 Jeff
Harrop
My professional career began in a tool shop in Penetanguishene,
Ontario.
I had just finished high school and I wanted to earn
a little money before going to university, so I decided
to work as a general labourer in a small moldmaking
shop where my mom was a designer. After a year of sweeping
up steel chips, boring bolt-holes, polishing inserts
and - of course - cleaning toilets, I was more than
ready to head back to school. I had a little bit of
money and a great appreciation for how unsuited I was
for manual labour.
I applied to and was accepted at the University of
Waterloo, Canada's equivalent of M.I.T. (although we
always liked to refer to M.I.T. as America's equivalent
of Waterloo). My best friend had been accepted into
the Computer Science program there a year earlier, so
I decided to follow suit. It took me two terms there
to figure out two things: 1) I really like beer; 2)
I really DON'T like programming.
I decided to switch to Economics - the ultimate program
for those who want to keep their options WIDE open.
The mixture of behavioural science and mathematical
analysis really agreed with me and I stuck it out to
the end. Along the way, I gained valuable experience
in the co-operative work program, which was pioneered
by UW in Canada. In between terms at school, I spent
a total of 8 months at IBM Canada doing financial analysis
and lease pricing and 12 months at Western Gas Marketing
(at the time they were the marketing arm of TransCanada
Pipelines after deregulation), doing forecasting and
spot and futures market analysis. It sure beat flipping
burgers, and it gave me some pretty cool experience
to take to the workplace after graduation. Speaking
of which…
Now that I had finished my degree program and got my
feet wet with some real world experience along the way,
what was next? Banking? Financial Services? Commodities
Trading?
Once again, I decided to keep my options open (Translation:
I still had no idea what I wanted to do with myself).
I cleaned up my resume and applied to everything I
thought I was qualified to do. Soon after, I got a call
from Canadian Tire. Turns out, I had applied for a particularly
uninteresting entry level finance position, but after
reading my resume, they were wondering if I'd be interested
in interviewing for a position on their newly formed
Logistics Re-Engineering team. (I should point out that,
at the time, I thought "logistics" had something
to do with the army and I didn't even know that "re-engineering"
was a word).
I agreed to the interview, but I didn't hold out much
hope. A few days later, I met with two of the project
managers for a bacon sandwich - one of them was my current
partner, Mike Doherty.
For the next 3 years, we had quite a few ups and downs,
but we were a great team and we always managed to have
a blast and learn a lot. When the project was completed,
5 of the core members of the team decided that we didn't
want to split up, so we formed a consulting company
to help other companies the way we helped Canadian Tire.
By and large we were successful and we helped a number
of companies, but over time it became apparent that
we each wanted different things (imagine a marriage
with 4 spouses instead of one!). Another fork in the
road for yours truly…
After working on contract for a few months and thinking
carefully about my options, I realized that supply chain
planning and process design was in my blood. Mike and
I set up a new partnership and the rest, as they say,
is history.
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