International Bonus: Building a business from a cabin in the woods

A bonus for you in Canada and around the globe, while the US is busy with family and Thanksgiving: an interview with Canadian entrepreneur Gregg McLachlan.

MP3 download: Gregg McLachlan mini interview

Gregg McLachlan built a nation-wide resource site in Canada from his cabin in the woods using dial-up internet access. He told me how in this short, 3 minute interview.

I was struck by what a great lesson he had for any business struggling with limits and for any people struggling with an industry that is dying or at least changing around them.

Catch up with Gregg at Work Cabin Communications or on Twitter as @GreggMcLachlan. Or take a look at his Canadian environmental jobs site, Work Cabin.

Transcript of Gregg’s comments:

I’ve spent 22 years in media. I’m actually from the city of Toronto, and I moved down here 23 years ago. In 2007, I realized that the media business was changing dramatically. So it was time to look for a Plan B.

I looked at what were the things that connected me to a potential business opportunity. I live in the forest, do a lot of work in the forest. I’m an amateur naturalist and wildlife photographer so I decided, OK, there’s an opportunity here to look at the environmental jobs business, because there was a real void in Canada for how you find those types of jobs. I could deliver that service and be genuinely authentic because I’m part of that community. I thought, let’s give it a shot. That’s what I did.

I live in a community of 200 hundred people. I have a 30 acre forest where I live. When I launched the business in 2007, it existed on dial-up for several years because the forest blocked a lot of the signals.

The world doesn’t know that you’re on dial-up. They access your service. They don’t know the behind the scenes. It ran fine; it ran smoothly. We had broadband come in several years ago, so now I can get my signal going up, rather than through the forest.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.