In March, 2006, a pipeline in Alaska developed a dime-sized hole. The results were large and disastrous. Before the leak was discovered, an estimated 5,000 barrels of crude oil covered two acres of arctic tundra. A year later, the pipeline owner pled guilty to negligent discharge of oil, received a $20-million fine and experienced substantial profit losses while its remaining pipelines were surveyed and repaired.

The ensuing report revealed that the small hole was caused by years of corrosion, and the leak could have been prevented by a pig. Pigs, or pipeline inspection gauges, travel down pipelines to clean them, and are widely used in the industry. But pigs are expensive, and they can get lost or stuck.

Konrad Misiewicz wants to help solve that problem. In 2009, he won the YTP-HATCH prize – a business plan competition open to NAIT grads and students and sponsored by novaNAIT and the Youth Technopreneurship Program. His winning proposal was based on building a better pig tracker.

Now, with his father Mark, the 22-year-old is turning that proposal into a family business.

“Our device can fit inside a pig or be towed behind it, and will transmit a signal for up to 250 hours,” says Misiewicz, who is currently at work on his diploma in Business Administration – Management, in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation stream. “That’s important, because some runs are quite long, and you want to know where you can pick it up in, say, four hours.”

With over 500,000 kilometres of pipeline in Canada, Misiewicz believes his pig tracker has huge potential. “In Alberta alone there are 150 to 200 companies which deal with cleaning and maintenance,” he says, “and because of environmental disasters in the past, companies have to comply with strict regulations.”

The tracking device is a solution for the sort of problem that Stuart Cullum characterizes as a “pressing issue” for the energy industry, because while stuck pigs can be very costly, there is no real alternative.

Cullum, the executive director of novaNAIT, recalls that it was partly Misiewicz’s sophisticated understanding of the market that impressed HATCH judges, and ultimately netted him the $20,000 of seed money and one year of incubation services with novaNAIT’s Duncan McNeill Centre for Innovation.

“As judges, we expect to see an idea with innovative qualities,” Cullum says. While Misiewicz’s tracker is not the only one on the market, it is more durable and can transmit a signal over a longer distance. More importantly, Cullum says, “he had a clearly identified market niche that addressed the right thing: saving money.”

Since winning the contest, Misiewicz has formally incorporated the company as Senta Inc. and is currently fine-tuning a deal to rent the pig trackers to an Edmonton-based pipeline tool manufacturer, which will receive exclusive rights to sell the device in the Edmonton area.

Of the deal, Misiewicz says, “It’s actually a great complement to their service: they’ll have an amazing piece of technology and you can get it all in one place: your pig, your pipeline, your receiver and your pig tracker.”

Misiewicz hopes to make similar arrangements with companies in southern Alberta and even the U.S., and has set a goal of $1.5 million in sales over the next two years.

Market Realities

Winning the HATCH prize has not translated into a rush of orders on the books. But attempting to spin positive publicity immediately into profits can be a dangerous game for a startup if it means rushing through the business fundamentals in order to get buyers' and investors’ interest before the media attention goes away.

“The worst thing you can do is set expectations that are too aggressive and not meet them,” Cullum says. Before the media comes knocking at the startup’s door, he says entrepreneurs need to have a solid understanding of the company’s valuation.

Good investors are savvy, and expect entrepreneurs to have a thorough understanding of the current financial situation as well as future capital requirements.

“If you aren’t ready to fill orders, if you don’t know what you need to move forward, you’re better off to let the community know that info is coming rather than try to wing it,” Cullum says.

Misiewicz had already begun implementing his business plan before the competition; he even had a working prototype. But there was still a lot to do, and for that reason he really appreciated the mentoring that came with the incubation space.

“I liked the incubation more than the money,” he says. “They gave us office space, and with that we had access to lots of other resources, like Randy [Thompson, NAIT’s entrepreneur in residence].”

Before the competition, Misiewicz’s venture was being funded by personal investments, so the $20,000 paid for marketing and a website, and funded the manufacture of 10 units.

The very practical value of the monetary prize is an extension of the real-world education that Misiewicz went to NAIT in search of. He had enrolled in business at another post-secondary education, but found the program too theoretical and transferred to NAIT after his first year.

“It was quite different at NAIT,” Misiewicz says. “All of my instructors had worked in the field for a long time, and when I asked questions about my business they gave me real answers.”

Though today he is only 22 (and was just 20 when he won HATCH), Misiewicz still had a vested interest in those business lessons. He had already experienced the bitter taste of an unsuccessful business venture while selling a line of all-natural skin products at trade shows.

He gave it up when he realized he was putting in far more time and money than he was getting back. He has always had an entrepreneurial bent; when he was 10, he capitalized on his classmates’ passion for certain toys when he discovered a way to buy them wholesale and sell them for a profit.

Still, even for the entrepreneurially inclined, the life can be a hard one. Misiewicz admits he has moments when he isn’t sure if everything will fall into place. (He is too much of an entrepreneur to call them moments of doubt.) But when he does experience such moments, he tries to remember that they are short pauses on a long journey.

“You are fending for yourself, and personally, I like that,” he says. “Even if you fall once or twice, in the end it’s all a learning experience. It’s all on the path to being successful. You may fail 200 times, but now you know 200 ways to recover.”