You know you’re sailing smoothly over the choppy waters of free enterprise when your own banker nominates you for a small business award.

Fact is, Mentor Engineering Inc. doesn’t fit the prototypical small-business model, though with a staff of 55, it meets the criteria.

But “small” doesn’t describe a team that’s drummed up dozens of major clients and corporate partnerships throughout the U.S.

Mentor’s brain trust thinks big, not small. The company is poised to open a U.K. branch office in London next month, and is dabbling in pilot projects in the People’s Republic of China.

Mike Sturk, Business Edge
Mentor Engineering's Stephen Hickle (left), Wolfgang Stichling and Gord Howell.

Highly respectable for an outfit which took eight months to make its first sale, and which was forced to move out of Gord Howell’s low-ceilinged cellar after it hired its first two staffers. One of them, sales boss Mike Koebel, stands taller than six feet, and got cranky when he had to hunch over in the downstairs bunker.

“Mike was too tall for our basement,” grinned Howell, one of three electrical engineers who founded Mentor 13 years ago this month.

When the bank phoned the founding troika to ask permission to nominate Mentor for the Calgary Chamber of Commerce Small Business Owner of the Year award – Mentor is one of three finalists – it was icing on a cake which has risen as steadily as an angel food masterpiece by Craig Claiborne.

Last year, Mentor won an NRC/ASTech Innovation in Industrial Research prize, and pulled in almost $10 million in revenue.

But in 1988, when Howell, Wolfgang Stichling and Stephen Hickle downed tools at what was then known as AGT Mobile Radio, and set up shop together, they weren’t thinking multi-million-dollar revenue.

“With AGT Mobile Radio, we were providing voice and wireless data systems for most of the major energy players,” including pipeline-control communications for Nova Pipelines and TCPL, said Howell.

Working together at AGT, they designed the systems and wrote the software. Meanwhile, they kept their ears open and repeatedly heard customers complaining of certain specific needs that nobody in the industry was filling.

After quitting AGT and moving into the basement, Howell, Stichling and Hickle began responding to those wish lists.

“We knew what customers were asking for. They didn’t make any commitment, but they said: ‘If you come up with a product that meets our needs, we’re willing to look at it,’ ” Howell said.

Ultimately, the troika developed the home-grown designs and applications which evolved into the company’s primary product, known as the Mobile Data Computer, or MDC.

“Kind of a stupid name,” grinned the slow-talking, T-shirted Howell. “But we’re stuck with it.”

What is it? Think of the compact keyboard/display screens that started turning up on Checker Cabs’ dashboards in the mid-to-late 1980s, and you’re in the ballpark.

After eight months of scrabbling away in Howell’s subterranean lab, they finally nailed down their first big sale.

Their oilfield clients bought into a Mentor-designed computerized alarm system, customized to record compressor failures and well shutdowns in remote drilling fields, then to alert service personnel driving field trucks, each outfitted with compact dashboard terminals.

“Most of our work was in sour gas,” Howell said. “If you get a sour-gas leak, you want to know about it.”

However, it wasn’t long before Mentor’s performance in the energy industry attracted notice from a fresh crop of potential clients – taxi, transit and ambulance companies, most of which are based south of the border.

“Eventually, most of our sales were for these new fleet-type systems. We said: ‘You know what? We’re not in the energy business anymore.’ ”

A change of direction was relatively painless, because MDC technology is a multi-purpose utility player.