To understand why Castaway Golf Technologies won the $287,250 first prize in the 2015 Breakthru competition, it’s best to consider why it changed its name in the middle of the six-month competition.
The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation announced Thursday that the Fredericton company founded by Matt Vance and Josh Ogden had captured top place in the biennial event.
When asked after the announcement what the prize meant, CEO Ogden mentioned coachability and making the changes needed to move forward.
“We’ve pivoted on a few things since we spoke before,” Ogden said Thursday, highlighting how much the company had changed since I had met him and Vance two months earlier.
Castaway started out as a company called Matt’s Got Balls, an irreverent name that suited the jocularity of Matt Vance, who got the whole thing going. Vance, as a boy in Truro, loved finding lost golf balls, and he and his father developed a mechanism for retrieving them from water hazards.
Matt’s Got Balls quickly made links with Maritime golf courses, and they made money retrieving balls and finding markets for them. The team also struck a deal with the Giant Tiger retail chain.
Then they entered the Breakthru competition, began to work with mentors and repositioned the business.
Hence the name change. Ogden and Vance are tapping a huge market, especially in the southern United States, and their customers are largely golf clubs that cherish dignity. The name Castaway Golf Technologies is a better fit for that market, so they adopted it in the middle of the competition.
But that wasn’t all they changed. In January, Ogden and Vance were considering setting up a franchise network and allowing independent operators to use their technology and sales platform. But they want to ensure anyone on a golf course with Castaway products conducts themselves properly. They’re planning to eventually have Castaway employees servicing these courses in distant markets.
Ogden gave an overview of the company’s plans. It is initiating three research and development projects and working on manufacturing deals for its equipment.
Ogden is the lone full-time employee, but the hope is to have three others in the autumn.
In short, he outlined the type of corporate growth that made Castaway Golf a winner. In many respects, it was a surprise.
New Brunswick is known for its digital success stories, yet the judges awarded first prize in its biggest entrepreneurship competition to a company with an automated product for golf courses.
Silver medallist Simptek, which is working on a digital home automation system that saves energy, is a more typically New Brunswick company. Even third place NB Biomatrix, which has developed a solution to remove heavy metals from waste water, rose out of university research, as many of the province’s best startups have.
Castaway is a bit of an outlier but probably won because its founders are aggressive sales people who have demonstrated they can position themselves to grow into something meaningful. They’re innovative, but they also give you the sense they understand the corporate side and will do what’s needed to bring money into New Brunswick.
“The entire community in New Brunswick is why we’re here, and we’d like to thank everybody who’s helped us,” Ogden said.
“We look forward to employing New Brunswickers here in New Brunswick.”
Disclaimer: Entrevestor receives financial support from government agencies that support startup companies in Atlantic Canada. The sponsoring agencies play no role in determining which companies and individuals are featured in this column, nor do they review columns before they are published.
