🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this candid and unexpectedly personal episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA sits down with Steve Barclay, founder of Canadian Assistive Technology and co-host of the AT Banter Podcast, for a career-length walk through Canadian assistive technology. Steve begins in November 1990 as Aroga Technologies’ very first employee, a bench technician repairing 40-pound CRT video magnifiers, Optacons, VersaBrailles and Prentke Romich Minspeak devices, and traces his climb to VP of Sales and Marketing and eventually part owner and chief operating officer. He then tells, in unsparing detail, how that 28-year run ended: his majority partner Grove Bennett diverted company money into a multi-level marketing scheme selling “quantum infused holograms,” ran Aroga into the ground, left behind an unpaid $300,000 tax bill, fled to Australia, and left Steve facing a TD Bank fraud charge and a consumer proposal before he rebuilt from his townhouse basement on his wife’s capital.
The second half turns to what he built instead. Steve explains the deliberately silly culture at Canadian Assistive Technology, the nicknames, the bulldog, the cowbells, as a working tool for meeting newly diagnosed clients who are fragile and emotional, and describes how AT Banter grew from a lunchroom idea he personally opposed into a show approaching 460 episodes that recently moved to biweekly because of open host burnout. He closes on where the business is heading: regional representatives in Saskatchewan and Ontario, a wish for French-language support, and a pivot toward senior-oriented safety technology as CCTVs and voice recognition go mainstream. His parting advice is not to go into partnership with someone holding dual citizenship, and not to get involved in a land war in Asia.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, an author, a lifelong advocate who is a barrier buster and who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its websites accessible to every Canadian, not just to safety warnings [unverified 00:01:55]. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in the courtroom or in the committee room or in a pottery studio [00:02:28], you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I am pleased, and I am privileged to welcome Steve Barclay, a high profile advocate, and everything else that this community really appreciates. Steve, welcome to my show.
Steve Barclay: Wow. I’m really flattered. That’s the best intro I’ve ever had.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you didn’t bribe me for it, right?
Steve Barclay: No.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Steve Barclay: Not yet. I might pay you to keep going, though.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, let’s get into the question. And, Steve, again, welcome. I want you to begin all the way back at the very beginning, because your story starts somewhere where most people never guessed. In November of 1990, you walked in as the very first employee of a company called Aroga. And your job was to be sitting at a bench repairing Telesensory and VTEK devices. Take our listeners back there. What did assistive technology actually look and feel like in 1990?
Steve Barclay: Well, so the company that I was working for, Aroga Technologies, they did low vision and blindness products. They also did augmentative communication aids for the nonverbal. So in terms of the low vision and blindness stuff, we were dealing with cameras for video magnification with massive CRT monitors. So, like, you know.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I remember that.
Steve Barclay: A 20 inch monitor would weigh, you know, probably 40 pounds. And the cameras themselves, they were, I don’t even remember what we called the type of tube that they used for the actual camera module. But they were also pretty darn heavy and clunky. We started around then to get the smaller CCTVs in with, you know, like 14 inch monitors, some of them. And they were all contained in a single unit rather than being two pieces. And those, as I recall, initially came from VTEK. And then Telesensory started making some of their own as well, of the same sort of style. But that was really the beginning of the all in one kind of design of a CCTV, where you had a monitor in line with the camera underneath and then an X-Y table on the bottom. And repairing those things was interesting. There was a lot of fiddling about with things like the yokes on the cathode ray tubes to make sure that the image was nice, square and proper inside the screen. And the cameras, they had their own foibles, and setting them up so that they would focus properly. And a lot of that repair back then was all component level repair. So there was no board swaps like they do today. If your computer dies, they’re going to tell you, oh, you need a new motherboard and that’s going to cost you 20 gazillion dollars. Back then it was, you know, the resistor will cost you five cents, but finding which resistor has to be replaced will take four hours. So very, very different world. We were also getting the first refreshable Braille displays back then in the VersaBrailles. You know, I think when I started, the second generation of VersaBrailles was out, which used floppy disks instead of cassette tapes.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Are they still around?
Steve Barclay: VersaBrailles. No, no. Long, long gone. Yeah. They’ve been replaced by, you know, the modern notetakers like the BrailleNotes and the BrailleSenses of the world. And what else did we have back? Oh. Optacon. Optacons were huge back then. You know, there were a lot of people who did their post-secondary education reading books with a little handheld camera and an array of pins that they set their finger on top of. And as they ran across the text, it would render the shape of the letters on those pins, and they would feel their way through that textbook. I found that absolutely remarkable that people could do that in the first place, because I could never, even when I was fixing them, I could never really make out the shapes of the letters well enough to read with them. But you know, I knew a couple people who put themselves through law school using those. And that’s quite an impressive achievement. And then on the augmentative communication side, we had products from a company called Prentke Romich, and they had devices that would have like 128 buttons on them, and using different combinations of those buttons, you could speak with them, you know, and carry on conversations in real time. They used a linguistic system called Minspeak where you had a bunch of symbols on the buttons. And by selecting the correct symbols in order, you would have different words. So like an apple might represent the concept of red. It might represent the concept of food. It might represent the concept of round. And depending on what button you pressed after, the apple would determine what word you were going for. And we had that same sort of device that was operated, rather than being operated by buttons, it was operated by a head worn, not a laser, but an infrared emitter. And you could track across the buttons and the little red LED would light up for whichever one you were pointing at. And if you just paused long enough on it, it would activate that button. So back in those days, that was, you know, revolutionary technology. It was pretty cutting edge. And we watched technologies come along like optical character recognition, which back then was rudimentary. It would only work with certain fonts and it wasn’t fabulously accurate. And now everybody’s got it on their cell phone, and it’s pretty darn good. So yeah, it was a long, long time ago. You know, we used to park our dinosaurs out in front of the building and wander in and do our job and then commute home with the bison. You know?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now there’s something quite special about being employee number one anywhere, right? You were there before the company was really a company. What did those earliest years teach you that you still rely on today, which is more than 35 years later?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. I didn’t even want to be the first employee. I tried really hard not to take the job.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, I was, back then, for the three years prior to that, I’d been fixing photocopiers. I was working for a company called Crosshatch Copiers [unverified 00:11:37] here in Vancouver. And I was trained in color laser copier technology, which was brand new at the time. And I had quit the company I was working for because I just couldn’t deal with the management there. And I had approached Kodak, who was a massive company back then. And they were one of the only other ones that had color laser technology. There was them and Canon. Canon also had color laser, but I didn’t want to work for the Canon dealer because they had a reputation for being nasty as well. But Kodak, it was a union company. They paid great wages, they had great benefits. And I was told that they were going to create a position for me. I just had to wait for them to create the position. So I was waiting. My roommate got sick of seeing me sitting around. And he actually took my resume in to Aroga. They were at the time renting two rooms out of the back of a computer company called Structured Computer Systems [unverified 00:12:50] where my roommate worked. And he came back one day and he says, oh, you got a job interview tomorrow? I said, what? He says, yeah, I got you a job interview. He says, there’s this little company working out of the back of our office. They rent two rooms at the back of our office, and they’re looking for a service tech. And it just sounded so shady to me at the time. You know, a little company renting two rooms out of it. But I went in and I made no effort whatsoever. I didn’t dress up. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t shave. I just sort of showed up. And the owners of that company, Bob and Barb, they’d been interviewing guys who had just recently graduated from BCIT and they were all coming in in three piece suits. But Bob and Barb, Barbara, a couple of hippies from Manitoba. And when the scruffy kid came in, they went, oh, we could probably live with that one. And they offered me the job, so I turned it down. And then Bob, who was just, he could sell ice to Eskimos. He talked me into it on the phone. And I started work there. But yeah, I mean, looking back, you know, what does that teach you? It teaches you how a company grows, you know, the steps that you go through, the pains that you go through. And now with Canadian Assistive, we’re back to being, you know, a small company, very few employees. And we’re going through those very same growth pains now, you know, trying to figure out how best to scale and how best to, you know, bring new staff on where you need them. And, you know, what your threshold is to trigger the next step. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s interesting, over your years at Aroga, right? You moved from the repair bench to vice president of sales and marketing and even to part owner and chief operating officer. That is a very long climb through every part of a business. How did seeing the industry from each of those angles change what you believed our community actually needed?
Steve Barclay: So the move originally, I moved into sales because Bob and Barb realized that the guy who was sitting at the bench repairing things and testing things and making sure that they worked properly knew more about their operation than they did. So they moved me into the sales role because of my product knowledge. And I think part of that was the recognition that, you know, what our industry needs isn’t salesmen. What they need is knowledgeable people who can, you know, meaningfully explain and train people on the technology. So, you know, I just sort of grew with the company from there. And as we added other people, they sort of fell underneath me. And that’s how, you know, I got the title of VP of Sales and Marketing. We eventually expanded. We first opened an office in Edmonton, Alberta with my good friend Carrie Anton [unverified 00:16:37]. And then we went from there. We hired Bob’s sister out in Kingston, Ontario. She started doing augmentative communication products for us in Kingston. We had a couple of attempts at opening an office in Montreal.
Steve Barclay: With mixed results. You know, it never really stuck. But then the CEO part of it, that title came along with the acquisition of Aroga. Bob decided he was going to sell the company and he ended up selling a majority stake in the company to a fellow named Grove Bennett and—
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: A minority.
Steve Barclay: —stake for me. So Grove became president and CEO. Sorry, I was chief operating officer, I believe CEO at that point [unclear 00:17:32]. Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my gosh. Then in 2017, the company that you had given 28 years to was winding down. You announced publicly that you were starting something of your own. Now, Steve, that must have been a frightening and clarifying moment, right? All at once. What did you decide right then that you wanted to do differently?
Steve Barclay: Well, my first revelation was no more business partners.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That was—
Steve Barclay: That was a key one. Yeah, I mean, that was just a horrible time in my life in general. You know, Grove decided that he was going to get involved in a multi-level marketing scheme peddling, I can’t make this up, quantum infused holograms for various health issues. It was just straight snake oil sales. But he saw dollar signs in it. And I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. And he said no, the company would be completely separate, nothing to do with it. And then he took all of our money and ran it into that and ran the company straight into the ground. And then because he was a dual Australian citizen he got to run away back to Australia and avoid all responsibility for it. So not only was I suddenly out of work, but I was also left holding the bag for everything at Aroga, including, you know, discovered that Grove had never paid payroll withholding tax. He’d never paid GST for a period of like two or three years. So there was a $300,000 tax bill with the government that they came knocking for. My only option at that point was to either declare bankruptcy or do what they call a consumer proposal, which is essentially the same thing as bankruptcy, except that you’re not considered bankrupt. And you can still be an officer of a company. And you basically tell them, okay, well, this is how much money I can give you. And they have to sign off on whether or not they’re going to accept that. And if they don’t accept it, then the next step is you pretty much have to declare bankruptcy. But they accepted it. And so I was broke, but fortunately my wife was not. So we got the start up capital through my wife to buy our first few pieces of equipment and start all over again from the basement of our townhouse.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Was Grove ever caught and made to pay for what he had done?
Steve Barclay: So, Grove and his wife, Diane, who also worked at Aroga. They vanished like, they just disappeared into the ether. They erased themselves from social media. They had their kids erased themselves from social media. So nobody knew exactly where they were, but there was one disgruntled woman who had loaned Grove a bunch of money under false pretenses, I might add. And she had very, very smartly gone on to his and Diane’s Facebook profiles in anticipation that they might make a run for it. And she had done screenshots of all of their friends on their friends lists.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Steve Barclay: And when they disappeared, she started going through those friends to say, hey, do you know where they are? And eventually they found someone who was willing to say where they were. And that was when we discovered where they were in Australia. I sent a demand letter because Grove owed me about $50,000 personally. And I got a lawyer down in Australia to send it. And the day after the first time it was served they went to the house and whoever answered the door denied that there was anybody named Grove Bennett at that location. And then they sent a process server to his work and they managed to get him at work. The very next day he declared bankruptcy in Canada.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My God.
Steve Barclay: And if you declare bankruptcy in Canada, it does absolutely nothing to you in Australia. You’re not considered bankrupt in Australia. So he essentially got out of all of his responsibilities in Canada. And got a clean go in Australia. So he didn’t get caught in that sense, but one day out of the blue, I got a call from a fella down in Australia saying, hey, do you know this guy Grove Bennett? I go, yeah, I know him. He says, well listen, he’s been part of our hockey club for a while, and we all think he’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s just gotten himself appointed to the Australian Olympic Committee for hockey.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Steve Barclay: And he had managed to convince the board to appoint him as, I think it was CEO, a position that had never existed before. It had always been just a volunteer board and managed to convince them to give him $100,000 salary. And so he started asking me questions about Grove. And I told him the whole story and he said, well, can you send me some of that documentation about, you know, the bankruptcy and everything and the charge? Because we were charged with fraud. Both myself, Diane, Grove, we were all charged with fraud by TD Bank because Grove had been filing falsified business information. And they eventually dropped the fraud charge on me because they realized that I’d never been sent to any of that information. It had come directly from Grove to them without me ever being copied on it. But there was a civil fraud charge. So I sent that all down to him. He took it to the hockey association. The hockey association said they would look at it. Grove somehow convinced them that no, this is all made up. This is just a disgruntled ex-business partner who’s trying to stir up trouble. And there’s nothing to it. Carry on. So they, the committee threatened to sue the guy who had given them the information. So he calls me back and he says, listen, I can’t pursue this any further. You know, I got a family. I’m afraid of what can happen, even though I don’t think they can really do anything to me. But would you talk to my friend Sandy, who’s a reporter? So I got to talk to Sandy, the reporter. I can’t remember his last name off the top of my head now. But Sandy ran a story in an online news service about it. And then that story got picked up by Channel Nine News in Australia and the Channel Nine news article, when it hit the airwaves, that got Grove tossed from the Olympic Committee. So he did have a little bit of karmic payback there, I guess. But yeah, if you Google Channel Nine news and Grove Bennett, you will find that video. It’s pretty funny because they caught up to him at the tennis club he was working at. And he locked himself in a building and hid behind a kitchen bench to try and avoid their questions.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think we don’t, you know, I think our listeners, I know I’m not aware of what you just shared with us, but, you know, we did know that Grove had run away to Australia. I had met his wife Diane once or twice. I really liked her.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, she was a charmer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, I didn’t like him. He made a pass at me one time and I thought, why don’t you just get out and leave me alone, you know? Yeah, I know.
Steve Barclay: He was quite a piece of work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I bet. And I hope he never sets foot in Canada again, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah, indeed. I don’t know if he ever will, because one of the guys that he borrowed a lot of money from owns a gravel pit. And I don’t think he mess with guys who own gravel pits.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no you don’t. He would probably toss you into the pit, right?
Steve Barclay: Yep.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Now you did not start Canadian Assistive Technology on your own, right? Ryan Fleury and Rob, let me see, I hope, I mean, is that—
Steve Barclay: No, no. Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Mineault came with you. And anyone who has spent five minutes around your company knows about the nicknames, the Bulldog, and the general refusal to take yourself too seriously. Tell us about the culture that you have deliberately built and why does this matter in this particular industry?
Steve Barclay: Gosh. I’m just generally a silly person, I would say.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh. You’re not.
Steve Barclay: But well, just pour a couple of drinks into me and you’ll find out. But Rob and Ryan and I, we always had a good time together. We always enjoyed working together. You know, we’d started the AT Banter Podcast back then as well, back in the days. So we were, you know, we were always kind of a lighthearted crew. But I think, you know, we deal with people who are going through a pretty broad range of life experiences. And oftentimes our first contact with a new client is somebody who’s been recently diagnosed with something that is affecting their lives in a very negative way. And they’re fragile, they’re emotional. And it’s a lot easier to engage with them if you do it in a lighthearted fashion. You know, you let them know that you’re an ally, you’re not just somebody there to, you know, flog a product on them and send them on their way. So, you know, I just think that having a good sense of humor and a sense of empathy is incredibly important in the kind of work that we’re doing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I agree. And I’ve had the great experience of having had two podcast interviews with you guys, and I really enjoyed it. I thought this was a unique type of podcast, you know? I really enjoyed it. Now, the AT Banter Podcast actually came first and not long, sorry. You launched it in May 2016 while you were all still at Aroga. What made three people in the assistive technology business decide what the [world? 00:29:40] needed from them was a podcast?
Steve Barclay: You know, there was a lot of talk back then in the 20 tens about podcasting. And it seemed one of those things where everybody was starting to do their own podcast. And, you know, the cost of entry to doing a podcast wasn’t that expensive. You know, you needed a computer, you needed some microphones, you know, maybe an audio mixer and somebody who’s willing to sit down and take the time to edit it. So it came about as a lunchroom conversation. And it was either Rob or Ryan who came up with the idea. I can’t remember, I think they both may claim equal credit for it at this point, but I was the holdout. I was like, oh God, no, everybody and their dog’s doing a podcast. We don’t need to do a podcast. But originally what we had envisioned was doing a podcast that just talked about technology, that was just about, you know, the products that we sold and, you know, what they did for people and so forth. And after doing that a couple of times, we realized, you know, that in and of itself is pretty boring, pretty repetitive, and not all that interesting. So we started to focus more around people’s stories and what other people were doing, what the community was doing, you know, what sort of remarkable things were happening out there. And that seems to have really gained some traction. You know, we have listeners all over the world now. And I don’t know how true it is. I got an email from some company that claims to be a podcast rating agency, and they rated us as the top rated disability podcast in Canada last year. I don’t know if that’s true or not because I don’t know how they determine these things. It looks more to me like somebody who’s just trying to sell a badge to podcasts. It’s one of the things about podcasts, you just never know how many people are listening to you because it’s always spread amongst multiple platforms. You know, somebody will do it on, you know, iTunes, somebody else will, you know, do it on Podbean. You never get to collect all the numbers for how many people are listening. So we really have no idea what our listenership is now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But you’ve enjoyed it, right? And you’ve had lots and lots of fun doing it, right?
Steve Barclay: Oh, for sure. And we’ve met all kinds of, you know, really interesting people through it as well and learned about, you know, some really neat initiatives that, you know, different things that are being developed. And you know, I’m just scrolling back through episodes here. I don’t do all of them. I often miss things because I’m out on the road. But yeah, you know, we’ve had some great people on the podcast and talking about some great products and some, you know, charities that they work with or things that they’re doing, you know, like blind travelers who travel independently all over the world. And gosh, you know, we’ve interviewed a blind marathon runner.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Steve Barclay: And just, you know, all kinds of people doing all kinds of things that, you know, their teachers probably told them at some point in their life they were never going to be able to do. And there they are doing it. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. I think one thing, and I’d like to approach you offline, is I’m trying to launch this accessible travel podcast and I’m hoping that we could have a little chat offline about you becoming an endorser or a participant. It’s called From Curb to Curb in Canada [unverified 00:33:37]. I’m just now starting it up so we can talk about that later, but clock’s starting to wind down. And I have to ask you about the tone of that show because it is unlike most disability media. There are cow bells. There are sound boards. There are long running arguments about food. That is a deliberate choice, isn’t it? What are you pushing back against?
Steve Barclay: Well, that’s just the banter part of it, right? That’s just, this is the kind of stuff that Rob and Ryan and I have been doing to each other for years is, you know, having, you know, nonsensical conversations about Rob’s fascination for Chef Boyardee mini ravioli or, you know, Ryan’s fascination for different flavors of Oreos. So it’s just been ongoing. You know, the cowbell came about because there was that Saturday Night Live episode where they’re playing Don’t Fear the Reaper. And Christopher Walken is pretending to be a music producer, and Will Ferrell starts hitting a cowbell. So, no, no, no, we need more cowbell. So that’s where the cowbell came from. And yeah, it’s just again, it just falls back to the fact that we tend to be fairly silly people in our day to day lives.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, I think the title AT Banter really, really suits you guys. It does.
Steve Barclay: Yeah. We’ve often had discussions about changing the name of—
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no, no.
Steve Barclay: —the podcast. But yeah, it’s never come to pass because we’ve never come up with anything better.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And now you are approaching 460 episodes, and you recently moved the show from every week to every two weeks, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Quite openly because of host burnout. I think that honesty is worth passing on. What have you learned about the sustaining advocacy work over the long haul without burning yourself out?
Steve Barclay: Well, you’ve got to do it at your own pace, you know. A lot of people will throw themselves into something and just keep doing it out of a sense of obligation and that’s where the burnout comes in. You know, if you’re not loving what you’re doing, you’ve got to kind of step back and take a look at it and say, well, what do I like about this? And what don’t I like about this? And we just hit the point where doing it every single week, you know, I can’t do it every single week. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got places to go, people to see. But so it was really falling to Ryan and Rob more and more. And Lis when, when we brought this on [unclear 00:36:40]. But yeah, the fewer people you have to spread it out across, the harder it becomes. And Ryan and Rob have been doing the heavy lifting the entire time. So, you know, they’re very deserving of their break. And I doubt we’ll ever go back to a weekly podcast. I think we’ll probably stick with the biweekly format because that’s a lot easier to do. The other thing is you got to get a guest every week.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know. Tell me about it. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: Yeah. And, you know, you can rack your brain and never come up with anybody. And then all of a sudden you’ll get five emails and four of them will look like, hey, these could be good guests. But so it’s, it’s tough when you’re trying to pull it off every single week.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But you know what? You have sustained it better for, you know, for years. And, you know, and now, you know, you’re probably going to be turning into something else. And that’s unless [unclear 00:37:50] one of my final questions to you today. What is your future looking like? Where are you going? What are you dreaming of?
Steve Barclay: I’m really dreaming of having a profitable company at some point [00:38:00]. That would be really good. I often tell people I’m on the freedom 99 plan. My likelihood of retirement at this point is pretty much nil. So you’re going to have to put up with me for a few more years.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But gladly. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: But no, you know, I want to kind of get this company back to the same sort of position that Aroga was in where we had, you know, more regional representatives. And we’re slowly getting there. You know, we’ve added Riane Lapaire, she’s doing work for us in Saskatchewan. She also works for NNELS, the accessible library system. Stephen Ricci, since he was let go from CNIB, has been giving us a hand in Ontario. And he might come on as a more active participant in the next little bit. But I think he’s still weighing, you know, he’s got grandkids now and he’s got his cabin and, you know, he’s sort of, I think, weighing his options and which direction he wants to go right now. But he’s been very good for introducing us to people out there, which has been very nice. But yeah, I’d love to have, you know, some representation in Ontario. It would be great to have, you know, somebody on board who could help us develop the French speaking side of things because we are right now entirely an English company [00:39:50]. You know, we brag that we’re Canadian Assistive Technology, but we’re just kind of most of Canada Assistive Technology. You know, every interaction I have with anyone in Quebec is always done via Google Translate these days.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Steve Barclay: So it’d be nice to be able to provide, you know, technical support in French and, you know, sales support in French as well. So yeah, I mean, but again, you know, going back to the beginning, it’s baby steps, you know. You’ve got to figure out, you know, what your metric is to trigger the next, you know, bit of expansion. So over the last while, really what we’ve been doing is just sort of focusing in on breadth of product and trying to expand out, you know, what our product offerings are because, you know, a lot of the things that were the traditional fuelers of the assistive technology industry, the CCTVs and those sorts of things, those are all becoming very much mainstream now. You know, they’re.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: People are using their cell phones as video magnifiers a lot more instead of, you know, buying dedicated devices. So, you know, we’re watching parts of the market that are just sort of dropping off. You know, we don’t sell a lot of voice recognition technology anymore because that’s built into everything now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: You know, and I don’t know if there will ever be a time where the screen readers on the mainstream products become robust enough to take out, you know, the specialized screen reader manufacturers. But that would be another thing that could, you know, with AI, you know, it’s possible that that could happen.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, yes.
Steve Barclay: So yeah, it’s an always evolving landscape. So we’ve really kind of started doing more things that are senior oriented, you know, things for home safety for seniors. You know, things like, you know, automatic lights that come on when somebody gets out of bed so that they lower the risk of falling, or, you know, clocks for people with dementia that have video calling capabilities.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: You know, different things like that that were really outside of the standard assistive technology field, but are necessary for, you know, an aging population. So we’re just evolving as required, I guess. And you know, it’s an interesting landscape right now because everything is changing so quickly.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It is, it is. Give us your one minute word of advice as a closing, you know, thing for this podcast. What words of wisdom and advice would you give to anyone even like myself? You know, I’m always looking for opportunities. You got any words of wisdom for us?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. Never, never go into a partnership with somebody with dual citizenship. [Grove? 00:42:33] Yeah. Oh, it’s funny. Since that happened, I’ve heard so many stories of people who had business partners with dual citizenship, and the same story happens over and over again. Our laws, when it comes to pursuing people who do stuff in Canada and then run off to another country are extremely weak. So it’s something that happens over and over again and it will continue to happen over and over again until they make some changes. So that’s my best piece of advice. Aside from that, don’t get involved in a land war in Asia.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think Chris Chamberlin suffered a similar type of downfall to you. I don’t know the whole story, but definitely Frontier Computing had to fold, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. He had an accountant that was embezzling from him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, yeah, I believe he recovered some of it [00:43:38], but I doubt he got everything back.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know, I lost over $50,000 from these guys who were supposed to develop something for, you know, the CNIB. Never paid me a darn penny. And they’re Canadian. They live up the street from me.
Steve Barclay: Oh, really? Yeah. You could flatten their tires.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You want to come and help me out? Absolutely. It has been a pleasure. I mean, I’ve enjoyed this interview and learning about AT Banter and, you know, when you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about my own camp retreat initiative if you’re interested.
Steve Barclay: Oh, for sure.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, and I’d like you to be a participant in the accessible travel podcast. I think you have a lot to offer.
Steve Barclay: Oh, I think I’ve got something even better for you, but we could talk about that offline.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Yeah. All right. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I wish you the very best for the rest of the summer. And whenever you’re ready to talk, let me know. I’m presently in the Caribbean visiting my mom.
Steve Barclay: Oh. Very nice.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. I won’t be back in Canada till September the 14th, but I have, you know, Zoom connections. And whenever you’re ready, let me know.
Steve Barclay: All righty. That sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay, Steve, you take care and keep on going.
Steve Barclay: I will keep plugging away at it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Thanks again, and we’ll talk soon.
Steve Barclay: All right. You take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Yeah. Bye, Steve. Bye bye. Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
Connect With Me:
🌍 Website: https://donnajodhan.com
📧 Email: donna@donnajodhan.com
✏️ Blog (1): https://donnajodhan.com/blog
✏️ Blog (2): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling1
✏️ Blog (3): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling2
✏️ Blog (4): https://donnajodhan.com/blogspot
🛒 Etsy: https://donnajodhan.com/etsy
🎙️ Podcasts (Web): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts
🎙️ Podcasts (Apple): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-apple
🎙️ Podcasts (Amazon): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-amazon
🎙️ Podcasts (Spotify): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-spotify
🎙️ Podcasts (iHeart): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-iheart-radio
💬 Facebook: https://donnajodhan.com/facebook
💬 LinkedIn: https://donnajodhan.com/linkedin
💬 X1 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x1
💬 X2 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x2
📽️ YouTube: https://donnajodhan.com/youtube
🛜 RSS: https://donnajodhan.com/feed
Related
Remarkable World Commentary Episode #106: Interview with Steve Barclay, Founder and President, Canadian Assistive Technology, and Co-Host, AT Banter Podcast
🎙️ Listen to this Podcast.
In this candid and unexpectedly personal episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA sits down with Steve Barclay, founder of Canadian Assistive Technology and co-host of the AT Banter Podcast, for a career-length walk through Canadian assistive technology. Steve begins in November 1990 as Aroga Technologies’ very first employee, a bench technician repairing 40-pound CRT video magnifiers, Optacons, VersaBrailles and Prentke Romich Minspeak devices, and traces his climb to VP of Sales and Marketing and eventually part owner and chief operating officer. He then tells, in unsparing detail, how that 28-year run ended: his majority partner Grove Bennett diverted company money into a multi-level marketing scheme selling “quantum infused holograms,” ran Aroga into the ground, left behind an unpaid $300,000 tax bill, fled to Australia, and left Steve facing a TD Bank fraud charge and a consumer proposal before he rebuilt from his townhouse basement on his wife’s capital.
The second half turns to what he built instead. Steve explains the deliberately silly culture at Canadian Assistive Technology, the nicknames, the bulldog, the cowbells, as a working tool for meeting newly diagnosed clients who are fragile and emotional, and describes how AT Banter grew from a lunchroom idea he personally opposed into a show approaching 460 episodes that recently moved to biweekly because of open host burnout. He closes on where the business is heading: regional representatives in Saskatchewan and Ontario, a wish for French-language support, and a pivot toward senior-oriented safety technology as CCTVs and voice recognition go mainstream. His parting advice is not to go into partnership with someone holding dual citizenship, and not to get involved in a land war in Asia.
TRANSCRIPT
Podcast Commentator: Greetings, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA invites you to listen to her biweekly podcast, Remarkable World Commentary. Here, Donna shares some of her innermost thoughts, insights, perspectives, and more with her listeners. Donna focuses on topics that directly affect the future of kids, especially kids with disabilities. Donna is a blind advocate, author, sight loss coach, dinner mystery producer, writer, entrepreneur, law graduate, and podcast commentator. She has decades of lived experiences, knowledge, skills, and expertise in access, technology and information. As someone who has been internationally recognized for her work and roles, she just wants to make things better than possible.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Remarkable World Commentary. I’m Donna J. Jodhan, a lifelong disability advocate and one who sees the world mainly through sound, touch and stubborn optimism. I am a law graduate and accessibility consultant, an author, a lifelong advocate who is a barrier buster and who also happens to be blind. You may know me from a few headline moments, as in November of 2010, I won the landmark charter case that forced the Canadian government to make its websites accessible to every Canadian, not just to safety warnings [unverified 00:01:55]. And in July of 2019, I co-led the Accessible Canada Act with more than two dozen disability groups to turn equal access into federal law. And most recently, on June the 3rd, 2022, I was greatly humbled by Her Late Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee Award for tireless commitment to removing barriers. When I’m not in the courtroom or in the committee room or in a pottery studio [00:02:28], you’ll find me coaching kids with vision loss, producing audio mysteries, or helping tech companies to make their gadgets talk back in plain language. Everything I do circles one goal: to turn accessibility from an afterthought into everyday practice. I invite you to think of this show as our shared workbench, where policy meets lived experience and lived experience sparks fresh ideas. Now, before we jump into today’s conversation, let me shine a spotlight on today’s guest, a change maker whose work is every bit as remarkable as the world that we are trying to build. I am pleased, and I am privileged to welcome Steve Barclay, a high profile advocate, and everything else that this community really appreciates. Steve, welcome to my show.
Steve Barclay: Wow. I’m really flattered. That’s the best intro I’ve ever had.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And you didn’t bribe me for it, right?
Steve Barclay: No.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh.
Steve Barclay: Not yet. I might pay you to keep going, though.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Well, let’s get into the question. And, Steve, again, welcome. I want you to begin all the way back at the very beginning, because your story starts somewhere where most people never guessed. In November of 1990, you walked in as the very first employee of a company called Aroga. And your job was to be sitting at a bench repairing Telesensory and VTEK devices. Take our listeners back there. What did assistive technology actually look and feel like in 1990?
Steve Barclay: Well, so the company that I was working for, Aroga Technologies, they did low vision and blindness products. They also did augmentative communication aids for the nonverbal. So in terms of the low vision and blindness stuff, we were dealing with cameras for video magnification with massive CRT monitors. So, like, you know.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I remember that.
Steve Barclay: A 20 inch monitor would weigh, you know, probably 40 pounds. And the cameras themselves, they were, I don’t even remember what we called the type of tube that they used for the actual camera module. But they were also pretty darn heavy and clunky. We started around then to get the smaller CCTVs in with, you know, like 14 inch monitors, some of them. And they were all contained in a single unit rather than being two pieces. And those, as I recall, initially came from VTEK. And then Telesensory started making some of their own as well, of the same sort of style. But that was really the beginning of the all in one kind of design of a CCTV, where you had a monitor in line with the camera underneath and then an X-Y table on the bottom. And repairing those things was interesting. There was a lot of fiddling about with things like the yokes on the cathode ray tubes to make sure that the image was nice, square and proper inside the screen. And the cameras, they had their own foibles, and setting them up so that they would focus properly. And a lot of that repair back then was all component level repair. So there was no board swaps like they do today. If your computer dies, they’re going to tell you, oh, you need a new motherboard and that’s going to cost you 20 gazillion dollars. Back then it was, you know, the resistor will cost you five cents, but finding which resistor has to be replaced will take four hours. So very, very different world. We were also getting the first refreshable Braille displays back then in the VersaBrailles. You know, I think when I started, the second generation of VersaBrailles was out, which used floppy disks instead of cassette tapes.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Are they still around?
Steve Barclay: VersaBrailles. No, no. Long, long gone. Yeah. They’ve been replaced by, you know, the modern notetakers like the BrailleNotes and the BrailleSenses of the world. And what else did we have back? Oh. Optacon. Optacons were huge back then. You know, there were a lot of people who did their post-secondary education reading books with a little handheld camera and an array of pins that they set their finger on top of. And as they ran across the text, it would render the shape of the letters on those pins, and they would feel their way through that textbook. I found that absolutely remarkable that people could do that in the first place, because I could never, even when I was fixing them, I could never really make out the shapes of the letters well enough to read with them. But you know, I knew a couple people who put themselves through law school using those. And that’s quite an impressive achievement. And then on the augmentative communication side, we had products from a company called Prentke Romich, and they had devices that would have like 128 buttons on them, and using different combinations of those buttons, you could speak with them, you know, and carry on conversations in real time. They used a linguistic system called Minspeak where you had a bunch of symbols on the buttons. And by selecting the correct symbols in order, you would have different words. So like an apple might represent the concept of red. It might represent the concept of food. It might represent the concept of round. And depending on what button you pressed after, the apple would determine what word you were going for. And we had that same sort of device that was operated, rather than being operated by buttons, it was operated by a head worn, not a laser, but an infrared emitter. And you could track across the buttons and the little red LED would light up for whichever one you were pointing at. And if you just paused long enough on it, it would activate that button. So back in those days, that was, you know, revolutionary technology. It was pretty cutting edge. And we watched technologies come along like optical character recognition, which back then was rudimentary. It would only work with certain fonts and it wasn’t fabulously accurate. And now everybody’s got it on their cell phone, and it’s pretty darn good. So yeah, it was a long, long time ago. You know, we used to park our dinosaurs out in front of the building and wander in and do our job and then commute home with the bison. You know?
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Now there’s something quite special about being employee number one anywhere, right? You were there before the company was really a company. What did those earliest years teach you that you still rely on today, which is more than 35 years later?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. I didn’t even want to be the first employee. I tried really hard not to take the job.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, I was, back then, for the three years prior to that, I’d been fixing photocopiers. I was working for a company called Crosshatch Copiers [unverified 00:11:37] here in Vancouver. And I was trained in color laser copier technology, which was brand new at the time. And I had quit the company I was working for because I just couldn’t deal with the management there. And I had approached Kodak, who was a massive company back then. And they were one of the only other ones that had color laser technology. There was them and Canon. Canon also had color laser, but I didn’t want to work for the Canon dealer because they had a reputation for being nasty as well. But Kodak, it was a union company. They paid great wages, they had great benefits. And I was told that they were going to create a position for me. I just had to wait for them to create the position. So I was waiting. My roommate got sick of seeing me sitting around. And he actually took my resume in to Aroga. They were at the time renting two rooms out of the back of a computer company called Structured Computer Systems [unverified 00:12:50] where my roommate worked. And he came back one day and he says, oh, you got a job interview tomorrow? I said, what? He says, yeah, I got you a job interview. He says, there’s this little company working out of the back of our office. They rent two rooms at the back of our office, and they’re looking for a service tech. And it just sounded so shady to me at the time. You know, a little company renting two rooms out of it. But I went in and I made no effort whatsoever. I didn’t dress up. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t shave. I just sort of showed up. And the owners of that company, Bob and Barb, they’d been interviewing guys who had just recently graduated from BCIT and they were all coming in in three piece suits. But Bob and Barb, Barbara, a couple of hippies from Manitoba. And when the scruffy kid came in, they went, oh, we could probably live with that one. And they offered me the job, so I turned it down. And then Bob, who was just, he could sell ice to Eskimos. He talked me into it on the phone. And I started work there. But yeah, I mean, looking back, you know, what does that teach you? It teaches you how a company grows, you know, the steps that you go through, the pains that you go through. And now with Canadian Assistive, we’re back to being, you know, a small company, very few employees. And we’re going through those very same growth pains now, you know, trying to figure out how best to scale and how best to, you know, bring new staff on where you need them. And, you know, what your threshold is to trigger the next step. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It’s interesting, over your years at Aroga, right? You moved from the repair bench to vice president of sales and marketing and even to part owner and chief operating officer. That is a very long climb through every part of a business. How did seeing the industry from each of those angles change what you believed our community actually needed?
Steve Barclay: So the move originally, I moved into sales because Bob and Barb realized that the guy who was sitting at the bench repairing things and testing things and making sure that they worked properly knew more about their operation than they did. So they moved me into the sales role because of my product knowledge. And I think part of that was the recognition that, you know, what our industry needs isn’t salesmen. What they need is knowledgeable people who can, you know, meaningfully explain and train people on the technology. So, you know, I just sort of grew with the company from there. And as we added other people, they sort of fell underneath me. And that’s how, you know, I got the title of VP of Sales and Marketing. We eventually expanded. We first opened an office in Edmonton, Alberta with my good friend Carrie Anton [unverified 00:16:37]. And then we went from there. We hired Bob’s sister out in Kingston, Ontario. She started doing augmentative communication products for us in Kingston. We had a couple of attempts at opening an office in Montreal.
Steve Barclay: With mixed results. You know, it never really stuck. But then the CEO part of it, that title came along with the acquisition of Aroga. Bob decided he was going to sell the company and he ended up selling a majority stake in the company to a fellow named Grove Bennett and—
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: A minority.
Steve Barclay: —stake for me. So Grove became president and CEO. Sorry, I was chief operating officer, I believe CEO at that point [unclear 00:17:32]. Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh my gosh. Then in 2017, the company that you had given 28 years to was winding down. You announced publicly that you were starting something of your own. Now, Steve, that must have been a frightening and clarifying moment, right? All at once. What did you decide right then that you wanted to do differently?
Steve Barclay: Well, my first revelation was no more business partners.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: That was—
Steve Barclay: That was a key one. Yeah, I mean, that was just a horrible time in my life in general. You know, Grove decided that he was going to get involved in a multi-level marketing scheme peddling, I can’t make this up, quantum infused holograms for various health issues. It was just straight snake oil sales. But he saw dollar signs in it. And I told him I wanted nothing to do with it. And he said no, the company would be completely separate, nothing to do with it. And then he took all of our money and ran it into that and ran the company straight into the ground. And then because he was a dual Australian citizen he got to run away back to Australia and avoid all responsibility for it. So not only was I suddenly out of work, but I was also left holding the bag for everything at Aroga, including, you know, discovered that Grove had never paid payroll withholding tax. He’d never paid GST for a period of like two or three years. So there was a $300,000 tax bill with the government that they came knocking for. My only option at that point was to either declare bankruptcy or do what they call a consumer proposal, which is essentially the same thing as bankruptcy, except that you’re not considered bankrupt. And you can still be an officer of a company. And you basically tell them, okay, well, this is how much money I can give you. And they have to sign off on whether or not they’re going to accept that. And if they don’t accept it, then the next step is you pretty much have to declare bankruptcy. But they accepted it. And so I was broke, but fortunately my wife was not. So we got the start up capital through my wife to buy our first few pieces of equipment and start all over again from the basement of our townhouse.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Was Grove ever caught and made to pay for what he had done?
Steve Barclay: So, Grove and his wife, Diane, who also worked at Aroga. They vanished like, they just disappeared into the ether. They erased themselves from social media. They had their kids erased themselves from social media. So nobody knew exactly where they were, but there was one disgruntled woman who had loaned Grove a bunch of money under false pretenses, I might add. And she had very, very smartly gone on to his and Diane’s Facebook profiles in anticipation that they might make a run for it. And she had done screenshots of all of their friends on their friends lists.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Right.
Steve Barclay: And when they disappeared, she started going through those friends to say, hey, do you know where they are? And eventually they found someone who was willing to say where they were. And that was when we discovered where they were in Australia. I sent a demand letter because Grove owed me about $50,000 personally. And I got a lawyer down in Australia to send it. And the day after the first time it was served they went to the house and whoever answered the door denied that there was anybody named Grove Bennett at that location. And then they sent a process server to his work and they managed to get him at work. The very next day he declared bankruptcy in Canada.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: My God.
Steve Barclay: And if you declare bankruptcy in Canada, it does absolutely nothing to you in Australia. You’re not considered bankrupt in Australia. So he essentially got out of all of his responsibilities in Canada. And got a clean go in Australia. So he didn’t get caught in that sense, but one day out of the blue, I got a call from a fella down in Australia saying, hey, do you know this guy Grove Bennett? I go, yeah, I know him. He says, well listen, he’s been part of our hockey club for a while, and we all think he’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s just gotten himself appointed to the Australian Olympic Committee for hockey.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no.
Steve Barclay: And he had managed to convince the board to appoint him as, I think it was CEO, a position that had never existed before. It had always been just a volunteer board and managed to convince them to give him $100,000 salary. And so he started asking me questions about Grove. And I told him the whole story and he said, well, can you send me some of that documentation about, you know, the bankruptcy and everything and the charge? Because we were charged with fraud. Both myself, Diane, Grove, we were all charged with fraud by TD Bank because Grove had been filing falsified business information. And they eventually dropped the fraud charge on me because they realized that I’d never been sent to any of that information. It had come directly from Grove to them without me ever being copied on it. But there was a civil fraud charge. So I sent that all down to him. He took it to the hockey association. The hockey association said they would look at it. Grove somehow convinced them that no, this is all made up. This is just a disgruntled ex-business partner who’s trying to stir up trouble. And there’s nothing to it. Carry on. So they, the committee threatened to sue the guy who had given them the information. So he calls me back and he says, listen, I can’t pursue this any further. You know, I got a family. I’m afraid of what can happen, even though I don’t think they can really do anything to me. But would you talk to my friend Sandy, who’s a reporter? So I got to talk to Sandy, the reporter. I can’t remember his last name off the top of my head now. But Sandy ran a story in an online news service about it. And then that story got picked up by Channel Nine News in Australia and the Channel Nine news article, when it hit the airwaves, that got Grove tossed from the Olympic Committee. So he did have a little bit of karmic payback there, I guess. But yeah, if you Google Channel Nine news and Grove Bennett, you will find that video. It’s pretty funny because they caught up to him at the tennis club he was working at. And he locked himself in a building and hid behind a kitchen bench to try and avoid their questions.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think we don’t, you know, I think our listeners, I know I’m not aware of what you just shared with us, but, you know, we did know that Grove had run away to Australia. I had met his wife Diane once or twice. I really liked her.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, she was a charmer.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, I didn’t like him. He made a pass at me one time and I thought, why don’t you just get out and leave me alone, you know? Yeah, I know.
Steve Barclay: He was quite a piece of work.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I bet. And I hope he never sets foot in Canada again, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah, indeed. I don’t know if he ever will, because one of the guys that he borrowed a lot of money from owns a gravel pit. And I don’t think he mess with guys who own gravel pits.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, no you don’t. He would probably toss you into the pit, right?
Steve Barclay: Yep.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Now you did not start Canadian Assistive Technology on your own, right? Ryan Fleury and Rob, let me see, I hope, I mean, is that—
Steve Barclay: No, no. Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Mineault came with you. And anyone who has spent five minutes around your company knows about the nicknames, the Bulldog, and the general refusal to take yourself too seriously. Tell us about the culture that you have deliberately built and why does this matter in this particular industry?
Steve Barclay: Gosh. I’m just generally a silly person, I would say.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh. You’re not.
Steve Barclay: But well, just pour a couple of drinks into me and you’ll find out. But Rob and Ryan and I, we always had a good time together. We always enjoyed working together. You know, we’d started the AT Banter Podcast back then as well, back in the days. So we were, you know, we were always kind of a lighthearted crew. But I think, you know, we deal with people who are going through a pretty broad range of life experiences. And oftentimes our first contact with a new client is somebody who’s been recently diagnosed with something that is affecting their lives in a very negative way. And they’re fragile, they’re emotional. And it’s a lot easier to engage with them if you do it in a lighthearted fashion. You know, you let them know that you’re an ally, you’re not just somebody there to, you know, flog a product on them and send them on their way. So, you know, I just think that having a good sense of humor and a sense of empathy is incredibly important in the kind of work that we’re doing.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I agree. And I’ve had the great experience of having had two podcast interviews with you guys, and I really enjoyed it. I thought this was a unique type of podcast, you know? I really enjoyed it. Now, the AT Banter Podcast actually came first and not long, sorry. You launched it in May 2016 while you were all still at Aroga. What made three people in the assistive technology business decide what the [world? 00:29:40] needed from them was a podcast?
Steve Barclay: You know, there was a lot of talk back then in the 20 tens about podcasting. And it seemed one of those things where everybody was starting to do their own podcast. And, you know, the cost of entry to doing a podcast wasn’t that expensive. You know, you needed a computer, you needed some microphones, you know, maybe an audio mixer and somebody who’s willing to sit down and take the time to edit it. So it came about as a lunchroom conversation. And it was either Rob or Ryan who came up with the idea. I can’t remember, I think they both may claim equal credit for it at this point, but I was the holdout. I was like, oh God, no, everybody and their dog’s doing a podcast. We don’t need to do a podcast. But originally what we had envisioned was doing a podcast that just talked about technology, that was just about, you know, the products that we sold and, you know, what they did for people and so forth. And after doing that a couple of times, we realized, you know, that in and of itself is pretty boring, pretty repetitive, and not all that interesting. So we started to focus more around people’s stories and what other people were doing, what the community was doing, you know, what sort of remarkable things were happening out there. And that seems to have really gained some traction. You know, we have listeners all over the world now. And I don’t know how true it is. I got an email from some company that claims to be a podcast rating agency, and they rated us as the top rated disability podcast in Canada last year. I don’t know if that’s true or not because I don’t know how they determine these things. It looks more to me like somebody who’s just trying to sell a badge to podcasts. It’s one of the things about podcasts, you just never know how many people are listening to you because it’s always spread amongst multiple platforms. You know, somebody will do it on, you know, iTunes, somebody else will, you know, do it on Podbean. You never get to collect all the numbers for how many people are listening. So we really have no idea what our listenership is now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But you’ve enjoyed it, right? And you’ve had lots and lots of fun doing it, right?
Steve Barclay: Oh, for sure. And we’ve met all kinds of, you know, really interesting people through it as well and learned about, you know, some really neat initiatives that, you know, different things that are being developed. And you know, I’m just scrolling back through episodes here. I don’t do all of them. I often miss things because I’m out on the road. But yeah, you know, we’ve had some great people on the podcast and talking about some great products and some, you know, charities that they work with or things that they’re doing, you know, like blind travelers who travel independently all over the world. And gosh, you know, we’ve interviewed a blind marathon runner.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Wow.
Steve Barclay: And just, you know, all kinds of people doing all kinds of things that, you know, their teachers probably told them at some point in their life they were never going to be able to do. And there they are doing it. So.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. I think one thing, and I’d like to approach you offline, is I’m trying to launch this accessible travel podcast and I’m hoping that we could have a little chat offline about you becoming an endorser or a participant. It’s called From Curb to Curb in Canada [unverified 00:33:37]. I’m just now starting it up so we can talk about that later, but clock’s starting to wind down. And I have to ask you about the tone of that show because it is unlike most disability media. There are cow bells. There are sound boards. There are long running arguments about food. That is a deliberate choice, isn’t it? What are you pushing back against?
Steve Barclay: Well, that’s just the banter part of it, right? That’s just, this is the kind of stuff that Rob and Ryan and I have been doing to each other for years is, you know, having, you know, nonsensical conversations about Rob’s fascination for Chef Boyardee mini ravioli or, you know, Ryan’s fascination for different flavors of Oreos. So it’s just been ongoing. You know, the cowbell came about because there was that Saturday Night Live episode where they’re playing Don’t Fear the Reaper. And Christopher Walken is pretending to be a music producer, and Will Ferrell starts hitting a cowbell. So, no, no, no, we need more cowbell. So that’s where the cowbell came from. And yeah, it’s just again, it just falls back to the fact that we tend to be fairly silly people in our day to day lives.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, I think the title AT Banter really, really suits you guys. It does.
Steve Barclay: Yeah. We’ve often had discussions about changing the name of—
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: No, no, no.
Steve Barclay: —the podcast. But yeah, it’s never come to pass because we’ve never come up with anything better.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: And now you are approaching 460 episodes, and you recently moved the show from every week to every two weeks, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Quite openly because of host burnout. I think that honesty is worth passing on. What have you learned about the sustaining advocacy work over the long haul without burning yourself out?
Steve Barclay: Well, you’ve got to do it at your own pace, you know. A lot of people will throw themselves into something and just keep doing it out of a sense of obligation and that’s where the burnout comes in. You know, if you’re not loving what you’re doing, you’ve got to kind of step back and take a look at it and say, well, what do I like about this? And what don’t I like about this? And we just hit the point where doing it every single week, you know, I can’t do it every single week. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got places to go, people to see. But so it was really falling to Ryan and Rob more and more. And Lis when, when we brought this on [unclear 00:36:40]. But yeah, the fewer people you have to spread it out across, the harder it becomes. And Ryan and Rob have been doing the heavy lifting the entire time. So, you know, they’re very deserving of their break. And I doubt we’ll ever go back to a weekly podcast. I think we’ll probably stick with the biweekly format because that’s a lot easier to do. The other thing is you got to get a guest every week.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know. Tell me about it. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: Yeah. And, you know, you can rack your brain and never come up with anybody. And then all of a sudden you’ll get five emails and four of them will look like, hey, these could be good guests. But so it’s, it’s tough when you’re trying to pull it off every single week.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. But you know what? You have sustained it better for, you know, for years. And, you know, and now, you know, you’re probably going to be turning into something else. And that’s unless [unclear 00:37:50] one of my final questions to you today. What is your future looking like? Where are you going? What are you dreaming of?
Steve Barclay: I’m really dreaming of having a profitable company at some point [00:38:00]. That would be really good. I often tell people I’m on the freedom 99 plan. My likelihood of retirement at this point is pretty much nil. So you’re going to have to put up with me for a few more years.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: But gladly. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: But no, you know, I want to kind of get this company back to the same sort of position that Aroga was in where we had, you know, more regional representatives. And we’re slowly getting there. You know, we’ve added Riane Lapaire, she’s doing work for us in Saskatchewan. She also works for NNELS, the accessible library system. Stephen Ricci, since he was let go from CNIB, has been giving us a hand in Ontario. And he might come on as a more active participant in the next little bit. But I think he’s still weighing, you know, he’s got grandkids now and he’s got his cabin and, you know, he’s sort of, I think, weighing his options and which direction he wants to go right now. But he’s been very good for introducing us to people out there, which has been very nice. But yeah, I’d love to have, you know, some representation in Ontario. It would be great to have, you know, somebody on board who could help us develop the French speaking side of things because we are right now entirely an English company [00:39:50]. You know, we brag that we’re Canadian Assistive Technology, but we’re just kind of most of Canada Assistive Technology. You know, every interaction I have with anyone in Quebec is always done via Google Translate these days.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Oh, okay.
Steve Barclay: So it’d be nice to be able to provide, you know, technical support in French and, you know, sales support in French as well. So yeah, I mean, but again, you know, going back to the beginning, it’s baby steps, you know. You’ve got to figure out, you know, what your metric is to trigger the next, you know, bit of expansion. So over the last while, really what we’ve been doing is just sort of focusing in on breadth of product and trying to expand out, you know, what our product offerings are because, you know, a lot of the things that were the traditional fuelers of the assistive technology industry, the CCTVs and those sorts of things, those are all becoming very much mainstream now. You know, they’re.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: People are using their cell phones as video magnifiers a lot more instead of, you know, buying dedicated devices. So, you know, we’re watching parts of the market that are just sort of dropping off. You know, we don’t sell a lot of voice recognition technology anymore because that’s built into everything now.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: You know, and I don’t know if there will ever be a time where the screen readers on the mainstream products become robust enough to take out, you know, the specialized screen reader manufacturers. But that would be another thing that could, you know, with AI, you know, it’s possible that that could happen.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yes, yes.
Steve Barclay: So yeah, it’s an always evolving landscape. So we’ve really kind of started doing more things that are senior oriented, you know, things for home safety for seniors. You know, things like, you know, automatic lights that come on when somebody gets out of bed so that they lower the risk of falling, or, you know, clocks for people with dementia that have video calling capabilities.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Barclay: You know, different things like that that were really outside of the standard assistive technology field, but are necessary for, you know, an aging population. So we’re just evolving as required, I guess. And you know, it’s an interesting landscape right now because everything is changing so quickly.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: It is, it is. Give us your one minute word of advice as a closing, you know, thing for this podcast. What words of wisdom and advice would you give to anyone even like myself? You know, I’m always looking for opportunities. You got any words of wisdom for us?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. Never, never go into a partnership with somebody with dual citizenship. [Grove? 00:42:33] Yeah. Oh, it’s funny. Since that happened, I’ve heard so many stories of people who had business partners with dual citizenship, and the same story happens over and over again. Our laws, when it comes to pursuing people who do stuff in Canada and then run off to another country are extremely weak. So it’s something that happens over and over again and it will continue to happen over and over again until they make some changes. So that’s my best piece of advice. Aside from that, don’t get involved in a land war in Asia.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay.
Steve Barclay: Yeah.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I think Chris Chamberlin suffered a similar type of downfall to you. I don’t know the whole story, but definitely Frontier Computing had to fold, right?
Steve Barclay: Yeah. He had an accountant that was embezzling from him.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Barclay: Yeah, yeah, I believe he recovered some of it [00:43:38], but I doubt he got everything back.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: I know, I lost over $50,000 from these guys who were supposed to develop something for, you know, the CNIB. Never paid me a darn penny. And they’re Canadian. They live up the street from me.
Steve Barclay: Oh, really? Yeah. You could flatten their tires.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You want to come and help me out? Absolutely. It has been a pleasure. I mean, I’ve enjoyed this interview and learning about AT Banter and, you know, when you have a moment, I’d like to talk to you about my own camp retreat initiative if you’re interested.
Steve Barclay: Oh, for sure.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: You know, and I’d like you to be a participant in the accessible travel podcast. I think you have a lot to offer.
Steve Barclay: Oh, I think I’ve got something even better for you, but we could talk about that offline.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Yeah. All right. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I wish you the very best for the rest of the summer. And whenever you’re ready to talk, let me know. I’m presently in the Caribbean visiting my mom.
Steve Barclay: Oh. Very nice.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Yeah. I won’t be back in Canada till September the 14th, but I have, you know, Zoom connections. And whenever you’re ready, let me know.
Steve Barclay: All righty. That sounds good.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay, Steve, you take care and keep on going.
Steve Barclay: I will keep plugging away at it.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Thanks again, and we’ll talk soon.
Steve Barclay: All right. You take care.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA: Okay. Yeah. Bye, Steve. Bye bye. Bye.
Podcast Commentator: Donna wants to hear from you and invites you to write to her at donnajodhan@gmail.com. Until next time.
Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA
Global Leader In Disability Rights, Digital Accessibility, And Inclusive Policy Reform
Turning policy into progress for people with disabilities.
Connect With Me:
🌍 Website: https://donnajodhan.com
📧 Email: donna@donnajodhan.com
✏️ Blog (1): https://donnajodhan.com/blog
✏️ Blog (2): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling1
✏️ Blog (3): https://donnajodhan.com/sterling2
✏️ Blog (4): https://donnajodhan.com/blogspot
🛒 Etsy: https://donnajodhan.com/etsy
🎙️ Podcasts (Web): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts
🎙️ Podcasts (Apple): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-apple
🎙️ Podcasts (Amazon): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-amazon
🎙️ Podcasts (Spotify): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-spotify
🎙️ Podcasts (iHeart): https://donnajodhan.com/podcasts-iheart-radio
💬 Facebook: https://donnajodhan.com/facebook
💬 LinkedIn: https://donnajodhan.com/linkedin
💬 X1 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x1
💬 X2 (Formerly Twitter): https://donnajodhan.com/x2
📽️ YouTube: https://donnajodhan.com/youtube
🛜 RSS: https://donnajodhan.com/feed
Share this:
Like this:
Related
Published in Remarkable World Commentary