Self-employment
Making it our businessWith their expertise and training, engineers can make a killing as entrepreneurs. Here's what to expect if you decide to go over to the business side. By Nathan Wilkinson |
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 [ 2008-10-03 ] |
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Philippe Dumais, eng., co-founder of
À la Fût microbrewery
Photo : Marie-Claude Hamel
In spring 2005, electrical engineering student Philippe Dumais found his career in a bottle of beer. He and two classmates at Montreal's École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) took a beer-making course and began buying kettles and fermentors. “One of our apartments was completely dedicated to brewing beer for three or four months,” Dumais recalls.
“At one point we were even brewing it in our bathtubs!” Engineers to the core, they were as keen on the technical process as on the final brew — and when they started tinkering with electronic chilling systems, they knew they had a marketable product on their hands. They founded a microbrewery named À la Fût in Saint-Tite, Quebec, to sell their lager, ale and patented digital kegs. By June 2006, their venture won first prize in the Business Creation Division of the annual Québec Entrepreneurship Contest, winning them $10,000 and a flood of new investors.
More and more engineering graduates are converting their passion and expertise into success as entrepreneurs. According to Martin Michaud, president of the Club des Ingénieurs Entrepreneurs (CIE) at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, engineers make natural businesspeople. “Fewer people go into business from the Polytechnique than from [business school] HEC Montréal, but [those from] the Poly end up doing better. They're better prepared, even if they haven't done a bachelor's of business administration!”
He credits the management principles and communication skills that engineering students learn through teamwork courses and oral presentations, in addition to their traditional skills in technology, math and problem-solving. If you have ideas brewing for your own business, start planning now for possibly the most gruelling — and rewarding — adventure of your life.
LEARNING THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF A START-UP
Chris Psinas, a '93 Concordia mechanical engineering graduate and founding president of Contrast Corporation, a quality consultancy, agrees that engineers are well-trained for business but warns that entrepreneurs need financial skills, too: “The company I started in the 90s — it was so hard, there were times we didn't have money to buy groceries. After three years, I realized it wasn't about the product, it was about the sales … I learned about banking, I learned about venture capital.”Engineering faculties are increasingly offering business options to interested students. In 1999, McGill Engineering pioneered a Minor in Technological Entrepreneurship (MTE). Judy Pharo, Associate Director of the Engineering Student Centre, says: “Many [engineering students] had the technical innovation, the skills. But we didn't have the business courses to help them realize that.” The faculty brought in management professors to teach courses that would lead engineers from the idea stage to presenting a product and going into business. The MTE is now fully booked with 20 to 25 students who end the minor by developing business plans under the guidance of experienced professors.
Montreal's French-language institutions also offer sophisticated business training. ÉTS students and alumni, including the À la Fût team, have access to that school's business incubator (Centech, or Centre de l'entrepreneurship technologique). After Dumais and his partners had their project approved, Centech provided them with prototyping facilities, up to $10,000 in funding that does not need to be repaid, exclusive seminars, and accompaniment from inception to launch.
Centech mentorship coordinator Robert Bilodeau describes the two types of mentors available. There are “technology mentors,” drawn from ÉTS faculty, and “business mentors,” who have experience in accounting, financing or leading a company. Founded in 1995, Centech has ushered some 30 companies into independent operations and has another 30 in the incubation stage. At the Polytechnique, the CIE entrepreneurship club functions as an arm of the Centre d'entrepreneurship HEC-Poly-UdeM, an inter-institutional mentorship body that has helped launch 116 companies since 1996.
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