SMALL BUSINESS: FROGBOX STILL HOPPING
When Doug Burgoyne was stricken with cancer, the focus was on finding the ‘new normal’
Doug Burgoyne’s reusable moving box rental company was on a roll.
Frogbox had secured financing from celebrity investors on the CBC television show Dragons’ Den not once, but twice. The little company had expanded to 19 franchise outlets, and Burgoyne was busy building a solid company while bettering the world.
Then t he unthinkable happened.
In August 2013, Doug, father of two young children, was diagnosed with a rare and fast-growing cancer.
“We cried and we told our family, then we changed from a place of crying to a place of how do we handle this and what do we do?” Doug’s wife Celeste Burgoyne said in a recent interview.
At first, the key challenge was keeping things stable.
Celeste had not been officially involved in the business, and had her own job as Lululemon vice-president of global store operations.
Fortunately, Doug had always taken care to build scalable systems. His operations manual included such minutiae as how often a franchisee should post on Twitter and what to say when delivering boxes.
Phil Harbut, Doug’s first employee, was a University of B.C. geography student when he answered a 2008 Craigslist ad for a driver with a van.
“As his first driver, he wanted me to write an operations manual. We didn’t have another staff member. I thought he was crazy,” recalled Harbut, who was soon promoted to director of marketing.
He remembers Frogbox’s first contract. “Doug and I, we did the very first delivery on Expo Boulevard. We were really nervous and we missed the address the first time and drove around the block.”
He remembers spending August to December 2013 “figuring out what was the new normal. There wasn’t a solution for him being sick, but there was a solution for everything else.”
He started taking over Doug’s monthly franchisee phone call. “It was really strange to be kind of choking back tears while on a conference call because you’re just trying to get through the business part.”
Doug and Celeste needed to concentrate on Doug’s health, and they took quick action to make it possible. By January 2014, they had found and installed Rob Lee as president and CEO, with Doug taking a 50 per cent pay cut to put toward Lee’s salary.
“It was the best thing we did,” Celeste said in retrospect.
“Suddenly Phil and I were the ones who knew all the history of the company and how it worked,” said Mathieson McCrae, Frogbox’s Vancouver general manager.
“You forget how much the founder knows and instinctually understands,” Celeste said.
Everyone badly missed Doug’s entrepreneurial energy. He died in April 2014.
McCrae and Harbut often repeat Doug’s favourite sayings and guiding principles to themselves. He had a “three snakes” rule, McCrae said. “If you see a snake (problem or issue) fix it. Don’t talk about dead snakes. And if you’ve made some kind of effort to solve the thing, it may not be perfect, but stand behind it and don’t address it again unless you need to.”
Celebrity investors Jim Treliving, co-owner of Boston Pizza, and Brett Wilson of Canoe Financial investment management — who had invested first $200,000, then an additional $50,000 each for equity of 13 per cent each — were supportive.
Now, one year later, the small team is starting to “lift our heads up and start innovating a little bit ourselves,” Celeste said.
Trevor McCaw, Doug’s silent partner, and Celeste decided to manage the company hands-on, and Lee transitioned out.
“Now that I’ve had time, it feels really nice to be in something that Doug was so involved in,” Celeste said. “The only catch- 22 is making sure we’re making decisions based on the future and not the past.”
Amazingly, Frogbox’s revenue was up 12 per cent in 2014, even though this was lower than their usual average of 20 per cent, McCrae said.
Frogbox is redesigning its website for better conversion and scheduling, and planning to give up its office space. “The world is shifting. You can do a lot of things remotely in the city and rent space when you need it,” Celeste said. “That’s a very hard one for me because the Frogbox headquarters … that’s the most attached to Doug for me.”
It also bought back its Seattle franchise and plans to open more corporate locations in the U.S., Harbut said.
Celeste and McCaw are working evenings and weekends. Harbut and McCrae hold up the day to day.
“Everybody has thought about cancer being such a thief in the night,” Harbut said. “Before Doug passed, we probably didn’t do a good job of planning for what would happen if he did pass. … To me, I was letting him down if I planned.”
“I feel like Doug was the biggest flywheel and he got it going for seven years,” Harbut said. “That flywheel is going to spin on as long as I can make it spin on.”