The 15 members of the Inventors Society of Nova Scotia trail along behind Michael Duck as he leads them across the shop floor of his gleaming factory in Sackville, Nova Scotia, where machinists build circuit boards and run punch presses the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Then it's on to the production line, where 90 workers assemble the components of the SureShot Dispensing System—the invention that made Duck one of the most famous entrepreneurs in the province. After that, Duck herds the group into the plant's custom movie theatre, to show off some of the new products his company, A.C. Dispensing Equipment Inc., is working on—including a new, improved version of a machine that dispenses flavoured shots like hazelnut and French vanilla for the Starbucks crowd.
"How do you get people to listen to your ideas?" asks one aspiring inventor.
"How do we get the right people to believe in us?" asks another.
Duck happily answers every question: Provide a great product in a market where an opportunity beckons. Look after your customers. Make every transaction a win-win situation for both seller and buyer. Be honest.
The aspiring inventors—among them a welder, a couple of office workers, a professor and a machinist—are a little star-struck. Twenty years ago, Duck was one of them. By day, he worked in maintenance at the local dairy; at night, he parked himself at the kitchen table to tinker with version 1.0 of the SureShot. The idea had come to him one morning as he stood in line at Tim Hortons, waiting for his large coffee. Every day, it was the same thing—either he ended up with too much cream or too little. What the place needed, Duck thought, was a machine that would spit out precisely the same amount of milk or cream every time.
A simple enough idea—but the best inventions always are. Today, A.C. Dispensing, the company Duck created in 1985, generates annual revenue of $24 million. Though Duck steadfastly refuses to talk about his clients, other than Tim Hortons, his SureShot system has reportedly been installed at Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme outlets. (The company also makes a version for doling out oil, which has been bought by Pizza Hut and other chains.)
Duck, a fit-looking 50, relishes his role as big shot. A massive gold ring adorns his left hand. In the parking lot outside sits a BMW X5 SUV; he's got a Shelby Cobra and a Maserati Spyder (each of which cost him more than the average Sackville house) in his garage at home. He's got a vacation property in Florida, plus a condo at Nova Scotia's exclusive Fox Harb'r Golf Resort, owned by his buddy Ron Joyce, co-founder of Tim Hortons. In A.C. Dispensing's boardroom—one of the stops on the tour—is the huge cherrywood table where the world leaders sat during the 1995 G7 Economic Summit in Halifax; Duck bought it at an auction five years ago. "It was a neat piece of history and a cool-looking table," says Duck. "And it's round, so everything is neutral—there's no obvious person in charge. I mean, someone's always in charge, but there's no need to flaunt it."
Duck's an ideas guy, a salesman, fond of saying things like, "Free your mind and your ass will follow" and "Find your big, hairy, audacious goal." When he really gets going, he sounds like a revivalist preacher. In other words, he's a typical rags-to-riches entrepreneur. And like many entrepreneurs, he's great at motivating the troops and talking up his product, but not so great at the daily management and long-term planning that can turn a small outfit into a huge one. The difference between Duck and the next guy is that he recognized it early enough to ensure his company will survive long after he's retired to the sunny South.
Duck loves to talk—and when the subject is himself, well, all the better. Over the years, he's told his Horatio Alger tale to MBA students, kids, executives, aspiring inventors and anyone else who asks.
Duck grew up in Neptune, on the New Jersey coast, in the 1960s, when race riots rocked his working-class neighbourhood and even his school. In 1973, when Duck was 16, his father, James, looking for a fresh start, moved the family to Halifax and started his own heating and oil-burner repair service. Duck wasn't cut out for the classroom, and soon after moving to Canada, he dropped out of school and took a job as a stevedore on the Halifax docks. Three years and a few jobs later, he landed at the dairy. It was there that Duck discovered what he calls his "freaky quality"—an aptitude for mechanics that allowed him to become the plant's head maintenance engineer within 18 months, with zero training. "I was always making things," he says, "always picking up a screwdriver and doing something. I just needed a chance to show people what I could do."
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