Vitalis
and we’d write them a check and then they’d say the chiller was an additional $24,000, and something else was another $10,000. So the whole experience was frustrating. Then, when we had a couple of those machines in field, different science teams couldn’t talk to each other. Different sets of spare parts couldn’t be shared. Pete and I were having discussions about the need to simplify things under one platform – we wanted bigger vessels, the science teams wanted colder processing, faster pumps, and the financers wanted a deal. It was a universal answer when we took that out to manufacturers – no customization, no deals… scram. “I didn’t like that answer, so I went to a friend, James Seabrook, who was the lead engineer at a company building mobile drilling rigs for oil and gas and is now a member of our ownership group (there are just the three of us). He said ‘no problem’ to building the pumps we needed, but ultimately the manufacturers he worked with didn’t want to get into the cannabis sector. It took me some time but I eventually talked the guys into quitting their job and starting a manufacturing company and that was the beginning of it.” BVM: Where do you operate? Sherlock: “We take everything from raw steel forward at our sites in Kelowna. We have our weld and pressure shop, assembly shop, pressure testing shop, and we just bought a larger building to bring some of those teams together. So we’ll be operating three main facilities in Kelowna. And we have a team in Bogota, a team in Europe based in Greece, and a warehouse in Las Vegas. Our major customers include Afria, Valens, Medipharm in Canada, and some of the largest MSOs in the U.S.– in reality, we power most of the commercial extraction teams, globally, if they’re running CO2.” BVM: What are your biggest challenges? Sherlock: “The speed the market is innovating. As an equipment company, selling machines is a quarter of the battle. Servicing is the much larger piece. When people are looking at investing a million-plus dollars into equipment, we always
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