Litebooks have you sold since your first sale in June of 2001?
“More than 10,000. Canada is a very good market. We also do well in the northern U.S. and Scandinavia. We have sales in 29 countries and we’re growing exponentially right now, signing up dealers and distributors all over the world. We market it through professional trade shows, psychiatrists, psychologists, sleep medicine doctors and retail chains like London Drugs and Shoppers Drug Mart.”

9. Is the product in Wal-Mart?
“Not yet. Wal-Mart and Costco are down the road. We’ll have new versions of the product that we’re developing. We’re probably a couple of cycles away before the critical mass of acceptance of light therapy is such that the products will be on the shelves at Wal-Mart.”

10. What’s the key to getting that acceptance of the product?
“FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) approval. We’re doing clinical trials right now as part of an FDA trial. I’m optimistic that we’ll have the results of that in a year or two.”

11. Who’s your competition?
“The existing light-box manufacturers, like the Northern Lights company. They’ve come out with a smaller one now, but it’s still quite big by comparison to ours.”

12. Are you profitable yet (Pederson owns about one-third of the private company)?
“We’re hoping to be profitable next year. It’ll be pretty much a break-even situation this year.”

13. Do you still use the product?
“I use it every morning. I feel fantastic. My mood and my energy are fantastic, given the pace that I keep.”

14. As the company grows, will it remain based in Medicine Hat?
“The good news is that with the Internet, the world is a very small place now and we could run this company from anywhere, as far as I’m concerned. It doesn’t matter where a company is located. In the beginning, people said, ‘You’ve got to be in Toronto, Vancouver or Calgary.’ We don’t see any need to move at this point.”

15. What’s your long-term vision for the company?
“I think it can be the No. 1 light-therapy product in the world – when people think of light therapy, they’ll think of Litebook. We envision having these in the backpacks of every kid going to school. College kids are already using the products. I think that shift work will be a huge application. You can shift your body clock with light. If you really want to talk the big picture, light is like bottled water. The three essentials of life are air, water and light. Without light, there is no life. Twenty years ago or 10 years ago, people laughed if you talked about putting water in a bottle and paying for it. A lot of the big issues we face in terms of health and wellness are a direct result of the lack of light we get on a daily basis. If you can’t get people to go into the light, you have to bring the light to them.”

16. What does it mean to you when you hear stories about how the Litebook has dramatically changed people’s lives?
“It means a lot to me. It justifies all the time and energy that I’ve put into this because I know what it did for me. It’s ironic in a way, that 30 years ago I went off to university to become a doctor because I liked the idea of being able to help people and make them feel better. And now, 30 years later, I’ve taken a very long way around to that same end.”

17. How do you see your role changing as the
company grows?
“I’m not going to be able to work 60 hours a week for the next 10 years. As we grow, I look forward to being able to do what I really enjoy, which is talking about light therapy and being the evangelist, if you will. And you know what? If somebody comes along and says, ‘we can do this better than you and get this product in more people’s hands’ – like a Philips (Lighting Company) or somebody – that’s fine. If they say that tomorrow morning we can get this into 161 countries, I’d be pretty hard-pressed not to take a look at that and we’ve got investors that want to realize their investment. So we have to look at increasing the value proposition of this company where it either goes public or gets sold.”

18. How would you describe your entrepreneurial style?
“I believe in ‘go big or go home’. Like Donald Trump, I’m a big believer in that. We didn’t want to just do a mom-and-pop business. We’ve thought big all the way along and sometimes that has come back to bite us. But it’s go big or go home and think outside the box.”

19. Who was your mentor or role model?
“My father (Verne). He had fantastic people skills and believed in empowering people. He had a very strong sense of right and wrong. He had a wonderful sense of humour and the ability to be persuasive without making people feel that they were being taken advantage of.”

20. What do you see in your life’s crystal ball?
“I plan to write a book about the experience of this whole process. It’s amazing what I’ve learned. As an entrepreneur, there weren’t a lot of books about other people and what they had gone through. I wish there had been. The name of the book would be the same as our company slogan: A Little Lite Goes a Long Way. The subtitle would be, The Strange But True Story of The Litebook.”

LARRY PEDERSON
* Title: President/CEO/chairman/part-owner, The Litebook Company.
* Born/raised/age: Medicine Hat; 46.
* Education: University of Alberta, Bachelor of Arts, philosophy; University of Southern California, Bachelor of Arts, film production.
* Career: Prior to founding The Litebook Company in 1999, Pederson was a distributor for Northern Light Technologies. He has also worked as a film censor for the provincial government and as a Hollywood screenwriter.
* Role Model: Verne Pederson (his father).
* Favourite Entrepreneur: Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
* Passions: Movies, squash, backpacking, camping.

THE LITEBOOK CO.
* Profile: The Litebook Company markets light-therapy products to assist those with SAD (seasonal affective disorder), winter blues, jetlag and other health problems related to light deprivation.
* Products: The Litebook is billed as the world’s first handheld light-therapy device and is sold in 29 countries. In Canada, it costs $299. The company also markets a Litebook with a body-clock calculator designed to help people with jetlag.
* Website: www.litebook.com
* Address: #6, 941 South Railway St. S.E., Medicine Hat, T1A 2W3.
* Phone/Fax: 403-504-1533/403-526-9444 (toll free 1-877-723-5483).


(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)