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Sure, we do HR. And we love breaking down tips, tricks and myths about the HR world. But the business world is far more complex than just HR. That's why we're running our series "Inside Industry Minds", where we interview business professionals and give you a glimpse into their journey - their struggles, and successes. If you're currently in the business world, or hoping to be in the future, solid business advice from a mentor can make all the difference in your journey.
This week we connected with Erik Paul, the owner of Mountain River Life, located in Calgary, AB.
Can you tell us a little bit about your business?
We make mountain-inspired products to help our customers keep adventure in their lives. Apparel and woodwork are our two main product categories.
Can you tell us about the journey of starting your own business? What inspired you to become a small business owner?
I have always wanted to have my own business, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Mountain River Life started as a part-time woodworking business during the summer of 2020. Everything was locked down due to COVID, and I had finished all the projects I wanted to do around the house, so I went into the garage to try to make an epoxy river board for my dad’s birthday. It turned out much better than I expected, and I thought I could sell them. I set up a website and an Etsy shop and designed a few products. It was probably about a $4,000 investment to buy some equipment like tools and laser engravers and pay the setup costs for the website. We sold about 150 boards in the first 120 days after launching and then continued to scale and grow from there.
In May 2022, I quit my job and leased a commercial shop space. In the summer of 2023, we expanded from woodwork into apparel.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced in running your own business, and how have you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges in our business has been managing cash flow in a very seasonal business. Most of our wood products are given as gifts, so we get about half of our annual sales November 10 to December 15, so we have to build up substantial inventory throughout the year, then sell a ton in those few weeks.
We have been working on overcoming that in three ways:
1. Access to short term credit. We have lines of credit that sit paid off for most of the year but then get used aggressively from September to December to buy inventory.
2. We have tried to diversify our customer base with a focus on home builders to give boards as possession gifts for their new home buyers. Doing this has allowed us to smooth out the seasonality by having a more consistent level of orders throughout the year. They also tend to have less closes in December so it balances the rest of our business well.
3. We have shifted our apparel to more of a print on demand model. We invested in heat presses and created a set of designs offered in 1-2 colours. It makes it so we only need to build inventory of the blank shirts and DTF designs, instead of making every design in every size ahead of time.
As a small business owner, what do you consider to be the most important lessons you've learned along the way?
Try your ideas. A lot of things won’t work, but enough will.
Can you discuss a particularly memorable success story or milestone that stands out in your business journey?
We landed our first contract with a fairly large homebuilder in the fall of 2023. It was a huge proof of concept milestone and set us up where we knew that one deal would keep the lights on and take the cashflow pressure off a bit.
How do you stay competitive in your industry and differentiate yourself from larger competitors?
Post COVID, there were a ton of new hobby woodwork businesses from everyone being stuck at home (ours included). We invested in CNC machines so that we could do more unique designs
which allows us to differentiate ourselves from the businesses that just have standard woodworking tools.
We also invested in laser engravers right from the start so that we could make standardized products, then offer customization as the final step before shipping. That won us a ton of business.
How do you prioritize work-life balance as a small business owner? What do you do to recharge outside of work?
I don’t prioritize it too much yet, to be honest. I’m still in the building phase of the business where the work has to be frontloaded. One thing I do is take more family time when I have time. For example, mid-November to mid-December, I work every single day. Weekends are spend at Christmas markets and then weekdays are back in the shop to ship out all the orders from the weekends. However, from mid-April to mid-August, I have a bit more flexibility so I will leave work a couple hours early on Fridays or take some long weekends to spend time with my family.
What role do you believe community involvement and engagement play in the success of a small business?
The community around a business is critical to long-term success. So many purchasing decisions these days are price-based, so if you aren’t looking to compete on price, you have to offer something else. Building a brand within a community, and helping that community, will earn loyalty and create long-term customers who love your company. When you have those, you can build something sustainable.
We are working on the community aspect now to build a mountain community around the Mountain River Life brand.
Finally, if you could offer one piece of advice to other small business owners or inspiring entrepreneurs, what would it be?
Start something. The only way to get practical experience with entrepreneurship is to put some skin in the game and do something.
You will figure out along the way what you really want your business to be and you can make changes as you go, but if you are waiting for the perfect idea, that is exactly what you want to do, you will never find it.
At this point, we don’t sell any of our original products, and most of our best-selling products came from custom order requests from customers. But, if we hadn’t started somewhere, we wouldn’t have ever gotten those ideas because no one would have been coming to us for custom requests.
Put yourself out there, and let good ideas come to you from the market.
If you want to learn more about Mountain River life, you can find them on Instagram @mtnriverlife, on Facebook as Mountain River Life, or online at www.mtnriverlife.com
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