1. BY WILL CHABUN, LEADER-POST MAY 28, 2012
Adam Reesen, a fourth-year U of R business student, is competing in an entrepreneurship competition this week at Victoria’s
Royal Roads University, he started a granite sign making business.
Photograph by: Bryan Schlosser, Regina Leader-Post
REGINA — Adam Reeson is truly a chip off the old block.
The fourth-year U of R business student hopes to win a entrepreneurship competition this week at
Victoria’s Royal Roads University with a couple of pieces of polished granite.
Reeson’s bright idea springs from his family’s four generations running Regina-based Remco, the
dominant producer of cemetery memorials in Western Canada.
Over time, new laser-etching technology has permitted these memorials to become more detailed and
personal while retaining the dignity and durability of granite, which can handle the extreme weather of
Saskatchewan.
Reeson’s idea is to apply Remco’s equipment to a new product: attractive personalized house
numbers.
This “business ideas” competition is the first under the sponsorship the Pacific North-West Economic
Region (PNWER), which is, its website says, a “statutory, non-partisan, bi-national, public/private
partnership in North America” that offers a “forum for collaborative bi-national planning involving both
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2. the public and private sectors and offers leadership at the state/provincial level in Salem, Olympia,
Boise, Helena, Juneau, Edmonton, Regina, Victoria, Yellowknife and Whitehorse.” If you’re
geographically challenged, those are the capitals of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska,
Alberta, Saskatchewan, B.C., the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
Its official interests include agriculture, arctic and border affairs, energy, health, plus economic
development. And with PNWER wanting to become better-known, what better way than through a
contest for the region’s young entrepreneurs?
The 50-plus universities in the Pacific North-West were invited to hold competitions for new business
ideas. Emerging from the one at the U of R’s Hill School of Business was Reeson, who had to make a
pitch (covering customers, strategy and competitive advantage) to a panel of judges, and convert this
into a three-minute video.
Reason, 22, plus U of R associate professor Chris Street, head later this week to the next round,
where he’ll pitch it to a panel of judges. “Kinda like Dragon’s Den, but they’re not giving away any
money,” Reeson said.
As well, he’ll also take business workshops at an entrepreneurial boot camp. “I believe I’m the only one
from Canada,” said Reeson.
Whatever the result, Reeson plans to take his idea to the marketplace, pushing initially for high-end
buyers and selling through home builders, then, if things work out, expanding to other cities.
And if he wins, it will be another feather in the organizational cap of the U of R’s Hill School of
Business, which has done well in a string of regional and national business competitions since being
created out of the old Faculty of Administration.
“I’ve noticed an attitude change,” Reeson said of Saskatchewan and its young commercial class. “I’m
thinking there’s more emphasis on innovation and there’s more emphasis on Saskatchewan as a great
place to be — and ‘why don’t we used these great programs to make things happen?’”
wchabun@leaderpost.com
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