Griffin Simony and Josh Peill, the owners of Shift Accessibility Contractors.Supplied
Behind every small business is a ‘big why’ – the reason they started their company in the first place and what motivates them to keep going, even when times get tough. Intuit QuickBooks is proud to support Canadian small businesses through every step of their journey and is pleased to celebrate companies doing remarkable things in this “Small Business, Big Why” series.
Griffin Simony’s interest in accessibility started close to home. He grew up in Nova Scotia, but moved to Calgary, where his grandparents lived, in 2017. At the time, his grandparents were facing a difficult but common experience: They could no longer physically navigate their home and were moving into an assisted living facility.
“I was chatting with my aunt [then], who’s an occupational therapist, and she mentioned how there wasn’t really anyone working in the built environment around improving accessibility, especially in the residential side,” Simony says.
The perfect partnership
Simony had built a career as a construction engineer, mostly focusing on commercial and heavy civil projects, but he was interested in doing more residential work. Around the same time, Josh Peill, a friend who also worked in construction, mentioned that he had been thinking of starting an accessible renovation company.
Peill had done some market research and found a few companies in other provinces that were doing this type of work, but there was no one in Calgary – or anywhere in Alberta for that matter – dedicated to serving people with disabilities.
According to Statistics Canada, 680,310 Albertans ages 15 and older have a disability. Of these folks, almost 40 per cent have a severe or very severe disability – such as pain, mobility, flexibility, dexterity or sight – all of which could require accessible modifications to their homes.
“Josh connected with a similar company based in Ontario and the stories they shared about the experiences they’d had with their clients [were really powerful], whether it was giving people access to levels of their home that they’ve never had before or allowing them to shower independently for the first time,” Simony says.
“It really came back to how we could use our skills and knowledge to make the most direct impact.” That was the start of Shift Accessibility Contractors.
Getting the word out
Of course, it took some time for the business to take off. They incorporated Shift in January 2019, but didn’t land their first job – a deck with a vertical lift that provided access from the house into the backyard – until that summer. For those first few months, Simony and Peill focused on connecting with people and organizations that support seniors and people with disabilities, introducing themselves and explaining how Shift could help serve their needs.
“It was really just a lot of late nights and walking into businesses to drop off pamphlets and see who we could chat with,” Simony says. “Nothing glamorous.”
Shift is the only construction company in Alberta dedicated to serving people with disabilities.Supplied
Eventually, things started picking up. By 2020, they were getting enough work that Simony could quit his day job. In 2021, they hired their first full-time employee and landed their first $100,000+ contract, which was a big milestone because, as Simony explains, it gave them confidence to go after even bigger projects.
This follows a pattern set by many Canadian entrepreneurs. Even when times get tough – like the pandemic or more recent inflation concerns – optimism about the future of their business remains. According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses in August 2023, most Western provinces have gained optimism over the long term.
Just three years after opening the business, Shift earned $2 million in annual revenue – and they’re on track to hit $3 million this year. And that growth has largely been through word of mouth.
“Everything has been through referrals and developing relationships with organizations,” he says. (The duo has made connections with Spinal Cord Injury Alberta, Alberta Health Services, Workers’ Compensation Board Alberta and Cerebral Palsy Alberta, among others.) “But it’s also about actually executing when you do get some work.”
“One of the things Josh and I have always said is that we only want to have trade partners and employees that we would feel comfortable having in our home or our grandparents’ home,” Simony says.
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Finances and the future
Day-to-day, the company’s biggest challenges are administrative. Or rather, as Simony puts it: “It would be a whole other set of problems if we didn’t have QuickBooks. It’s not that we’re facing challenges that we need the platform to solve, it’s that we’re not facing daily challenges because we have it.”
The Shift Accessibility Contractors uses QuickBooks to help manage their $3 million business.Supplied
Simony and Peill use QuickBooks Online to stay on top of accounts receivable and payable, as well as profit and loss for each project and for the year. This allows them to not only manage their cash flow and pay their sub-trades on time, it’s also an easy way to see where they’re making and losing money, how expenses are balancing out on each project and what they’re spending on overhead.
All these insights they easily collect within QuickBooks Online are important when building their business strategy and deciding what projects to bid on. It also frees up their time so they can focus on their ultimate goal: giving people more functional homes, all the while helping everyone understand how important accessibility is.
“We’d really like to start getting ourselves in front of people a little bit more, even if it’s not just for the purpose of saying ‘hire our company’,” Simony says. “We want to bring awareness around improving the built environment – and that you can do it in a way that can be really beautiful and functional.”
Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Intuit QuickBooks. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.