Marianne Bertrand President and founder of Muttluks Toronto, Ontario Business-driven and innovative, to boot. "If you can solve a problem, you have a business."

That's an important premise for Marianne Bertrand, president and founder of Muttluks, a Toronto-based company that manufactures high quality boots for dogs. "And if that spark comes from a passion, you're going to go a lot further," says the winner of a 2002 Rotman Canadian Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Innovation.

Spotting a niche
Bertrand definitely knows what she's talking about because her business started out with one simple but powerful idea. During a cold spell in 1994, she saw that her dogs' paws were suffering with extreme weather and salty streets. Her drive to find a solution and the unavailability of quality boots led her to design a pair of her own that featured innovative fabrics and features to keep paws warm and dry. And that was just the beginning.

"I sold 130 sets in less than a week to local pet stores, and then it just exploded," says Bertrand, who at the time was having difficulty making a mortgage payment. With that revenue, she began a company that now employs 20 full-time and 40 part-time people in a 15,000 square foot manufacturing facility and exports 92% of its products largely to the U.S. Her boots were even used to outfit search and rescue dogs during the September 11th World Trade Center crisis, where she donated 850 pairs.

Making the sales
Bertrand is an inspirational case study in how a company can go from a home-grown business to global with hard work. Muttluks' sales continue to double almost every year, and the owner attributes a large part of her success to sheer determination. "People say they can't start a business because they have no money. I say exactly the opposite. You start a business because you need to make money," she says. When her company was getting off the ground, she knocked on every possible door, sometimes visiting up to 17 pet stores a day. "You can't underestimate the potential of every small sale," she emphasizes. "I realized very quickly that it was a word-of-mouth business."

Another rule of thumb for Bertrand today is to ensure that you "sell your business to everybody, your suppliers and your financiers, not just your customers." In the beginning, for example, she always wore a suit and washed her car before a meeting. "That kind of thing really counted."

Building a business network
To build her business network, Bertrand says she has always been very involved in womens' business and support groups. She recalls one of her initial trade missions to Washington as a real eye-opener on the importance of networking. "I needed mentoring then. You don't have to reinvent the wheel about everything you do. Sometimes you just need to watch what others are doing and learn from it. There were so many women that had the kind of inspirations that I had and it helped to meet people who share your experiences."

Her ability to learn from others and hire the right people has also served her well. "You get the professional help and the right talent where you need it." She cites an example of recruiting a professional to help her hire people to sew in her manufacturing facility. "I didn't know the first thing about sewing factories or how to hire the right people. We have a difficult product to sew because it's small and curved. Not everybody can handle that kind of sewing, so I hired one of my home sewers to do the recruiting job."

Optimizing productivity
Even through the good times, Bertrand admits that the company has had to roll with the punches. "One of the toughest challenges in my business is time constraints. You have to be able to deliver high volume with extreme seasonal fluctuations," she explains. To build in maximum flexibility in her manufacturing operations, Bertrand and her team have tailored production to be able to sub-contract or manufacture in-house every stage of production, depending on the company's specific needs and demands.

To do that, for example, she financed equipment with the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) that enabled her to laminate Velcro in house, a process that's difficult to find elsewhere. "BDC was very receptive to the idea that I needed to be able to manufacture quickly and efficiently," says Bertrand, who got her business growing with a small loan with the Bank in 1997. Since then, her company has also received working capital from BDC and used the BDC Consulting Group for management advice. "They came in here and looked at things like productivity. I'm proud to say that they didn't have much to say. It's hard to beat our efficiency," she says smiling.

Throughout the years, Bertrand has also adhered to a distinct Canadian flavour in her company. Even her business name is inspired by the original Inuit sealskin boots known as "mukluks."

"Being Canadian started out as a warm and fuzzy feeling and then turned out to be a real business opportunity for me. Foreign manufacturing and materials are customarily purchased in U.S. dollars. Manufacturing in Canada with Canadian raw materials eliminated the cost and risk of dealing in U.S. dollars. It also gave us the benefit and flexibility of short lead times. Being Canadian has paid off."

There's no doubt that Bertrand's boots are made for walking.