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 m
