I had the chance to swing by Bolster HQ at Telus Sky and sit down with Mike Bignold, CEO and Founder of Bolster. Mike was incredibly welcoming, and has a great team by his side. I've been super excited to get this one out to y'all.
Who is Mike?
I’m just me. I ran a contracting company, a small business. I built software to help me run it. I realized one day it made more sense to sell software than it did to sell construction - I could help a lot more people and add a lot more value that way. And things escalated from there. I still feel the same, but now I have a lot more people on board.
Did you always find yourself entrepreneurial?
I’ve been self-employed in one way or another since I was 18. My parents and grandparents were all self-employed; it was something I grew up with. I often struggled with being employed, I feel like I’m just better at being self-employed or a founder. My dad was a contractor, my grandpa was a plumber, it goes back generations of contracting.
Bolster came out of you pulling on threads from your experience as a contractor?
I just saw that things could be done differently. The construction industry is the industry that's the most behind, the least transformed. All the systems and processes are built for paper – that was the only way to manage things. The second stage was software companies coming in and digitizing the paper processes. But this didn’t necessarily solve the problem, if anything it created a new one, now you have to teach someone the software. My goal from the beginning was to eliminate the paper processes and build processes that are tech native.
Does the pace construction moves at makes it easier or more difficult for you guys to get clients on board?
Both, the fact that we’re doing something so radically different from other companies makes it appealing but also more challenging. Appealing because people think ‘Finally somebody is doing something the way it should be done’, we don’t just automate processes, we eliminate unnecessary processes. To a lot of contractors, that’s a breath of fresh air, but others might’ve gotten into construction because they’re tech adverse; it can be challenging to get them up to speed. There’s going to be resistance, but we know it’s the right move. And if we don’t do it, someone will. We just think the time is now.
Have you noticed any mindset changes in the construction industry since then?
100%. Imagine trying to get a contractor on a Zoom call before COVID. What’s Zoom? At that time, they’ve never ordered anything online before. COVID changed all of that. Suddenly, they’re ordering online because they had to. They know how to use tech because they’ve had to be disconnected from fieldwork in different ways.
What about shifts in Startup Culture in Calgary?
It’s come a long way. There was a defeatist vibe to startup culture here, there were low expectations. I feel like that has changed in the last 5 years; there have been some great successes and people are starting to realize that it can happen here, that Calgary can be a startup city. We were the first Calgary company to get into Y-Combinator; we’re connected to San Francisco, so we have the privilege of comparing here to there. In the last 5 years, Calgary has come a long way.
And in yourself? Any shifts in you since incorporation?
I always sort of saw myself as a lone rebel in a way. I always had a belief that we’d get to where we are, but it was like the dog chasing the rabbit, now that you’ve got the rabbit what do you do with it? It was a surprise; I’ve had to level up in a lot of ways personally. I developed a wider range in all the things that I do.
It’s like walking through fire, you just get hardened the more you walk through it, and it’s been a non-stop inferno. But you almost need to go through that to get to the next level. Certain things stop scaring you, and things that seemed impossible now seem easy.
I used to be more reactive to things, and that wasn’t helpful. You learn to roll with the punches. When you’re younger, you react to things more intensely; as you get older it doesn’t impact you as much. It’s the same thing in business. Things just don’t affect you as much, which is good because it helps you stay focused.
You develop a thicker skin, and you trust your gut reactions more, right?
It’s also you often will ignore your gut feeling because you’re scared of something, even if it feels right. If you react really hard to something, that’ll swamp out your gut, and you’ll forget to trust. Your gut is just your machine learning algorithm, spitting out the best subconscious path to take at the juncture you’re at. That can easily be swamped out by emotional reasoning, the more reactive you are, the more emotional reasoning you’ll have that’ll take you away from the machine learning you’ve been doing.
Why Calgary?
I’m from Canmore, and Calgary is the next thing to home. Interestingly, there’s a lot of construction tech out of Alberta. I think the fact that Calgary has always been so business-friendly, there’s more income and opportunity. It’s always been that way. People like to pit O&G against Tech, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. All the corporate industries in Alberta have the highest salaries in Canada. There’s so much more resources that are organized by the private sector here, which means there’s so much more to go around. There’s more money to be invested, there’s just a little bit more per capita that helps Calgary do better. I think it comes down to having a greater share of our resources managed by the people who earn those resources.
Why Cape Town for the other office?
I did some traveling after my first year of university, a big road trip through South Africa. I then went back to Cape Town after I graduated and stuck around for a year It’s the most beautiful city in the world, it really is. And you can have a really great life there, it’s my favorite place in the world.
What inspired you to get over there the first time?
I went to school with a bunch of South Africans, and one of them went back and took a trip back after he graduated, and I just thought ‘How cool is that? A road trip through Africa’. I was always into offbeat trips and would go to Russia, South Africa, or Sudan rather than Australia or Thailand. I was just attracted to what I thought would be the ruggedness of it, which in reality is much different than I expected. I thought it would be a rugged holiday I would talk about forever, but it became a place I could see myself living forever.
I always wanted to go somewhere to find something that shocked me, and I think that was the best way to learn something. I don’t like to take the easy way, traveling or business.
I often forget that people don’t understand Africa in general. I’ll always ask ‘Is this what you expected from Africa?’ and it’s always met with ‘hell no’. Cape Town is like twenty small towns mixed in one. It’s a really cool melting pot of people and vibes.
What do we think we can learn from them? What have you picked up having an international influence baked into the company?
I would say here in Calgary we have a lot to learn about the lifestyle. Cape Town is a casual city, they do a lot right with lifestyle. I think I learned a lot more about Calgary about going to Cape Town; I saw us through someone else’s eyes. It made me think about Calgarians, the people from here, and the people we attract to Calgary, it’s a group of people who are serious about building something and doing something great, and looking at the world and seeing how you can improve it. It solidified how distinct Calgary is from the rest of the country.
How do you balance, say, walking through the fire and sleeping at night?
I didn’t always sleep well. Just as I was explaining you get hardened and it doesn’t bother me as much anymore. You trust your abilities more too. I would think ‘Who am I? Who gave me this fun job? Why am I the captain of this ship?’. But you get to the point where you realize you are there for a reason, it’s not an accident, and you trust your abilities. And they just get better. You also learn to give yourself some grace when things don’t go well. You’re less hard on yourself. Things go wrong enough times, and you realize that’s just the pattern, that’s how life goes. And that makes it easier to sleep.
Any hobbies to take your mind off things?
I have a very beginner genetic engineering lab. I like to just read up on that, and try different things, I’m really into the science of biologies and genetics these days. I don’t have a ton of time anymore through.
It’s just something I’m really interested in. I’m thinking one day I’ll have more time and turn it into a business one day. But I try not to let anything distract me from what we’re doing here at Bolster. If they let me, I would work 12-15 hours a day here, but sometimes you need something lighter to work on.
Do you read much?
I don’t anymore. I did most of the coding for the app we use, and that was such a creative time in my life. This was before I sold my contracting firm and we started going for revenue here. I just had this time of pure creativity, just read and learn and iterate. Just working on my own. I told myself this was my time to read, my time to learn because I knew that as soon as I had people and this was a machine, that would be over for a while. I’m in a period now where that creative, building time is on pause, and I’m committed myself to driving this forward until it can sustain itself, which is the goal. But during that time, I wasn’t worried about revenues, targets, sales, or that sort of thing, it was all just the product and what I was building. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to do that if it started as a revenue business from the start, it might’ve just been another cookie cutter. We achieved really unique things because of that time I believe.
I’m learning more in doing than I could in a book right now, I feel. That’s the stage I’m at right now.
What’s 2024 for y’all?
A huge year, we’re launching a whole version 2 of the product basically. We launched it internally already, and externally in July. It’s full circle for us, business in a box. You don’t need to use any other software, we have everything. We have some huge plays coming up soon, some massive shifts. There’s some real excitement here, tears were shed in the town hall the other day.
Thank you Mike
Writer and Photographer | Sam Doty
