Life in a Northern Town
Can entrepreneurism succeed in B.C.’s hinterland where big government and big resource companies have failed?
Once in a while, someone literally crashes into a business opportunity. That’s what happened to Tom Teichroeb when he glanced a rock cut with his blade while grading road on the outskirts of Vanderhoof. In the process, an exquisite rock slab calved away from the cut and landed in the ditch. Intrigued, he backed up and tried to replicate the effort, resulting in another slab of almost equal dimensions. His mother had recently passed on and the family was pondering an appropriate memorial, so he decided to truck the rough-cut slabs to his backyard workshop and try his hand at engraving.
“Something inside me just said that I should give this a try,” says the plainspoken 57-year-old, who was born and raised in Vanderhoof and has lived in this community 95 kilometres west of Prince George his entire life. Teichroeb’s amateur attempt 15 years ago at headstone engraving proved successful and, in typical hard-working Mennonite fashion, a business was born. “It just started to spread, word of mouth. At first it was about eight headstones a year – now I do that in a week,” says Teichroeb, who subsequently hung up the keys to his grader and now runs Northern Monumental Ltd. with his wife and one of five sons, producing thousands of different headstone designs.
Teichroeb’s is a small and unconventional business success story in a part of B.C. accustomed to economic fortunes and failures of spectacular proportions. Indeed, big is traditionally what sells in central and northern B.C. Prince George has its outlandishly towering peg-legged Mr. PG, Mackenzie boasts the “world’s largest tree crusher” and Houston touts a giant fly fishing rod. Everything around here is monumental: the sky, the landscape, the dreams as well as the problems. There was a time not so long ago when it seemed the green gold of the vast Interior lodgepole pine and spruce forests would fuel the good times forever. But a little creature called Dendroctonus ponderosae – the mountain pine beetle – coupled with the recent collapse of the U.S. housing market has quickly put the lie to that delusion; by the B.C. Ministry of Forest and Ranges’ own estimates, the beetle alone could reduce the output of the traditional Interior forest industry by as much as 40 per cent over the next 25 years. Last year alone not one, not two, but four forest mills closed in Mackenzie, evaporating 90 per cent of the town’s high-paying manufacturing employment base, while Fort St. James, north of Vanderhoof, lost two mills in 2008, leaving more than 100 workers unemployed.
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