The corporate brand recalls the co-operative spirit of a 13th-century tapestry guild.
Then there’s the workspace — a rustic frame house, with a foosball game and a dart board down the basement stairs. Step into the lino-tiled foyer, and the decor jolts you back to Haight-Ashbury, circa 1967.
Good vibes, man. But, psssst . . . don’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Just kidding, folks. This is no nostalgia trip. The roof of The Guild may need new shingles, but after raking in revenue of $1 million-plus last year, the founders of one of Calgary’s most happening, high-tech collaboratives can afford it.
Their names are James Graham, Chad David, Kirk Brillon and Barry Kreiser — and they’re about as retro as next week’s stock quotes.
Tech maestros in their late 20s and early 30s, the partners each took something of value from the computer-science programs at the University of Calgary or SAIT.
Back in the mid-1990s, when they were young, gifted and grass-green, they buttonholed every suit in corporate Calgary and somehow raised $1 million, in $5,000-$10,000 mini-bites, to finance their start-up.
Today, the roster of clients at The Guild (A.K.A Guild Software Inc.) reads like Standard and Poor’s A-team: Nortel Networks, IBM Canada, Adobe Systems, CP Rail and Group Telecom, among others.
These kids are natural-born digitized virtuosi. They do software/database design, Java solutions, systems integration and multimedia authoring the way Yo-Yo Ma does Dvorak’s cello concerto.
But they’ve learned other, more traditional, business lessons in traditional style — at the grad school of hard knocks.
Graphics expert Graham and precocious tech star Chad David, connected when David, then 21, was network administrator for CadVision, back in its first year.
They joined forces with Brillon to create EnerNet, The Guild’s forerunner.
And they started hammering on doors.
“We made the hardware deal that IBM will give to anyone who’s prepared to buy a lot of their stuff,” remembered Graham. “They’d give you half off, if you splash the IBM logo around.”
The kids brought prospective clients into their network room and watched them swoon over the big racks. Because of their youth, corporate Calgary respected them as keepers of the keys, bestowers of secret wisdom, forbidden to those old enough to grow a goatee.
A few old-schoolers demanded market research, to prove the worth of EnerNet’s services.
“There wasn’t any,” David shrugged.
But far-seeing corporate buyers — Gulf Canada, for instance, and Husky Oil — sniffed something big in the wind. So did others, including the Alberta Science Centre, which recruited the whiz kids to build their Web sites.
“They weren’t great cash jobs, but they were designed to mark up our notoriety,” David said.
Then they took a refresher course in street smarts.
“EnerNet was a compressed business school for us,” said Graham, and the partners paid full retail for the wisdom purchased. “We signed on for a very expensive marketing campaign. Before our revenue stream was fully fleshed out, we had marketing money going out the door,” Graham sighed.
Painful lesson. But it sunk in.
After they sold EnerNet, and reunited as The Guild, the partners reverted to old-fashioned bean-counting. Graham calls it “tending our backyard” — establishing revenue flow, before spending the company into deep doggy-doo.
It’s one reason they traded their $20-a-sq.-ft. office tower for a relaxed reincarnation of the moss-swaddled, West Coast communal house where I met my wife back in the Iron Age.
“Yeah, we’ve improved efficiency,” David agreed. “We’re better at organizing, tracking our projects — and invoicing. We refused to pay someone $75,000 a year to come in here a few days a month and do our invoices.”
Instead, the partners handle it themselves.
Last year, the streamlined business model helped them double revenue. Current priorities include training — and retaining — key employees, plus a slow-and-steady approach to growth management.
“A company tried to buy us with paper about eight months ago,” Graham said. But if they’d gulped the bait, The Guild would own perhaps one-tenth of a $25 million company.
Looks good — outstanding — on paper, right? “But we’d be out of control. We’d have no say, and our 10 per cent would dangle on the perceptions of others, someone we might not have faith in,” Graham said.
Clearly, nobody’s been swilling electric Kool-Aid under The Guild’s shingle roof.
