SeanFromCanada's Blog

Originally posted on 11.17.13

I started my first information management business in September of 1997. By early 1999, we had grown large enough to necessitate formal office space. As we toured many options around Calgary, surprisingly we were lead to one of the buildings being rented on Calgary’s former army base, Currie Barracks. The army had shut down the base and moved the troops to Edmonton a year or so earlier.

For five years, I worked and grew my business from our Dieppe Avenue address on the base. It was hard times, operating a company with a slightly flawed business model, but I loved working out of that location, and always felt like I was on familiar turf within the base.

As I reflect back to those days, I think about many of the great team members I worked with. We were young and capable. What we lacked in experience, we made up for in effort. The base represented that for our business. We were willing to put in the hours and effort in order to succeed. We didn’t ask for luxury and we didn’t complain when it got hard. It was a literal translation of the physical nature of military life…there was a mission and we were committed to success. We sacrificed for the cause…and got the job done.

It was an appropriate place to build a software business.