Dreaming even bigger

With Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf up and running successfully it was time to dream once more. We took serious runs at two adjacent properties with the idea of building a good sized mountain surrounded by a themed railroad and bumper boats. Hidden inside the mountain would be our house, studio and workshop. Along with these plans we considered renaming Imagination Corporation to Giggle Ridge Studios. Because we were busy much of the year on our own projects, the plan was to do only concept design for our clients from that point on. But, as with many of our previous plans in years gone by that dream was not to be.

We were disappointed but not for long. Instead we began dreaming in a new direction and with brand new ideas. The train would survive as a private railroad but everything else would change. But I'll save that tale for the next post. Stay tuned...

Lifetime opportunity

After five extremely busy years on the road building the projects at West Edmonton Mall and elsewhere, the time had finally come to do a project we had long dreamed of. That project was a small park of our own. It also meant permanently relocating from Chemainus on Vancouver Island to the mainland. We found the perfect land for lease in Cultus Lake, British Columbia. The window of opportunity was tight for we had only 100 construction days to finish the project in order to capture the critical summer season. We called back our best workers from years previous and managed to pull it off.

Giggle Ridge Adventure Golf was themed after a 1920's logging camp, typical of what would have been found in the area. The goals we set were many. We wanted a facility of our own but we also wanted to prove the feasibility of building a world class project on a small scale. IT WORKED!

Size does matter

As we gained experience and strengthened our portfolio, we needed to decide is how big a company we wanted to be. For a while we were seriously considering opening an office in the United States which meant a rapid further growth of the company into that large market. In 1999 we had twenty-two employees with three good sized projects simultaneously on the go in three Canadian cities a thousand miles apart. It was an exciting and very busy time and we had an awesome team. The projects were off the charts. But as I travelled between cities keeping things on track I realized that the job I was doing wasn't what I desired. I really wanted to be hands-on with both the design and build and not just a manager of lots of people. Too many people meant that I only got to be a band leader. Too few people meant we got little done which limited the size of projects we could handle. We had to find the balance. 

Over the next year we purposely downsized our workforce, resolving that quality of project and a relaxed family lifestyle were far more important than the quantity or size of the jobs. We learned to be more selective in how we scheduled our commitments and more importantly how to say no to projects that weren't the perfect fit. Those policies proved to be the right decision for us and we follow that same path to this day.