It’s exciting and heartening to learn of a small Calgary business — started by a family almost 75 years ago — continuing to grow into larger space here and with new locations across the west.

Bolt Supply House was launched as a supplier of fasteners. It was purchased by Murray McCann in the mid-1960s, who then sold to his brother, John, in 1992.

He grew it to 14 locations in Western Canada and its success caught the eye of Lawson Products, the metal fabricator and hardware giant based in Chicago.

Lawson Products acquired Bolt Supply House in 2017 but it continues to run as an independent subsidiary of the Lawson Products Canadian Division, choosing to maintain its long-established brand recognition.

Although Calgary remains as the centre of its operations, company president Kurt Mario chose to oversee running the company from Saskatoon where, before accepting the role as president, he was the branch manager for more than 20 years.

A strong and successful enterprise with a growing customer base, the distributor of fasteners and industrial maintenance, repair and operations supplies recently took possession of a new building in the Balzac area.

There are three outlets in Calgary, including one in the Manchester area that long served as a warehouse and retail operation. New customers and new products meant larger space was required.

Mike Warner, executive vice-president of Cushman Wakefield industrial sales and leasing, who along with his business partner, Kevin Tang, have long been the exclusive agents for Bolt Supply House throughout its territories, increased the size to 40,000 square feet — 10,000 used by administration.

That was soon consumed and Mario made the decision to contract the Cushman Wakefield team to search for a much larger property that would accommodate needs for today and in the future.

The result is a move into a 100,000-square-foot new structure two and a half times the size of the former Calgary main branch. Designed by GGA-Architecture and built by Dawson Wallace Construction, it is located in the Nose Creek Business Park developed by QuadReal Property Group.

The Manchester location is still open as a branch, but the Balzac building, which has much bigger warehouse space and a huge yard, offers much better transportation links to other stores with its proximity to Highway 2 and easy access to Stoney Trail.

From its humble beginnings, Bolt Supply House has become a major supplier of “Much More Than Just Nuts and Bolts”, boasting a constantly growing catalogue of industrial products from hard hats to job site storage.

One of the newer lines of power tools is its association with Milwaukee Tools.

Founded in 1924, the company is recognized as a leading manufacturer of heavy-duty power tools, hand tools, instruments and accessories for skilled tradespeople.

Bolt Supply House offers a touring Rolling Red Zone mobile Milwaukee Tools Showroom to help customers complete each job with greater efficiency using the right tools and accessories. The 18-foot trailer is set up to feel like a showroom with a checkout counter, where trades can see and handle the products in person while receiving expert advice on innovative trade specific solutions.

Mario’s business continues to grow, necessitating doubling the size of its distribution centre in Saskatoon, and he continues to look for new growth opportunities — organically or by acquisition — with a focus on expansion across the Lower Mainland of B.C.

Calgary-based Userful, a leading provider of Audio Visual over Internet Protocol (AV-over-IP) solutions, has teamed up with the University of Calgary to help bring the Silicon Valley engagement model to Calgary. Userful CEO John Marshall spent 25 years in the northern California centre for high technology, building innovative market-leading innovations. He says Silicon Valley enjoys a tightly knit interaction between universities, venture capitalists and leading tech companies who all benefit from close relationships, and he plans to develop the same kind of spirit here. Userful begins by offering multimedia workshops at the university to teach students the basics of multimedia software framework GStreamer, API and video streaming. It also recently named Schulich School of Engineering professor Dr. Mohammad Moshirpour as one of its strategic advisers.

David Parker appears regularly in the Herald. Read his columns online at calgaryherald.com/business. He can be reached at 403-830-4622 or by email at info@davidparker.ca

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