Colin WheelerPage 1
ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview with Collin Wheeler by Chauncy Rucker
at the ATIA Conference, January 28-31, 2009, Orlando, Florida
RUCKER:Collin, I’d just like you to give us your history -- talk about how you got into working in terms of disability and where that lead you over all the years.
WHEELER:Okay. After university I got into the medical field more than rehabilitation field, in the area of orthotics and prosthetics, as a salesman, sales manager…artificial limbs, mastectomy products; things like that. So that gave me my background in the medical rehabilitation field per se; working for an American company called SH Camp which was one of the leaders in that field over the years. Then I had a few jobs which never lasted that long and were not that very satisfying to me to be totally honest and I wanted to get back into the field. I saw an ad in the paper which intrigued me for what looked like a very small company which in fact it was, and after a couple of interviews which was an interesting process, I got the job. The company was TASH which in those days was really called Technical Aids and Systems for the Handicapped Inc. which is a, you know, huge moniker to haul around so we stopped really using that.
RUCKER:What year was that?
WHEELER: That was 1985. The company had actually started in 1978, ’79 and when I interviewed for the job they told me it was a not for profit corporation, which it was. However, they never told me to run it as such. They basically were looking for growth and expanding their market base and expanding what they were doing for disabilities. The company was actually started in the late ‘70s because the National Research Council in Canada, a government department, had a rehabilitation arm that were developing items for people with physical disabilities.
RUCKER:Right.
WHEELER: Let’s stress that TASH was really a physical disability company. But the problem was that this arm of the government had no way to really market these devices because of the fact that they had no way to really accept money other than through the general coffers of the government and they wanted to, you know, to expand this arm. So they went to an organization called the Canadian Rehabilitation Council for the Disabled – another long name, CRCD for short – and in Canada that was an umbrella organization of the March of Dimes, the Easter Seals, the larger charities which in Canada couldn’t stand along because we have such a smaller population base. And they said to this organization, will you start a company to manufacture and market these products that we’re coming out with, and they said yes they would, and can you help us out with some seed money for a few years to get it going. The government agreed to that and that’s how TASH was born.
For the first five years they really struggled with a bit of an identity crises – are we a not for profit, are we a charity, are we a company, etc. As it turned out, about a year before I started, they did a bit of a management study. The Board was all volunteers and one of the members of the Board was an accounting firm and they did a study for free basically as a charitable donation. They discovered that the company had all these products out and nobody was paying for them – which is no way to run a company. So they cleaned it up and they terminated the existing General Manager and I got the job. And as I say, they never told me to run it as a not for profit.
The first thing I did really was start to look outside Canada, realizing that Canada is such a small marketplace; in those days just somewhere over 20 million people. Of course, a lot of Canadian companies export to the United States so one of the first things we did is start exporting to the United States, and then to Europe fairly quickly thereafter. So we had a few years of explosive growth. Our Research & Development was continuing to be done by this rehabilitation technology unit of the Canadian National Research Council – basically for free. And that was good and bad because we sometimes had to take products that we thought, oh, this isn’t going to fly, but we had to take them because they had spent all this time and trouble on them. So there were some good parts and there was some bad parts. My expertise at the time, I had a science degree in biology and chemistry, and over the years I got an MBA in international marketing and finance so that was my background to be a General Manager of this Company.
We were owned by them and basically we would have to provide, even though we were a not for profit, we provided a surplus to them every year which they used for their charitable works. Round about the middle ‘80s, I had always wanted to be…you know, buy into the company but of course with the ownership as it was there was no way to do that. However, in the middle ‘80s the opportunity came up. They started to have some of their own squabbles—not related to TASH; with their own organization, and I received a clue that now is the right time if you ever wanted to do something, you know, try and get something together.
So I went to the staff at TASH, all the staff, and offered them an opportunity to buy into the company. We were about eight or nine people at the time. Several of them did; some of them chose not to, but at least I gave them the opportunity, and we were able to complete a buy-out in August of 1996 which is when I took over as owner of the company. We had had some pretty good years of pretty explosive growth, mainly in the export marketplace as I say. We did import to Canada. We introduced the Adaptive Firmware card to Canada with Don Johnston. We introduced Intellikeys from Unicorn Engineering. We introduced all those products to Canada over the years because we were the only company really doing this sort of work in Canada at the time. So we introduced those.
Over the years we became a manufacturer-distributor because our research was being done by a government department. We then opened an office in the United States, in Richmond, Virginia, and basically ran the company from our two offices until we started to investigate selling the company.
The National Research Council, the RTU, they provided funding for about five years – seed money. It was operating money. It wasn’t investment money or anything. It was just an operating grant on a yearly basis. We had to survive on our own after that, and then once they decided they really…you know there were a lot of government cutbacks at that time in Canada, and they decided that that was one department that was going to be closed down. Workers in that department got an opportunity to actually buy some of the equipment and continue on as their own and actually one of them became a very good supplier to us. We had joint ownership of the molds and the plans and things like that, and he became a very good manufacturer for us and to the last day he was a very, very close partner with us, working partner. We actually bought up 99% of his production so it was that close you know.
Between us then, after we stopped getting research being done by the government, we started to do our own development – new products, ideas, and they basically came from our travels and talking to people and you know, what’s missing and what do we need. Once you hear it once, okay, but when you hear it two or three times, that’s time to say, okay, why don’t we try to develop something that will work in the marketplace. Which we did, and I think over the years, our computer access was well known, our switches were well known, our mounting systems were well known, and we became...I think most people appreciated our quality and our price points and things like that.
Where we were compared to some of the other companies in this industry, our computer access was based educationally, in the educational system, for physical disabilities. But our switches were used more in the wheelchair rehabilitation end. Take it to the other end which isn’t as well represented in ATIA or some of the other augmentative communication companies. All of the aug-com companies I think have used our products at one point in the past. We’ve been a supplier to pretty well everybody because of the generic nature of the TASH product line. But we also had this marketplace in the wheelchair end which most people didn’t really appreciate. I had approximately…2007…yeah, late 2007, I had a very chance conversation with somebody from AbleNET; indicated that my children, my family, were not interested in continuing on in the business. They have their own careers and actually live quite a bit away from us now. We started to negotiate and started to investigate the possibility and on April 15, 2008, basically we sold the assets of the company to AbleNET and I basically, after a transition, retired! Which is why we sit here today!
RUCKER:Is there any great question I should have asked that…well, I didn’t ask any questions but…
WHEELER:Over the years…no, I don’t think so. I think over the years we pretty well got to know everybody and we were talking earlier about some of the developments with the Adaptive Firmware Card, things like that, and we’ve been…the old people…TASH actually was one of the initial members of CAMA if you remember that, the Communication Aid and Manufacturers Association. And I was one of the ones who went on those bus tours around the country to take the mountain to Mohamed or whatever the expression is—to take our products out there! And then actually TASH was also one of the founding members of ATIA. I was on the initial Board, at the initial meetings, to get the association going. So we…even though we were a small Canadian company we tried to contribute to the overall health of the industry over the years, and I think we did a fairly good job.
RUCKER:And this is your last conference?
WHEELER:This will be my last conference. I am officially retired. I will not be doing anything in the business from now on. My wife retired at the same time; approximately mid-2008 so we’re going to start making some decisions about where we go from here. And it’s been a great 20…I guess 23 years. Before TASH, I only stayed at a company for less than four years…my maximum. When I got into TASH it was a small company that was doing some good work and at the end of the day you had to feel good because your products were being used by people who really needed them.
RUCKER:How lucky am I to catch you at your very last conference [laughter] and get your message. Thank you so very much!
WHEELER:You’re very welcome. I appreciate the chance to talk to you.
RUCKER:Okay.
WHEELER: It's been great.