Rob Davy's Blog

It’s been quite a while in the works, but I’m really excited to announce that Brittany and I are opening a new business, Edmonton Paintball Centre!

Just last week we signed the lease on a building to host this new venture (below) We have both quit out jobs (sorry Neil and Ian!) to work on this full time.

 


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A Little Back Story…

Back in 2010 I opened the original Edmonton Paintball Centre at the old Cadence Creek property with the help of my good friend Eric Warnke

Waiting for my first paintball people to arrive

— Rob Davy (@robdavy) August 21, 2010

 

It was a good little game, last a few months before the weather took a turn. But it was a great learning experience.
Life continued, jobs came and went, but the thought always lingered in the back of my mind.

In late 2012, Brittany and I started talking about it more and more, running the numbers, casually looking on Kijiji for spaces, etc. The more we talked, the more it seemed to make sense…

 

The Journey

The most difficult part of this process has been finding a space! We’ve looked at dozens of spaces…

Luckily along the way we’ve had the help of our wonderful commercial real estate broker, Alex Heintz of the Trikon Group. Without him, we would have been lost so many times, we’re so grateful for his help. If you ever need help finding a commercial space or if you have one to lease/sell, he’s your guy. Most commercial brokers suck (trust us, we met many); Alex doesn’t!

 The Building

The space we’ve leased is a huge 3 story building at 10010 107a Ave. It’s been many things since it was built in 1979, including the headquarters of the Edmonton Public School Board, home of Alcoholics Anonymous and most recently the Edmonton Mennonite Centre for Newcomers (EMCN). It’s an office building with three floors (basement, main and 2nd) each of 22,500 square feet. There’s also a 10,000 square foot ‘mechanical penthouse’ on the roof, bringing the total size to 77,500 sqft. Depending on your willingness to stretch the interpretation, that would make us (as far as we can tell) the largest indoor paintball facility in North America (there’s one in Montreal at 70,000 sqft that currently claims that title).

The building has been sitting empty for a couple of years, so the owners were… motivated to make a deal Eventually it’ll probably be knocked down when re-development reaches that part of the city, but until then!

On the inside, it’s currently split into offices using a simple modular divider system that has already proven very easy to remove

Our intention is to remove the vast majority of the internal ‘walls’ to leave us with 3 floors of open space:

We’ll then build the limited walls we need for reception, staging areas, changing areas, birthday rooms, etc.

We took possession of the building in the last few days which was very exciting. It’s also very weird walking through a building that size knowing that it’s effectively yours for the next 5 years…

 

The Business

Our business is called Edmonton Paintball Centre (catchy eh?). I’m a strong believer in keeping things simple and obvious. There’s no confusion about what we do. We’re also a destination

Dear Costco, it’s still August. Not time for Christmas trees. Thanks. Rob

Ps, seriously, who buys a Christmas tree in August? Anyone?

I’ve just woken up, and I flipped on the TV to give myself an excuse to stay in better a little longer (to be fair, it’s been a long time since I’ve lied in). I came across a presentation of some sort on Access about the Oil Sand developments in Fort McMurray.
I’ve no idea who the presenter was, but it was dated 2007 and looked like it was in a theatre of some kind.

If anyone knows who he is, post in the comments.

Anyway, he was obviously against the oil sands, so I watched for a few minutes to see what he said. In general I’m for the oil sands. Some things up there suck, but so does destroying Iraq and Afghanistan to help secure our oil supply. Yes, yes, perfect world we’d not need their oil, etc, etc, but we do for now, and it’s better it comes from here than there in my opinion.

Anyway, he was listing all these reasons as to why it was so bad, and a noticed a couple of things fishy about his data.

Firstly, he said that each Canadian uses 25 barrels of oil a year which need 75 barrels of water to produce (from the oil sands) and needs 50 tons of earth moved. Hmm. What do you notice about those numbers. Awfully round aren’t they? It’s not 28 barrels, it’s 25, a nice multiple. In my eyes, that means they’re either made up, or very poorly calculated that they magically come out that rounded. If he’d said Canadians uses an average of 22.8 barrels a year, that’d be reasonable, and if that was the number why on earth would anyone round it to a nice round number? Think your audience is stupid and can’t handle non-simple numbers?

But then came the best part.

He was complaining about the human impact on Fort McMurray (cost of living, drugs, etc) and then he mentioned the highway that goes up to Fort Mac (highway 63) and said it’s known as “Hell’s Highway” because… “The average speed on that highway is one hundred and seventy eight kilometers per hour”. Exact quote.

Think about that for a minute. 178km/hr. 110miles/hr. I’m not sure most cars can even do 178km/hr! And there he is saying that’s the *average* speed!

He didn’t say it was the average speed for speeding tickets (which even then wouldn’t made sense). Didn’t say it was the fastest speed ever recorded (which could make sense). No, he said it was the *average* speed.

You know what? Suddenly everything he said was ignored by me. If he can’t get something so simple right, why should I trust him with things that I can’t relatively quickly dissimulate?

So lesson here: if you want peo0ple to believe what you’re saying, don’t screw up simple things, because suddenly any credibility you may have had will be gone.

So hopefully this works, using the wordpress iPhone app…

I spent today (Saturday) and yesterday (Friday) in Sherwood Park Mall with a couple of ponies for Mall Wide Registration. Basically the Mall lets a load (44 in this case) of organizations setup booths in the mall where they can hand out information about their programs and register people for them. There was everything from music and dance lessons to karate, girl guides, boy scouts and baby salsa lessons (!).

For a for-profit organization (like ours) it’s $50 for the 2 days, which is a bargain! For non-profits it’s free.

As before (we did this last year too), we had a contest to win free riding lessons.

This is mainly to collect email addresses to add to our already huge mailing list (1200+ people). I haven’t counted them yet, but I think there’s over 200 in there!

We don’t actually do registrations at the mall; we direct everyone to the website (www.edmontonridinglessons.com) where they can register. I’ll send all the new email people an email tomorrow reminding them to register too.

It’s a long time to sit in a mall (12 and 8 hours), but it’s amazing value and worth it. Next one is March I think…

It’s that time of year again; time to secure our hay supply. Last year we used about 550 round bales of hay (over 600,000 lbs). This year we expect it to be a little less (less horses on property) but it’ll still be a lot.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but it’s been really dry this summer (hence the lack of mosquitoes and the introduction of millions of grasshoppers). This has really affected the production of hay. Some of my suppliers are saying they’re down 20%, some 50% so prices have adjusted accordingly. Luckily diesel is a LOT cheaper than it was this time last year, which helps offset some of the production and transport costs. It hasn’t just affected the price, it’s affected the availability. Because we’ve only been around for 4 years, we’re not at the top top of anyone’s ‘list’ when it comes to who they supply to, so a couple of my supplies have said they’ll have no hay for us this year. So we’re having to go further a field, which is why I found myself near Barrhead today.

Very round-about way of getting there, via some questionable roads.

Barrhead County has some very… lax standards with regards to it’s rural roads. One I was on for about 20km was well maintained, but made up of about 4″ of gravel, so kinda slippy. And it went up and down, round and round. There were also ‘roads’ that were basically just tracks in fields. Really weird seeing a proper road sign in what appears to be the middle of a field.

Met a really nice guy up there called David, and his wife Donna. They’re going to supply me with 150-200 bales this year at a nice price. They’re hay looks great too.

We probed a couple of bales with a moisture meter to the moisture levels. Moisture levels are very important in hay, as too much moisture will allow the bale to mold, start to heat and literally eat itself into a big lump of mold. Just as bad, and more likely, is that the hay will just get kinda moldy and dusty. This is fine for cows who can tolerate it, but horses can’t. It’s easy to avoid damp hay; you simply have to let it dry out in the field before you bale it. If it gets rained on, it has to be allowed to dry for a few days before you bale it. The problem is that you’re at the mercy of the weather. It needs to stay dry for long enough for your hay to dry and get baled, and when you’ve got a larger operation and are baling thousands of bales, you need quite a long period of dry weather. Not too much of an issue this year I guess, but still, one summer storm, and you’re back at square one.

We metered these bales and they all came out between 8 and 11% moisture, which is great. Anything less than 15% is generally acceptable.

We’re also going to supplement our hay with Alfalfa cubes this year.

I’ll post more about them some other time, but they’re great.

So now just got to finalize my trucking for this hay and it’ll be ours. Then just need a few more and we’ll be good.