From scavenger to star

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This article was published 25/10/2018 (2532 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Blayne Wyton, a Manitoba Entrepreneur of the Year nominee, started by tearing down old barns eight years ago.

Then his firm, Prairie Barnwood Ltd. in Morden, turned the weathered, paint-peeled, worm-holed and nail-punctured timber into rustic furniture: bedroom sets, dining room sets and everything in between, including doors, fireplace mantles and even charcuterie boards.

“A Star Is Barn,” you might call it, with apologies to Lady Gaga. Wyton is one of three nominees in the top business category for 2018. The 35th annual Manitoba Business Awards, sponsored by the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, will be presented Friday at a gala event at the Fairmont Hotel.

“Mind-blowing,” is how Wyton described the tribute for his little venture that operated out of a former chicken barn for the first seven years. Judges were similarly blown away by his business.

“It’s a unique story, very Manitoba-like. It has a real Manitoba feel to it, that idea of skilled tradespeople building something unique and extremely beautiful,” said Manitoba Hydro president and CEO, Kelvin Shepherd, a member of the Manitoba Business Awards jury panel.

Wyton, 39, even invented a new furniture colour he calls “Manitoba winter.” It’s the paint-pealed timber from whitewashed dairy barns.

He’s sold his product as far away as the Hamptons in Long Island, N.Y.

“We took some beams out of a barn and made them into a hardwood floor for a customer there,” Wyton explained.

Not only is the wood a century old or more, but Wyton also replicates the furniture construction of that period.

Sales have doubled in the past four years and Prairie Barnwood, with eight employees, now converts around six or seven barns a year into furniture.

Prairie Barnwood gets up to 150 pieces of furniture from a barn, plus about 5,000 square feet of siding and shiplap used to make decorative walls like the one built for Stone Angel Brewery on Pembina Highway.

Last year, Prairie Barnwood finally vacated the former chicken barn and moved into a new 2,000-sq.-ft. building, complete with a showroom.

Wyton uses primarily Douglas fir and pine from Manitoba barns but has recently been salvaging maple, oak and ash from barns in Ontario. The wood is kiln-dried and heated for a week to kill any smell or bugs, and it’s treated with a water-based, non-toxic stain.

Wyton said the aged wood triggers memories with people and features like the black staining around nail holes are almost like beauty marks.

Leaf Landscaping Inc.

No one calls her “Crooked Hillary,” at least not as far as she knows.

Instead, Hillary Proctor’s Leaf Landscaping business has travelled a straight-line trajectory to success.

“When I wrote my original business plan, I was very hopeful of getting about $200,000 in business my first year,” she said.

Instead, she got $650,000 worth and is looking at $1 million in her second year.

Proctor is another of the three nominees for Entrepreneur of the Year.

Leaf Landscaping does everything from landscape design and construction to grass cutting, fall and spring cleanups and snow shovelling.

Proctor is a graduate from Red River College’s three-year greenspace management program, which is now being terminated, much to Proctor’s dismay, particularly after the college spent $3 million on a landscaping facility a few years ago

After completing school, Proctor worked in the landscaping and nursery businesses for almost a decade before she decided to venture out on her own.

She is very much a woman in a male-dominated world.

“In the last two years, I had to acquire a lot of equipment. Every salesperson says, ‘I never sold anything to a woman before,’” she says. She’s often asked to stand for a photo with the dealer to immortalize the event.

Not that she minds. It’s marketing, after all. The same happened again recently when she bought her first Peterbilt truck.

“This is an unconventional field for women because it’s so physically demanding,” said Proctor, 32.

As for being an entrepreneur, she said, “(it) is not just gaining a skill set. You have to be a bit of a risk-taker because the stakes are high. The amount of equipment you could have is endless.”

She has six employees and takes on three extra staff in winter from another landscaping business that shuts down after freeze-up. Leaf Landscaping is kept busy clearing snow for 160 houses and 30 businesses.

“One business takes eight hours. It’s a lot for one night,” she said.

“She’s one of the rare female owners in construction,” awards panellist Shepherd said. “Her vision is to empower other females to enter the construction industry.”

Waterford Global Inc.

A year into starting a global “headhunter” recruitment practice, partner Karen Swystun was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Swystun had previously built the executive search practice at Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC), where she was a partner, and had started to work on an international service when PWC terminated the practice.

So she and one her first hires at PWC, Fred Loewen, launched their own recruitment service, Waterford Global Inc. Then Swystun got sick. She left the country for treatment but was still only given a 25 per cent chance to live.

“When I came back, Fred and I decided the work we continued to do needed to be meaningful and needed to give back to the community,” said Swystun, the company’s CEO. “That’s where, and how, our physician recruitment practice started.”

They refashioned the model for recruiting corporate clients and developed a process where they focus on practice-ready physicians instead of IMGs (International Medical Graduates), who have a less than 50 per cent success rate.

“It’s very disruptive to a community if a doctor comes in and after 18-24 months they don’t pass and are not able to stay in Canada and practice,” she said

Almost half of their recruitment is now medical, everything from general practitioners to specialists and technical specialists. Much of Waterford’s work is for places that have a hard time finding physicians.

“The physician recruitment we do is for a lot of communities that otherwise would not have the ability to recruit someone into their community,” she said. For example, Waterford recruited two doctors for the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority.

Based out of 201 Portage, Swystun was interviewed from London, England, this week, where she was recruiting medical practitioners for Canada. She travels to the United Kingdom about once every two months, working with Regis Recruitment there. It’s literally “planes, trains and automobiles,” she says, as she’s in a different place every day over two-week stints.

“There’s not another firm in Winnipeg that does the type of work that we do,” said Swystun, meaning both physicians and executive searches.

In addition to health and medical recruitment, Waterford also focuses on manufacturing, financial services, agriculture, construction and other areas.

“There are over 300 Canadian manufacturers in Mexico and we’re supporting a number of them,” she said.

And while Swystun was in the U.K. recruiting, COO Loewen was in New York attending an Artificial intelligence conference. It was the first conference of its kind held for the recruitment industry specifically. Loewen’s background is in business and competitive intelligence.

As for her health, she will have been cancer free for 11 years in December. She is about to celebrate her 12th year in business, and the entrepreneur nomination is the cherry on top.

“They’re a unique management business. They’ve done a lot of work specializing in rural medicine and bringing in medical professionals to the province,” Shepherd said.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca