Thanks to their own business smarts, plus financial and moral support from members of their parents’ generation, four youthful go-getters are reaping good times and rising revenues from a switched-on virtual gold mine.

Though it’s formally and somewhat whimsically known as the SwitchBox Gaming and Internet Palace, 550 members and a mushrooming Calgary customer base of 7,000-plus just say SwitchBox. It’s a fibreoptic Valhalla for discerning computer gamers. And it’s been packing them in since the grand opening 18 months ago.

Last weekend, SwitchBox owners Robert Stevenson (the only partner over 30, with a few telltale flecks of grey in his hair), Steve Chaba, Shane Chaba and Gavan Brown flew to Toronto to accept the Best Business Award from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF).

“It’s almost like a new-age bowling alley,” cracked Brown, a born marketer who originally hooked up with Mount Royal College grads Stevenson and Steve Chaba while they were running a successful web development company known as Eclipsion Concepts.

Larry MacDougal photo, Business Edge
SwitchBox partners Gavan Brown, Steve Chaba, Shane Chaba and Robert Stevenson, clockwise from left, are on a roll.

“Instead of just playing PC games at home in their basement, hobbyists come into SwitchBox and play on our local area network (LAN) of 70 computers. We also supply Internet access so people can play games on the ’Net.”

As many as 300 (mostly male) game geeks a day take advantage of SwitchBox promotions such as Unemployment Monday or Sunday Bloody Sunday to score a discounted day-long pass (annual membership costs $30 and entitles the bearer to lower rates and other goodies) to waste enemies and support teammates in do-or-die virtual combat games such as Battlefield Vietnam or Counter-Strike 1.5.

Seventy top-of-the-line PCs in both SwitchBox stores (the original Calgary location at 8330 Macleod Tr. S.E. has been augmented by a second store at 761 Northmount Dr. N.W. ) are directly linked by 100-megabit fibre, enabling combatants from north and south to compete as though they were sitting side by side.

“All the players connect from their PC to a server which handles traffic load for each of them,” said Brown.

And don’t worry too much about things getting rowdy, particularly in the south Calgary storefront. The guy working the machine next to you may well be an off-duty officer from the Calgary Police Service’s District 6 office, right around the corner.

“Lots of our customers are cops,” grinned Brown.

SwitchBox impressed the CYBF judges by generating healthy first-year revenues that almost exactly matched fiscal projections targeted by the corporate business plan.

But their fast start wasn’t a complete surprise to Stevenson or Steve Chaba, who got their feet wet running a reasonably successful web-development outfit (founded in 2000) that was able to attract high-profile customers such as CP Rail and Shell Canada, among others.

But when corporate clients began to cut their web-development budgets, the Eclipsion Concepts consortium started casting about for alternatives.

“We had bills to pay,” Steve cut to the chase with a shrug.

Today, the friends credit Brown with the inspiration for SwitchBox, although the idea itself is not new. According to Stevenson, many Asian PC palaces run networks of 2,000 computers.

“I knew about LAN parties, but I’d never been to one,” Brown recalled. “That’s when somebody rents a community centre, say, and people bring over their PCs. But it’s too much hassle to disconnect your computer and take it somewhere like that.”

Solution: Set up a permanent LAN party while applying the precepts of a practical business plan.

After pooling their resources, the partners successfully applied for a start-up loan to the CYBF, the same non-profit foundation which toasted their success last weekend.

Founded in 1996 by the CIBC, the Royal Bank and the Canadian Youth Foundation, the CYBF was created to encourage young entrepreneurs aged 18-34.

The SwitchBoxers caught the foundation’s eye by submitting a thoroughly-researched, 84-page business plan that took a year to develop.

Also under the auspices of CYBF, the SwitchBox gang was teamed with an experienced businessman/mentor from the Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO), a non-profit group of retired business execs.

Speaking of research, don’t tell the SwitchBox crowd that video combat games are bad for you.

These dudes can recite chapter and verse. The partners cite studies indicating that simulation games such as Civilization are effective teachers of economics, history and political science. Meanwhile, blood-spattered shoot-’em-ups improve hand-eye co-ordination.

“A chubby kid who’s nothing on the football field can be a god in a PC game,” Brown concluded the case for the defence. “It’s a level playing field.”