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January 2010 |
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| Edition #4 | Issue #1 |  |
gillian@onteast.com | |||
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Ontario East Seismic Monitoring Solutions Firm Doubles in Size While many North American companies are trying to figure out how to deal with reduced recession-era demand for their products, Kingston, Ontario’s ESG Solutions is struggling to ensure its next growth spurt is big enough. “In fact, I worry we should have built more,” says company director and CEO Roger Bowes. ESG Solutions, which provides seismic monitoring solutions to the mining, petroleum and geotechnical industries, is on the verge of doubling in size to accommodate continued demand for its systems. Thanks to a $200,000 grant from the Eastern Ontario Development Fund, the 16-year-old company moved in December into a new 15,000-sq.ft. facility that doubled its manufacturing and office space. The investment has so far added another 10 jobs to the workforce of 50 at ESG Solutions, which has regional offices in Calgary, California, Beijing and Dubai, and sales offices around the world. The company, which consists primarily of technologists, engineers and scientists, has come a long way since its launch in 1993 by six researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston. “It was kind of a boot-strap operation,” says Bowes. The company started with a handful of contracts and has steadily grown so that it now provides an extensive suite of comprehensive earth vibration monitoring systems to organizations around the globe. ESG Solutions’ technology provides engineers with continuous real-time information critical to planning and hazard assessment. Unlike many companies that choose their locations to be strategically central to their clients, ESG Solutions is not near its clients, who are spread out across the U.S. and the world, and doesn’t need to be. ESG Solutions remains in Ontario East because it hires the majority of its engineers and scientists out of Queen’s University and because of the low-cost, high-quality lifestyle afforded by the region. “It’s hard to get people to move here sometimes, but if they do come here they rarely leave,” Bowes says. The application process for the Eastern Ontario Development Fund money was helped along by Kingston Economic Development Corporation. Jeff Garrah, KEDCO’s CEO, describes ESG Solutions as being among the area’s “next generation of industry leaders” and says they are a role model for other growing companies who can see how local businesses can operate globally. “Over the past few years, we have seen and heard more and more success stories such as this, which reinforces that Kingston is a great place to live, work and do business,” Garrah says. For more information:
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