30 BCBusiness June 2015 pauL Joseph
in Dave Pettigrew and Paul Clark as sales and manufac-
turing heads. For approximately $500,000, the four men
purchased the former Anatek. Renamed Creation Tech-
nologies, the new company launched on March 18, 1991.
One day later, the new owners learned that they were los-
ing their primary circuit board customer, Novatel Wire-
less, and with it almost half of their contract electronic
manufacturing business. Other smaller clients dropped
them as well.
"I suspect that when Novatel and others heard there
had been an employee buy-out they got the heebie-
jeebies," Henderson says. "They knew the big money
backer was gone."
Also gone: a $100,000 line of credit from
CIBC. "Get-
ting the news was awful," Reed admits almost a quarter
century on, but adds: "We knew where we were at •nan-
cially and we knew what we had to do to get through it."
Emergency measures were required. Gennum had
employed 80 people locally; of them, 32 stayed on at Cre-
ation—with wage cuts—as the new owners scrambled to
retrench. "We brought everyone together and said that
we thought we could weather this," Reed recalls. "We
asked whether people were willing to take a pay cut to
get us through, and everyone said yes."
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