Inc. Magazine – September 2019

104 ● INC. ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● ● ● ● ● ●

like getting on the moving sidewalk of

life: Now you go to college, now you get

married, now you have a mortgage. By

the time I’d finished grad school, study-

ing mechanical engineering, I felt like all

of the hustle had been beaten out of me.

On the surface, it was fine. I had a good

job, a great marriage, two happy kids, a

nice home. But I definitely noticed that

the people around me, in Boston, who

had started their own businesses seemed

more fulfilled. They worked hard, got

results, and were rewarded.

Meanwhile, I was working for people

I didn’t particularly like, in a part of the

health care industry that had too many

regulations and special interests. I started

working on business models at night and

on the weekends, and I had some pretty

half-baked ideas—like how to keep bur-

ritos from toppling over and losing their

filling when you put them down midbite.

Then one day, I took my 6-year-old son

to get his skates sharpened, and it struck

me that we were still sharpening skates

in the same dumb way my parents had

done it two decades before. I had toyed

with solving this problem in grad

school—building something like a Netflix

model, where people mailed in their

blades and we returned them sharp-

ened—but the financial realities for this

concept killed that idea pretty fast. What

if there was a way to make the process

happen at home? I bought a commercial

sharpening machine in 2012, watched the

instructional video on an old VCR in our

basement, and became obsessed with

marrying the latest developments in

design and manufacturing with the crude

process of skate sharpening.

Progress was really slow. Like, pain-

fully slow. It’s hard to start a company

when you’re working full time and have

a family. But then, in mid-2012, my father

passed away and left me some money—

less than $50,000. In the big picture, it

was a small enough sum that it wasn’t

going to change my life. So it felt like if

that money evaporated, it wouldn’t be

the end of the world. But it was enough

that I could roll the dice and hire two

entry-level engineers to help get some

momentum going for my business.

They worked out of a tiny office just

down the street from my day job, and I’d

stop by before and after work and on my

lunch breaks to check in. It finally felt

like we were starting to get somewhere.

Then, in 2013, the company I worked for

was restructured and there was a massive

layoff. My boss called to tell me while I

was on a business trip, and it was a com-

pletely euphoric moment. My co-worker

was trying to console me, and I said,

“This isn’t horrible—this is fantastic.”

I threw myself into Sparx. Four months

later, we raised a small seed round from

a handful of friends and associates in the

hockey world. It took a year to bring our

first prototype to life, but as soon as we

showed the board of directors, it was

clear the design wasn’t going to work. We

were using an exposed mechanical struc-

ture, which didn’t feel safe enough, and

the material used to grind was almost like

stone, where bits would go flying every-

where as you sharpened the blade. We

trashed the idea and started from scratch:

We found a permanent abrasive, which

is used in the aerospace and medical

device fields, and we switched to a more

enclosed design, so all of the moving

parts are protected. It took another year,

but when we went back in front of the

board, I knew we had it.

Things moved really fast after that. We

blew past our 2015 Kickstarter campaign

goal almost immediately, though we

miscalculated the price so badly that the

first few hundred sold felt as if we were

mailing $100 bills along with the sharp-

eners. We adjusted prices after that to

reflect the cost to manufacture the prod-

uct, and sales continued to take off. We’ve

sold more than 15,000 consumer Sparx

sharpeners, and we’ve launched a com-

mercial design for hockey rinks and

teams to use—including those in the

National Hockey League, the American

Hockey League, and the National

Women’s Hockey League.

We took what’s traditionally this huge

piece of dangerous industrial equipment

that only professionals can use and

turned it into a consumer product that

anyone can put on the kitchen counter

and operate as easily as a Keurig coffee

machine.

By the

time I’d

finished

grad school,

I felt like

all of the

hustle

had been

beaten

out of me.

CO

UR

TE

SY

CO

MP

AN

Y

Keeping It Sharp

Sparx, the first
commercial-grade

in-home skate
sharpener, is now

used by teams in the
National Hockey

League.