The Entrepreneurs

“If you need anything, just whistle!” is Ron Foxcroft’s signature signoff. He is the grandfather of the professional referee whistle. His story is a journey of the determination to survive. As a teen, his dream of being the quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats was shattered due to a sporting injury.

His ambition shattered; he became a basketball referee, which was a part-time job. It wasn’t enough – he needed a job. Through a long-time friend, he managed a leveraged buyout of Fluke Transport. The company was small and money was tight. Ron would work dispatch in the morning and referee games all over the northeastern U.S. in the evening.

One day, his whistle failed in a high-stakes game in Brazil. “They shoot refs in Brazil,” says Ron, “so I decided to reinvent the whistle.” Easier said than done. He invested $150,000 that he didn’t have and invented the pea-less whistle.

Over the next forty years, the Fox 40 whistle captured the global referee business. Today, he sells 20,000 whistles per day and his trucking company is a thriving success. None of it was a fluke.  

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The Entrepreneurs is a show that features the imaginative, innovative drivers of our economy. For more, see our website at www.theentrepreneurs.ca.

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Imagine standing on a mountain in Tibet only to see a monk pull a mobile phone from their pocket. If you’re like Amanda Hall, the founder of Summit Nanotech, you’d be thinking, “What the heck is that person going to do with a mobile phone? They’ve taken a vow of silence.” To her amazement, the monk started typing a text.

As if that wasn’t a mind blowing revelation, you’d also have to be Amanda Hall to put two and two together and say, “I’m going to go back home to Calgary, quit my job, and start a lithium extraction business.” Her reasoning was, “If lithium batteries are in the mountains of Tibet, they are everywhere. And when I look at the way the Chinese government is ravaging the landscape in Tibet with its lithium evaporation methods, well then, mother nature needs some help.”

Amanda went home, sat down with a piece of paper, and developed an extraction method that would protect the environment and be of interest to investors. She looked at the human body and mimicked the loop of henle, where salts are separated from liquids. It worked in the lab, but not in the field.

Back to the drawing board. This time, to develop a membrane. Once again, it worked in the lab but not at scale. Back to the drawing board, refine, test, refine, test, refine, and test again. Smack in the middle of that research and development, COVID hit, shutting down the lab. Calgary banned access to offices within the city limits.

Innovators always find a way to keep going and in this case, Amanda and team found a barn on the outskirts of town, moved the lab there, and kept going. Confident they had the answer, they sent the test facility to South America, only to have it go missing in shipping. 

Entrepreneurs don’t give up easily; they went on a search for the missing lab, found it, and got it to Chile to start new tests. The results were better but not good enough. Back to the drawing board.

As of December 2025, Amanda and her team have a winning formula. The next major hurdle is commercialization. Along the way, Amanda was able to continue to attract investment capital – not because everything she touched was a homerun, but because she never surrendered to the idea that her vision was unattainable, proving investors invest in the leader more than the idea.

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The Entrepreneurs is a show that features the imaginative, innovative drivers of our economy. For more, see our website at www.theentrepreneurs.ca.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are moments you measure your life by, as in before and after. For Danny Sitnam, that day was late August in 1977. He was working as a line cook at the Owl and Oarsman up on a hill overlooking Vancouver.

He was taking a break when a helicopter landed in the field next to the restaurant. Little did he know, within the next 30 minutes his life would change. The pilot offered him a ride and, from that moment forward, his new life began.

He abandoned his dream of starting a machine shop with his father and became an aviation innovator. First, figure out how to afford to learn how to fly. He scrapped together enough money to buy a stake in a helicopter that would become a flight school.

After a stint in the Yukon as a bush pilot, he headed back to Vancouver. Keen to do something more than fly in the back country, one day as he and his wife were driving over the Lions Gate Bridge, they watched sea planes flying passengers to Victoria. “Why don’t you do that with helicopters?” she said, “Nah, that won’t work!” replied Danny.

But the idea wouldn’t go away. A few days later, he was approached by the owner of a helicopter who was trying to unload the aircraft. Danny convinced him to set aside selling the helicopter and said, “I have an idea, but it’s going to need a bigger aircraft.” Thus Helijet was born.

It was a logistical nightmare to make it happen – no landing pad in Vancouver or Victoria. So he convinced the federal government to build a couple and he would manage them. Obstacle one hundred of one hundred thousand cleared. Next: money. No one would finance the deal. So his partners fronted the venture.

The company took flight in November of 1986 and, within months, was on the financial ropes. Then the day came that could have killed the company. They were late on paying the leasing company and a seizure order had been issued.

Danny got word of the order, which couldn’t be enforced until the Sheriff could attach a decal to the aircraft. Danny, radioed the pilot who was enroute from Victoria to Vancouver: “Don’t land until I tell you.” He quickly got a judge to overrule the order.

The aircraft landed and the company survived to see another day. On that day, his partners and board called him in and told, “Either double the fares or shut it down.” Danny considered both options to be the deathnail of the company.

He doubled the prices and expected to see reservations plummet. They didn’t. Instead, they doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and kept growing. Danny later learned that passengers thought the low fares were the sign of an unsafe company. The higher fares represented a professional organization and assured passengers they would be safe.

Next came a move into air ambulance services and charter flights to and from coastal fishing lodges. The company survived and, forty years later, is thriving.

Over the years, Helijet has supported many charitable organizations and in 2021, along with son Owen, launched Helicopters Without Borders to service remote and rural indigenous communities in British Columbia with medical services.

Danny also donated a helicopter to serve as an air ambulance in Ukraine and Helijet is a supporter of Conversations Live.

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