When Angela and Justin Quinton decided to get into the agricultural testing business, Mother Nature was quick to throw them a curveball. The Quintons bought Lethbridge, Alta.-based Sandberg Labs in January 2010 – just in time for Western Canada’s wettest spring in four decades.
Come June, farmers throughout the region began sending in crop tissue samples. Levels of nitrate – vital for plant growth – tested pitifully low, leading some clients to question the new owners’ methods. So the Quintons dispatched samples to four other testing labs, all of which returned the same results.
But before that, they panicked. Phil Sandberg, the previous owner of Sandberg Labs, pointed out that this meteorological disaster was an opportunity for the couple to prove themselves to skeptical farmers.
“When the weather’s bad, that’s when they need you the most,” says Ms. Quinton, whose company provides services ranging from soil testing to crop monitoring for hundreds of customers, including small and large farms, agrology businesses and pet food manufacturers. “That’s when they need to know exactly what’s going on in their soil.”
Having survived this early trial, the Quintons still face a formidable business challenge. By the end of 2015, they aim to make Sandberg Labs the biggest and most accessible agricultural testing facility in Western Canada. Their goal is to almost double annual revenue to $1-million by boosting capacity, modernizing the lab and expanding services. To get there, the winners of the Challenge Contest, sponsored byThe Globe and Mail and Telus Corp., will use their $100,000 prize to upgrade processes and equipment.
Outside bucolic southern Alberta, Sandberg Labs’ 15 employees serve customers in B.C., Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories. Mr. Quinton, the president, works with many of the company’s larger clients, while his wife manages soil testing and does the paperwork.
“We inherited a dinosaur with a great customer base,” says Ms. Quinton, 39, who must turn clients away because the lab is running at full tilt. “There’s such a great need out there but with the current setup, we can’t meet it.”
The Quintons were smart to recognize that need. In 2006, they returned to their native Alberta after seven years in Silicon Valley, where Ms. Quinton ran a small homeopathy practice and Mr. Quinton was a product designer for San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc.
An electronics engineer who grew up on the family farm near Lethbridge, Mr. Quinton stayed with Cisco but took on a new role. As a quality auditor for the computer networking giant’s contract manufacturers, he visited factories in China, Mexico and Poland.
In early 2007, Ms. Quinton began working as a part-time technician at Sandberg Labs on the invitation of Mr. Sandberg, a friend who had founded it in the 1970s. Her new boss needed the help: Sales had surged 18 per cent that year after the few other agricultural labs in southern Alberta moved to Calgary, where they switched to industrial testing to serve the booming oil and gas industry.
While getting to know the business, Ms. Quinton watched this development with interest. But for all the signs that Sandberg Labs had a niche of its own, she also saw frustrated customers going out of province for services it couldn’t provide.
Laid off from Cisco, Mr. Quinton joined the company in 2009, when Mr. Sandberg was getting ready to retire. Convinced there was a big market for agricultural testing, the Quintons used their life savings and some bank financing to buy Sandberg Labs. “Our thing was, ‘Can we make this a first-class lab that can be there for the agricultural community?’ ” Ms. Quinton recalls.
She and her husband didn’t hesitate to make changes. In a move than brought them much new business, the Quintons switched to a different method of testing soil phosphorus levels. They also cut costs and automated nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur testing – a change that saved time and improved accuracy.
However, the new automated equipment has left the Quintons squeezed for space in their 3,000-square-foot lab. Rather than move to new premises, Mr. Quinton explains, Sandberg Labs will reconfigure its existing workflow.
To do that, he’s applying 5S, a Japanese organizational system that pares the workplace down to essential items and designates a place for everything. In addition, Mr. Quinton is using lean manufacturing principles to reduce transit times, thereby increasing billable hours. For example, he plans to move the lab’s grinding operations – currently spread throughout the building – into a room of their own.
