Chapter 1: My Origin Story

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I like to say strength is in my DNA. My grandmother's maiden name is Pahlvani, which loosely translates to "strongman." Her brother, my great uncle, owned a "house of strength" in the ancient city of Isfahan, where men would gather and swing traditional heavy clubs and exercise in ancient methods. And my other great uncle competed in Olympic lifting before the invention of bumpers.

On the other side, my Polish Grandfather and Ukrainian Grandmother had met in a Nazi slave labour camp during the war (Ostarbeiter) and managed to survive the camp's brutality and lucked out getting on a refugee boat instead of facing further persecution under Stalin's regime ( Ostarbeiter were considered traitors by the mouth breathing government) after the war to their new life in Canada.

four pillars of my entrepreneurial success

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I credit my mother forthe lessons that guided me to my present-day success:.

1. Adaptability; whether it was a surprise eviction because her husband hadn’t paid the rent or moving my brother and me across the country for a fresh start, my mum would adapt with grace and ease into the most challenging scenarios.

2. Non-materialistic; my mother taught me the value of a simple life. Although we didn’t have much, I never wanted for much. My lean living was essential in my startup days. Even with the success of Bells of Steel, my lifestyle remains relatively the same.

3. Hustle; the relentless tide that is caring for children, food, entertainment, and bills to pay. Sometimes ends didn’t meet, but my mum always made it happen; she did whatever it took and worked relentlessly to take care of her family.

4. Unconditional love; so many would-be entrepreneurs never make the leap for fear of disappointing their parent’s expectations, self-doubt, or the fear of failure. My mum had no conditions; she loved my siblings and me equally for no more than the fact we were her kids, our existence was enough, and our pursuit of happiness was left to me to dictate.

My discovery of sports

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Before I moved to Victoria when I was 12, I had never played sports other than gym class, there wasn’t much for programs in my area, and we couldn’t afford a car. But in the green grasses of Victoria, B.C., sports were everywhere.

I’ll never forget the first time I touched a rugby ball; I didn’t even know the sport existed until I played in my grade 8 gym class. A former Canadian national team coach, my teacher spotted my talent and encouraged me to join the school rugby team.

That year, my older brother graduated high school and left home, and with my father out of the picture, I officially became the man of the house. I knew if I were going to be powerless with money, I would develop a powerful body to keep us safe. Coupled with my new passion for rugby and my obsession with the WWE, I began lifting weights using my mother’s old pneumatic rowing machine.

The following year, my rugby coach made the silly decision of cutting me and my future team Canada Captain Phil Mack, from the junior high school rugby team.

I was devastated, but this ignited what I now like to call my “hyperfocus". Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD, which is a part of my obsessions with things like rugby and now, designing equipment and running a company.

My entire life became dedicated to making that team. I began training for HOURS every day, with absolutely no idea what I was doing. I even joined the cross country team with my now business partner Bryan to get my cardio level up.

With the obsession of being a better athlete, positive male role models from my coaches, and holding down a part-time job at the gas station, I managed to lay the foundations for breaking the cycle of poverty and intergenerational trauma.

After the season was over, I graduated high school, and the brevity of my situation dawned on me; there were no scholarships or opportunities for rugby, and welfare stopped cutting checks once you hit 18. Most of my money from my part-time job at the gas station supported the household.

I was fucked...

Leaving home

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My brother bought me a 1-way flight to Ottawa to start my adult life; I got a job as a commercial roofer labourer and spent the most brutal summer of my life earning a bit of cash.

Becoming depressed and having left all my friends behind, I moved back to Victoria and got an apartment with my best bud. Having worked on the roof all summer for 14 hour days, I hadn’t hit the gym much. So there I was, weak, broke and depressed, working at a gas station full time with no future ahead of me.

That was until I met my mentor and close friend, Brian Wall. We had gone to school together, but I didn’t know him; he had transferred schools a few times. I heard rumours about him. He’s the most jacked dude in Victoria.

Then I bumped into him at a party, and he was, in fact, the most yoked person I had seen in real life. Like something out of a movie, I went over to him and introduced myself, and he gave me his phone number and told me if I wanted to get big to call him.

Brian took me under his wing and started teaching me how to get big and strong, teaching me compound free-weight movements like squats and deadlifts (I had already benched 265 in high school, bro), and introduced me to what I like to call “poverty bulking.” Boiled eggs, cottage cheese, oatmeal with just cold water on it. In a few short months, He helped me become the biggest and strongest I had ever been in my life.

Still working at a gas station, a regular customer came in and noticed all my gainz. He suggested I call his friend who owned a nightclub to get a job as a bouncer. I had only turned legal drinking age (19) a few months ago and had barely even been to a bar.

I got the job and started working at “the joint” right next to Montys, the local strip club in a dive hotel. Shortly after, I ended up working with my mentor Brian at “the one lounge,” a notorious nightclub that only hired Victoria’s most enormous gym rats to operate the door.

With my newfound confidence, I applied to my local community college; I had almost not finished high school and had no idea how the post-secondary education system worked. I got in, quit my shitty day jobs, started bouncing full time at night while going to school full time during the day and even started playing rugby again. My life was back on track,thanks to Brian.

Chapter 2: The Foundations of Bells of Steel

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With a 1 way ticket to Canada and a few hundred bucks from a summer internship, I decided to head to Calgary. I had never been to Calgary, or Alberta for that matter, but I had heard from my Victoria friends that it was a new money town, oil was booming, everyone was hiring and as long as you worked hard and there was money to be made.

I flew to Victoria to see family and friends, then hitched a ride on craigslist to Edmonton to stay with Bryan (my now business partner), then headed to Calgary.

I crashed on a friend’s couch, and within three days, I got the highest-paying job I ever had at a fitness equipment store. I had posted an ad on craigslist for a free room to rent in exchange for me to be your in-house personal trainer.

Although I wasn’t a perfect trainer, my roommate was kind enough to let me stay for free until I got on my feet. He’s a good man, and if you ever need to buy a house in Calgary, here's his realtor link.

It was here I caught the bug for strength sports. See, before now, unless you were lucky enough to live near a hardcore gym that knew about actual strength sports, the only workout-related programming media was what you would see in bodybuilding magazines.

Now, for the first time, I owned a computer, and with the rise of the internet, programming as an alternative to bodybuilding methods was becoming mainstream. This is in 2008; there was one gym in a city of 1 million that had bumper plates. But I was hooked.

Initially, it started with kettlebells; then through a forum post, I connected with a guy who introduced me to an Olympic lifting gym in Calgary with an ex USSR weightlifting coach from Armenia. I joined up and started getting deeper down the rabbit hole.

The guy who introduced me then invited me out to train at his gym, Unparalleled. A hardcore powerlifting/Olympic lifting gym churning out world champions from their gym in the basement of a strip mall in Moosejaw, SK. I trained and competed in Olympic weightlifting and, gradually, strongman.

I had nowhere to get the equipment. I talked to my boss at the fitness store and told him we had to start carrying bumper plates and kettlebells. He was not interested but offered to let me order from his supplier in China and share space on his containers.

Now, this was way back in 2009; Alibaba was like the wild west. The chances of you getting scammed were pretty high, so this was a fantastic opportunity.

Taking the leap

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Soon after, I graduated, quit my day job at the fitness store and went full time with B.o.S. during the day and as a head bouncer at a local hipster bar at night.

Business was good, but up until now, I had just considered it a side hustle that would build my resume for my eventual corporate job. My girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to backpack Asia for five months as one last huzzah. I kept running B.o.S. from the beaches of SE Asia (can you tell I read the 4-Hour Workweek?), and it continued to grow.

When we arrived back in Canada, I began applying for my corporate jobs. The problem was no one wanted to hire me. I realized no one in this world saw my potential as much as I did. So I said fuck it, I’m going all in, and I did one more bouncing stint at the 2012 Calgary Stampede.

After a few more years, I ran into the most common of all problems of any eCommerce entrepreneur; I couldn’t get any financing. I had terrible credit and no parents to co-sign anything for me. My now-wife was generously letting me use her line of credit, but the banks wouldn’t touch me and the alternative lenders like there are now did not exist. I was spinning my wheels at $300k in sales, and I couldn’t budge

My close friend and now business partner, Bryan, agreed to loan me money as a rotating line of credit. In 2015, he bought half the company as a silent partner, providing a much-needed cash injection and acting as a general adviser

While running the company remotely (at this time, we were still using a 3rd party logistics centre in Vancouver), I decided I finally had the time, income and flexibility to make one last crack at going somewhere with rugby.

Finally making strides at age 30 and heading the direction I wanted, I was diagnosed with asthma and had a much-needed inhaler prescribed to me finally helping my conditioning. Unfortunately, after a long career of injury-free rugby, I got my comeuppance, my first-ever significant rugby injury came that year, and I tore my bicep.

Big things coming...

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Now, 30 years old and no more competitive sports, I began to hyper-focus on Bells of Steel. Every year was a record-breaking sales year than the last, we moved the operation back to Calgary, and I opened my own warehouse in 2018, after 8 years of running the company using 3rd party warehouses. I made my first ever hires in a 6,400 sq ft bay in Calgary and welcomed my first child to the world in the same year.

In 2019, I officially launched in the U.S. with a location in Indianapolis. Having had such terrible experiences with 3rd party logistics companies, I wanted someone on the ground in Indy to help manage our U.S. expansion and any issues we had with the warehouse.

I started looking up and DMing hardcore gyms in Indianapolis on Instagram; lucky for me, Andrew, the owner of West Indy Barbell, a hardworking know-it all hustler, responded and partnered together to become our U.S. Operations Manager and use his gym as a content studio for BoS.

In 2020, my partner and best bud Bryan quit his chemical engineer job and took a massive pay cut to come on full time with B.o.S. as the C.F.O. and help accelerate the company from a rag-tag group of meatheads into a trustworthy company.

Since high school, Bryan and I had been good friends; the way we met was an excellent metaphor for our skill sets and personality complementing each other. In grade 8 gym class, we were playing flag rugby.

Bryan, an analytical and logical man, had lined up in front of me to grab my flag, as were the rules of the game. Me, being a more gut-based person, never letting obstacles get in my way, proceeded to run him over and score the try.

But where our friendship truly blossomed was our passion for Magic: The Gathering. We spent many hours honing the craft and strategizing for one day what would become a core competency to strategizing for our company.

We worked together to get ready for the biggest year yet. We maxed out our credit cards, and Bryan maxed out his home equity line of credit.

We were ready for a big 2020; little did I know just how big…

Present-day Bells of Steel

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Although established in 2010, the company’s first eight years were mostly the same, primarily just myself growing a little company slowly. But in 2020, Bryan and I had positioned ourselves to take the company to the next level.

My personal life had been distilled solely down to family and work, and I was working around the clock with another baby on the way.

Although the Canadian side of things had been growing steadily, I had my eyes set stateside. With a grant from the government to assist in the expansion, I booked a booth at the Arnold’s Sports Festival and flights to attend FIBO, the most prominent fitness trade expo in the world in Germany

Then as you all know, the world changed overnight… I was literally about to walk out the door to drive to the airport to go to the Arnold’s when I got the call from Andrew in Indy “they called it off because of the corona.” I couldn’t believe it.

Like much of the world, we had no idea what to expect, then on March 16th, we had the biggest day of sales we’ve ever had. Then the next, and the next, until our emails and orders were overflowing and very quickly sold out.

Although privileged to be one of the lucky ones whose business flourished under COVID, The next 22 months would become the most stressful and challenging of my entire career.

In 2020, the most significant challenge had become just simply getting inventory. Factories I had worked with for years, such as my weight plate factory, simply told us to beat it; they had more prominent clients to serve.

Any inventory we had got scooped up shortly after I got it in. Still, in our tiny 6,400 sq ft warehouse, we knocked a hole in the wall to connect the bay next door to try and keep up with the growth. In Indianapolis, our warehouse provider struggled but managed to keep up better with the demand.

It was just myself and a small team of 7 trying to handle a tsunami and me; we made it through the year, but by 2021, I was utterly burnt out, and things had not slowed down; in fact, we 3X’d in 2020, then 2X’d AGAIN in 2021.

After a chat with an eCommerce friend of mine, I had three options: 1. Sell — eCommerce companies were selling for record amounts. 2. Keep the business small and keep operating as usual. 3. Keep hiring until I didn’t want to quit anymore.

I took option 3, and as of May 5 2024, Bells of Steel has over 80 employees, 30,000 sq ft building in Calgary, 15,000 sq foot in Toronto, 5,000 storefront in Indianapolis and 2 – 3PLs, in Indianapolis. Although COVID helped rapidly accelerate the business, we never had a post COVID sales slump and continue on a healthy trajectory.

The future of Bells of Steel is pretty clear to me; more and better products, international expansion, and building a company that will be left standing long after I'm gone.