Business in Vancouver's "How I Did It" feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, Jim Myers, founder and CEO of Jeda Mechanical Ltd., talks about the challenge of landing a large contract for which he had neither the capital nor the manpower, and how it helped him expand into new territory, including a new business based on technology that allows diesel engines to burn natural gas.
"After graduating from high school, I went to BCIT [British Columbia Institute of Technology] and worked for my father's firm, Keith's Plumbing & Heating.
"At the age of 40, I decided to go out on my own and open up a non-union firm because my father's is a union firm. In the residential market, you're much more competitive being non-union.
"I sold my house in West Vancouver. I had about $300,000 to start up my own business. I was successful in getting my first project: a $2.5 million job. We ended up bidding on bigger projects, and in 2008, we bid on one of the biggest jobs in British Columbia, the Olympic Village.
"At first I thought it was way out of our realm. It was a $35 million project, which I didn't have enough money to do, and I didn't think there was enough labour. I needed about $2.5 million in working capital. At the time when we tendered the job, we only had about $1 million.
"You had to get bonding, and I didn't have enough money to get bonded for these jobs. I had to borrow from the banks and friends to satisfy the requirements of the bonding company. Everything I owned, I put on the line. If I failed, I would have lost everything.
"That was a time when there was no labour left in Vancouver. Everybody was busy. I spent $10,000 a month advertising in all the local newspapers, and I wasn't getting any labour. So I used the power of Craigslist, and I ended up hiring people from all over the world. We had over 150 men on that job, and I probably had about 40 people from outside of Canada.
"The Olympic Village [project] is what put us on the world map of construction. It opened up all sorts of doors. Since we started, I've expanded the company into Phoenix, Arizona, in a development firm called Devon Developments in the United States, where we just built 274 rental apartments, and we're building another 600.
"I started a development firm, Quantum Developments, where I'm buying properties, renovating and building new houses on the North Shore.
"We also bought the rights from a firm in Phoenix. The technology is called ZHRO. It's a new state-of-the-art injector system for diesel trucks that will be able to use natural gas and/or diesel.
"We'll do the install in all diesel trucks for free. We'll have a GPS that monitors the truck and through the monthly savings that the truckers realize, they pay us monthly, based on the savings.
"I have acquired the licensing rights for the marine application in Alaska, B.C., Washington and Oregon, and the trucking rights for Seattle, Tacoma and Portland Oregon."
