I know what it’s like to be the whole business.

Every hat, most days.

I started Trapper in my garage, on pre-orders from the farmers’ market. When the orders outgrew it, I moved into a small shop, taught myself CAD and CNC with no one to ask, and built most of the equipment myself.

Design · Production · Inventory · Sales · Website · Shipping · Fixing the equipment

So when an owner tells me they’re the only one who knows where everything is, or that they can’t take a week off, I don’t need it explained. I’ve been there.

Most of what I know came from what went wrong.

Trapper has never been a runaway success. There were hard lessons and plenty of mistakes, and those are the lessons that stick. What it did become is efficient: one person, very little admin, and my time on the parts I enjoy, like a video call with every rider and tuning each board to how they ride.

Then I saw it from the other side.

After ten years of only my own business, I went to work for other manufacturers in Revelstoke. At the cabinetry shop, jobs were tracked on paper, so finding one meant walking the floor. I moved the tracking into software the shop already had.

At the shade sail manufacturer, I rescued a stalled software rollout, moved the business onto a system that fit, and sorted out how sales and production talked to each other. In my first year, the owners could take two or three weeks away and the business kept running.

In everything I touched, I tried to replace myself with a system anyone could run.

Why I do this now.

I’ve watched owners pay for advice that moved painfully slowly, and for programs that stop at the business plan. The day-to-day operations work, where most businesses actually get stuck, is the part nobody shows up for.

That’s the part I like. I know the shop floor and the technology, and I’ll tell you when the answer is a better process instead of more software. AI tools have changed what I can build, and I want owners to get that benefit without the learning curve.

Outside the shop.

I grew up in Peace River, Alberta, learning to fix and build things myself. My father could make almost anything, and I was the kid who listened to his long explanations. I spent five years as a biologist, which is where the data habit comes from.

I moved to Revelstoke in 2008 for the mountains. I came for the winters and stayed for the summers and the community.