Ready for takeoff: from planting seedlings to make a few bucks, to boldly acquiring their competition, a Wawa business trio has been wild about growth, and in their business, the sky is the limit.

Peter Moore and Trevor Laing are determined to leave no stone unturned in finding ways to grow and diversify their business.

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As founders of The Wilderness Group, a full-service forestry-based company, the Wawa duo has come a long way since establishing a tree-planting services company in 1986 with $10,000 and a beat-up pickup truck.

Today, the company employs 40 full-time employees and about 500 skilled seasonal workers, trained as firefighters, foresters, pesticide applicators, pilots, woodlands operators and GIS/GPS technicians.

Boyhood friends who grew up in the town of 4,200, about 240 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie, both Laing and Moore graduated in 1986 from the University of Western Ontario--Trevor as a geologist and Peter as a geophysicist. Alberta's oil patch beckoned, but their timing was wrong.

"It was during the glut when oil was $2 a barrel," jokes Laing, now 42. "We planted trees the year before and we felt there was an opportunity there."

While Laing picked up a hydro company job, Moore bid on some area tree-planting contracts with the Ministry of Natural Resources and ended up winning four of them. The work became very big very quickly and Trevor joined his friend to help out.

That first year, they planted between 800,000 and 900,000 trees, with a seasonal staff of 14 people.

The next year, they topped out at 1.5 million seedlings and boosted production exponentially each year until they were planting as many as 30 million trees annually by 1999.

But with almost 200 tree-planting firms operating in the North and profit margins dropping, the pair realized there was no money in it, backed off their planting pace and began strategizing for ways to diversify the company.

They added an aviation division to the mix in 1994 and spun off Wilderness Helicopters headed by another business partner, Blair Mills. A GIS (geographic information system) division was added in 1998.

Adding four Jet Ranger helicopters at bases in Wawa, Marathon and Chapleau didn't really complement the tree-planting business, says Moore, 40, but, allowed them greater flexibility to explore other ventures in tourism, fire suppression, airborne surveys and GPS mapping.

Their boldest move was the acquisition of a Thunder Bay tree-planting competitor, Broland Enterprises, in 2000. At the same time, they brought together all of their companies under one umbrella.

The new company, called The Wilderness Group, includes a forest services company, an aviation division and a GPS-vegetation management division.

They anticipate that industrial vegetation management (spraying, tree trimming and brushing out rights-of-way) will be one of their biggest growth areas.

While still headquartered in Wawa, the company has offices in Thunder Bay, Timmins and Hull, Quebec and is exploring a possible location in Alberta.

With aspirations to go national and bid on coast-to-coast contracts, Moore realizes they must have a marketing presence throughout the country.

"We've been lax in the past on marketing because we've never had to do it before," he says. "Now, we're actively marketing year-round.

"In the industrial sector," he adds, "there are companies with national requirements and we're looking to pursue those (opportunities). We're also looking to do creative things in the forestry business and bundle services with other suppliers."

Though reluctant to talk about clients and specific areas of interest for competitive reasons, Moore hints that the company will be working with nurseries to supply a range of services and will be exploring opportunities through its aviation unit.

"We're taking our three operating entities and looking for different ways to grow them," especially in areas of GIS-GPS and steering away from forestry and into municipal applications, he says.

Earlier this year, Wilderness GIS teamed up with a consortium of area geographic information system companies to win a contract providing GIS services in the Algoma District's north end.

Wilderness collaborated with Cree-Tech of Chapleau, Sault Ste. Marie's Pensink Technologies and the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre to provide GIS to the townships of Michipicoten (Wawa), Chapleau, Dubreuilville, White River and Hornepayne.

Among the lessons Moore says he learned in the 1990s was to limit dependence on the forestry sector and find cross-over opportunities for their services in other sectors.

"The forestry sector is very cyclical. It's a boom-bust type of environment ... and when overnight. You can't predict it. You can't see it coming and can't really do anything about it.

"Since our merger with Broland, we realized that forestry is a great industry, but it's certainly not smart in the long-term to rely on it for everything. We're trying to diversify ourselves and look for new opportunities, particularly in the region's booming mineral exploration sector."

Laing admits Northern Ontario can be a difficult place to do business. Though their roots and hearts are in the North, both Laing and Moore say the company has been fortunate in financing their operations through the Business Development Bank. Few mainstream banks are willing to invest startup capital in Northern Ontario ventures, he says.

With that in mind, the company is focusing its attention on more populous southern Ontario and U.S. markets.

"We've been so hungry in the North for so long ... when we go down to southern Ontario there is so much work ... it's a smorgasbord," says Laing.

"If you're lean and mean, you can really take a bite out of someone else's workload down there."

"We've got some inconveniences up here but also some inherent advantages. By being hungry, we're usually much more competitive than (southern Ontario companies) are, when they're (operating) up here.

"It's hard for them to come into our markets unless they're lean and mean, and very easy for us to go down there," he says.

www.broland.ca

By IAN ROSS 

Northern Ontario Business