With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/526329
photoS CourtESy of rogEr hArdy july 2015 BCBusiness 71 time to get a job, so Hardy went to a recruiting firm owned by Terry Vanderkruyk. "He had lots of energy, he was smart, and he was really good at building rapport," recalls Vanderkruyk, who was able to see past Hardy's shoulder-length hair and Doc Martens. "He needed some coach- ing on new clothes and a haircut, so I did the big brother thing." Vanderkruyk helped Hardy land a sales job at Loomis, the courier service. He would walk in the back door of every business in his territory, from Burnaby to Hope, with a box of doughnuts and strike up a conversation. His motivation was two- fold. Loomis salespeople from across the country were ranked on weekly sales charts. Hardy started at 119 out of about 140, and within two years, he had reached the top four. He liked the competi- tion—and he also liked the hefty cheque that came with a top ranking. But secondly, he was learning a lot from talking to people about how their busi- nesses worked, devising his own business plans and keeping them in a filing cabinet at home. By the end of 1996, Hardy had been promoted to national accounts at Loomis, but within two years he could see that the economy was slow- ing and that the courier business was suffering. He decided to take a job running a medical prod- ucts franchise for Wesley Jessen VisionCare Inc., where he was selling contact lenses to optom- etrists' offices. Having worked in logistics, figur- ing out how to move goods, he was struck by the inefficiency of the delivery. The patient gets a pre- scription, goes home and waits for the contacts to be delivered to the doctor's office—and then has to go back to the office to pick it up. "There was a bunch of strange back-and-forthing," he recalls. "But probably my main observation was that we were selling contacts to doctor's offices for $12, and they were selling them to customers for $70. No other business has margins like that." In 1999, just as everyone was launching something online, Hardy started to build his own website, called Clearly Contacts. He rented a warehouse in Richmond with a phone line and a computer. Then he flew to San Francisco to visit the office of Snap.com, which was a leading search engine at the time. He wanted his own banner ad to appear on the site when people searched "contact lenses," but Snap.com wouldn't return his calls. He walked into the lobby, where a Porsche Boxster was bolted to the wall as a prize for the number one sales person, and gave his list of words, including "contact lenses," to the woman at the desk. She took the list back through rows of desks with people on the phones and returned to give him a price: $100,000. They haggled on the word choices until he got down to a number that would almost clean out his life savings: $55,000. At times like this he thought of Terry Matthews. "There's a moment where entrepreneurs have to decouple from the linear progression of things, step off the ledge and take a risk," he says. "For me it was an easier step to take because I had seen all the opportunities and excitement [in Kanata] and the things that come out of growing a business." Optometrists had assured him that no one would ever buy contact lenses on the Internet, and this made him nervous. But on his first day of business, July 14, 1999, Clearly Contacts received 14 orders; within the first month, sales totaled $68,000. Hardy was using the sales tech- niques he knew from Loomis—five phases includ- ing approach, interview, validate, negotiate and "There's a moment where entrepreneurs have to decouple from the linear progression of things, step off the ledge and take a risk," Hardy says. "For me it was an easier step to take because I had seen all the opportuni- ties and excite- ment [in Kanata] and the things that come out of growing a business" pLAYIng To wIn (From left) Hardy and his Bishop's University rugby team; competing in the Whistler Ironman race