Leading-edge entrepreneurs turn international heads

Toronto's Arctic Kingdom Marine Expeditions handles the logistics for science expeditions in the far North. (Courtesy arctickingdom.com)A typical working day for Graham Dickson and his staff involves leading expeditions of international film crews, researchers and intrepid adventurers into the far reaches of the Canadian Arctic.

Gord Dorrett, president of Forrec Ltd. in Toronto, says his employees could easily spend a year or more at international locations designing fantastic creatures for Lego theme parks.

And for the folks at Arius3D in Mississauga, Ont., it wouldn't be unusual to help a museum transform a Da Vinci painting or skeletal remains from a Viking village into a 3D digital masterpiece.

It isn't every day you will meet an Arctic explorer, a theme park planner, or a 3D digital specialist who has seen every brush stroke of the Mona Lisa in microscopic detail. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any group in the world that matches the unique skill sets that these companies bring to the table.

Despite the fact that each has a stellar track record for success in remarkable and unique disciplines, these home-grown entrepreneurial companies have one other thing in common. The world loves them, while Canada knows very little about them.

In fact, in all three cases, more than 90 per cent of each company's revenue comes from international customers.

"We work on some of the biggest theme park projects in the world," Dorrett said. "But when we bid on projects in Canada, they don't seem to know who we are."

Serving up the true north

That's not an uncommon scenario, said Dickson, whose working title is president and chief expedition officer for Arctic Kingdom Marine Expeditions Inc. in Toronto.

His business took off after he and a handful of his scuba club cohorts decided to take a dive expedition to the Arctic.

"The first trip was purely recreational," he explained. "But then I started getting referrals because no one else was doing these types of tours."

The dive trips took on a new life when an adventure documentary production company in France asked Arctic Kingdom to co-ordinate an expedition for its 25 film crew members.

Arctic Kingdom handles everything from equipment logistics, on-site feeding and setting up campsites to co-ordinating ground and air transportation for northern expeditions.(Courtesy arctickingdom.com) "We thought that job was going to be as big as it could get," Dickson said.

Little did he realize that requests would start coming in from production companies in Germany and the U.K., and the groups and projects got bigger and bigger. The largest to date has been working with a film crew of 45 people for a two-month stretch.

As an expedition management outsourcer, Arctic Kingdom now handles everything from equipment logistics, on-site feeding and setting up campsites to co-ordinating ground and air transportation (including hot air balloons and Hercules aircraft on occasion), providing safety and technological equipment and doing location scouting.

Dickson now has eight full-time staff as well as a large network of contract workers, and manages an average of a dozen trips a year of varying size and complexity.

What makes Dickson and his team unique goes well beyond the fact that they can juggle a complicated schedule and find the best scene locations. Dickson and his team also have the advanced engineering smarts to design, build and deploy customized equipment to meet the demands of large groups and film crews.

Those innovations include a one-off customized airboat with special towing equipment for skimming over "mushy" landscapes when conventional transportation can't, a portable system for generating oxygen on site, and a portable, folding hyperbaric chamber for treating dive accident patients at remote locations to allow safe transport to health facilities. He was also one of the first in North America to offer BGAN (broadband global area network) services to expedition crews so they can stream video feeds to their head offices for reviewing and editing.

In addition, Dickson has forged close relationships with many local community members, who often provide their tracking expertise, transportation services — and even the occasional fruits of their hunting labours when food supplies start running low.

While he won't divulge revenue, Dickson does report the numbers are doubling consistently year over year. The next evolution for the company, he says, is feature films. He has also been asked to co-ordinate Arctic expedition projects in Norway.

"Every year we have grown in terms of what we can offer," Dickson said. "Being the only one who does this means we constantly have to find new ways to redefine our services. We're still doing that - and we're still the only one."

The lay of the landscape

Theme park design took hold with Dorrett when his landscape architecture company got involved in the master planning for Canada's Wonderland in 1979. Next came a playground design project at the West Edmonton Mall.

'One of the big reasons we do well is that we can blow people's minds with our creative ideas, but still build a project on budget, on time, and make it work.'—Gord Dorrett, president of Forrec

"One thing led to another and before you knew it, we had found this great niche. While there were thousands of landscape architects around, there were really no [Canadian] firms specializing in theme park and entertainment design."

Although the first projects were in Canada, the international scene provided the ideal playground for Forrec's team, since their talents were better utilized on multimillion-dollar megaprojects that demanded creative thinking and fiscal common sense.

"One of the big reasons we do well is that we can blow people's minds with our creative ideas, but still build a project on budget, on time, and make it work," Dorrett explained.

Forrec and Arius 3D are playing parts in the Aqua Dunya Theme Park project in Dubai, a massive eight-million-square-foot theme park built around the world's largest cruise ship. (Courtesy Forrec)Forrec's first taste of true international success was when his team was chosen to do architectural design and creative work for the new Universal Studios project in Florida in the late 1980s. At the same time, it was making inroads into China and other parts of Asia, where there was a growing appetite for theme park megaprojects.

"There simply haven't been any Canadian projects in recent years that could match these," Dorrett explained.

Today the Forrec team includes more than 120 architects, graphic designers, creative illustrators and storytellers. It is currently working on projects whose combined construction value is around $2 billion US, including the up-and-coming Aqua Dunya Theme Park project in Dubai, a massive eight-million-square-foot theme park built around the world's largest cruise ship.

A particular favourite project in recent years has been the Legoland theme parks - an ongoing international gig that involves the design and layout of the buildings, as well as the little people and creatures that inhabit them.

Toronto's Forrec Ltd. helped design the Legoland theme parks.(Courtesy Forrec)Given the fact that a big chunk of the industry's talent pool is snapped up by the likes of Disney and Universal, which like to keep their own creative teams on proprietary projects, being an independent based in Toronto works to Forrec's advantage, Dorrett said.

"We have the opportunity to send home-grown talent that we teach and train ourselves. And because we're the only game in town, our people like to stay with us, so we can maintain a solid core team that doesn't migrate from company to company."

Even though the company's competition tends to be U.S.-based firms, "Being Canadian works to our advantage more often than you could possibly imagine," Dorrett said. "People don't understand the strength we have being Canadian in an international market. Customers seem to relate to our 'sensibility,' for lack of a better word."

The dollar has always been a plus when engaged in the bidding process. "I'm quite happy to see it back to where it was, because it makes us very competitive," Dorrett said.

"We also put every effort into not being perceived as 'carpetbaggers' that only work in countries in economic boom times. When the Asian flu hit and the market went to hell, we stayed, went to trade shows and met with clients to show we were there for the long haul. They really appreciated that."

3D thinking

By coincidence, Arius3D is another Canadian innovator playing a part in the Aqua Dunya project, where it is developing imaging software applications for creating lifelike images of objects and creatures. And like Forrec, while it has done some work in Canada for the Royal Ontario Museum and other institutions, it is finding that the future for its technology is outside our borders, where the world is more densely populated with large-scale museums, galleries, private collections and entertainment entities.

Arius3D has established a strong international reputation for its ability to produce highly accurate three-dimensional renderings of real-world objects - from artifacts and artwork to skeletal remains and fictional characters on screen — for virtual museums, marketing, education, feature films, and video games, among other applications.

The company started in 2000, when founder David Breukelman obtained an exlusive license for a colour imaging technology developed by the National Research Council (NRC). At the time, the technology was way ahead of the available computer processing power for a small business. When desktop hardware finally caught up to speed, Arius3D was ready to hit the ground running and leapfrog over the competition.

Arius3D has established a strong international reputation for its ability to produce highly accurate three-dimensional renderings of real-world objects, such as this Haida artifact. (Courtesy Arius3d)Now that the technology stars have aligned, major museums in Europe and Asia are cottoning on to the idea of this method of digital archiving. Arius3D president and CEO Brian Mori reports that the company now has 25 staff, with revenues doubling year over year with expectation they will reach $20 million within two years.

Museums such as the Louvre have been using the software to scan their collections for archiving. Others are using the technology to create virtual museums when artifacts are simply too fragile to transport.

One of the more ambitious projects to date is the creation of a virtual exhibition for the Petrie Collection of Egyptian artifacts at University College London that can be exhibited in museums around the world.

As far as competing in a global market, Mori is also convinced that being Canadian does more good than harm - especially when the roots of its offering were with the NRC, which meant that the technology was already well documented worldwide long before it was commercialized.

Getting the word out was also easier when Arius3D was the featured technology for Canada Day events sponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs in the U.K., the Netherlands and Switzerland.

"These events were a tremendous way for us to meet leaders within the business and cultural communities in all these countries," Mori said.

Toronto's easy access to international markets and the high level of home-grown technical talent is also help keep head office operations close to home.

Of course, exclusivity is a trump card any business would love to have.

"It's always a plus to have the exclusive worldwide license to a one-of-a-kind technology," Mori said.

Outlook

It's a rare feat indeed to be a one-off in a crowded market. For companies like Arius3D, it was having the foresight to snap up a great technology idea ahead of its time. For Forrec, it was having the good sense to see a diversification opportunity when it came up. And for Arctic Kingdom, it was simply discovering a new and uncharted business frontier.

Given the fact that all of them are experiencing double digit growth these days, it's evident that the world is intrigued by what these Canadian up-and-comers have to offer.

The author is a Canadian freelance writer.