Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

“The sad tale for Canadian manufacturing is that it’s over” – Mike Keilhauer on Monday.
“one of the mistakes we made along the way was not outsourcing manufacturing to Mexico soon enough” – Kathryn From

Had the pleasure of attending an Ontario forum at the Rotman school on Monday. With some fascinating was hearing stories of successful Canadian business established for 15 to 25 years now, having weathered many cycles along the way and how they got to where they are. Presenting were:

Mike Keilhauer, President, Keilhauer Furniture
Kathryn From, Co-Owner and CEO, Bravado! Designs Inc.
Les Mandelbaum, Founder and President, Umbra

Some of my other notes:

• Outsourcing isn’t a business opportunity, it’s a matter of survival. you need to seek out every comparable advantage you can to stay ahead of their competitors in a global market.
• “Proudly designed in Canada, manufactured in Mexico” -Bravado!
• Canada is not a big enough market. Look internationally and to the US when starting a business, Canada is not enough to support most startups in a niche industry.
• Be different than your competitors, Keilhauer and Bravado! differentiate by being more specialized, Umbra differentiates by being more generalized
• Your competitors can be your only friends and your own customers can be your worst enemies. All spoke of the problem of wholesale intellectual property theft from suppliers and especially customers (think knock-off designs from the likes of Target or Home Depot). ” I can’t trust my suppliers, I can’t trust my customers” -Les Mandelbaum
• Advice, don’t go into the apparel or high-end maternity business. Very thin margins in apparel ~10%, and over 50% of a babies born in the US are to families with less than 33k in income (wow)
• As above, research your market carefully before you go into it, are you sure you want to be in this industry?
• “it takes 15 years to be an overnight success” – Keilhauer, or at least two to three years before you figure out how to really make Money in your business
• Have a simple brand message and stick to it. E.g. “quality furniture on time” then you can measure everything you do against that brand promise. Is this activity driving “quality furniture” on “on time”? If not, don’t do it.

Photo: the brunch at Doonies, mmm.

The Toronto restaurant Doonies doesn’t have “a blog”. Sometimes it just hits you in the face that we technologists often talk about “this stuff” all wrong. The purpose of new media, of new technology isn’t for the sake of itself it’s because of what it enables. Like at Dooney’s. Besides a fantastic eggs Benedict, go see the immensely interesting political discourse they are creating online.

My friend Joshua is a smart individual, he phrased it this way over IM today

Joshua: more than a blog. It is a protectorate.

Me: i was at an office2.0 conference in SF last week and there was much self absorbed obsession over the medium and mechanics of social media and yet no one was talking about the message. the point. [what it enables]

Joshua: marshaling, stewarding, jockeying. Blogs are conversations it is true. But they are far short of being true dialogue. No truth has so far arisen, save for the salience of hierarchy and control of flow. Other aggregators and filters have promise though.

me: yes and blogs wikis and all that are still sub-perfect (esp wikis) but they’re creating conversations that weren’t happening before
I’m working on some new filters, new conversation mediums these days that grow out of this. [this is Firestoker]

I have more on this later, I may have spoken too soon about any real value seen at Office2.0Conference, but nonetheless, between this trip, conversations with Joshua and a 5 five-car mashup of connected ideas over eggs earlier this morning, my head is aswim with ideas and optimism. If I can get it all down. I may not be making any sense just yet, but Jevon was off to a good start though back when he wrote this. More to come.

The quick moral here though is that these new media may on the one hand seem like just simple-to-use communication tools but on the other hand while running a busy restaurant, the folks at dooney’s have still had the time to built a touchpoint for local civil society (defn). Powerful stuff these new media.

It was good to see that town again, it’s been 2 or 3 years. The aircanada gate is still always the same. Ended up having a fantastic time though I still had the slightest feeling of dread upon landing landing there.

Song of the day. Come Back From San Francisco – Magnetic Fields.

click to play:

(nifty flash widget inspired from upcoming.org which I hope is ok. update: which i tracked down to here if you’d like to add this wordpress mp3 player to your site.)