SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
David Giroux is raising his prices. It may not be the most usual marketing approach, to take out business ads boasting your new higher prices, but for Giroux, it's part of finding peace with his own past.

David Giroux, seen here at his Dettah workshop, lives in the shadow of his past and discovering his own self-worth has been one of the most difficult aspects of his personal and business life. The slogans he painted on the inside of his workshop door are there to remind him that he is a business, not a charity. - Walter Strong/NNSL photo

The prices of Giroux's stoves are tied to his own self-worth.

Handcrafted in a small workshop out back of his Dettah residence, each wood-burning stove is almost completely built from recycled steel drums and plates. They are a unique combination of heat stove, smoker, roaster, oven and barbecue.

Hand-painted to a flat-black finish, Giroux's stoves bear the rough-hewn styling of handcrafted steel work created with only the most basic hand tools and welding equipment. An average stove will take Giroux about five days in the workshop to complete, but he has made custom stoves up to 10 feet long, taking more time to fabricate.

"Up until a few months ago, I was giving people a lot of breaks, underselling myself," Giroux said.

Giroux, now in his late 40s, is Deninu K'ue First Nation band member born in Fort Resolution. He is tackling his third commercial undertaking with his wood stove business. Before that, he made a run at commercial fishing and commercial woodcutting.

"I ran them all into the ground," Giroux said. "But I'd like to keep this one."

He ran them into the ground, as Giroux said, by undervaluing his time and not charging a fair price to himself. He said that's he's gone through more than $50,000 in funding from the GNWT and other sources since 1998.

Despite getting multiple businesses off the ground and functioning, he has never been able to make his ventures profitably sustainable.

Giroux is as frank about his own troubled personal past as he is about how that past has shaped his failed business ventures.

He said his experience of sexual abuse at a young age, and as a self-described Akaitcho Hall residential school survivor, created what he described as a spiritual sickness that spilled over into all aspects of his personal and business life.

Giroux has run into trouble with the law a few times and still carries a criminal record that limits employment opportunities for him, he said.

Clean since 1990, Giroux said putting alcohol and drugs behind him was only half his struggle.

"If a person doesn't know how to deal with that sort of stuff in a spiritual sense, it can be very frustrating," Giroux said.

Up until this year, Giroux would sell his stoves for a fraction of the value believed his time was worth.

He would take a stove that may have taken him five days to make, and sell it - delivery across the Alberta and B.C. borders included - for less than 20 per cent of the time he put into it.

"I would take two or $300 and go," Giroux said of a stove he put $1,500 worth of time into.

Giroux said he estimates he did that about 200 times in the past three years. Last spring, he did it for the last time.

"I took a trip in May or June of last year," Giroux said. "I took eight stoves with me. I left here with a dollar, a loaded trailer of stoves and a tank of gas."

After travelling and selling his stoves in the South Slave region and northern Alberta, Giroux returned to Dettah with only an empty gas tank to show for the trouble.

"(After) five days on the road, I didn't make any money."

The turning point for Giroux came after he told that story to an acquaintance.

"A few months ago, a fellow told me I was pretty well practising penance," Giroux said.

That was Giroux's epiphany.

Giroux said he realized then that his lack of self-worth stemming from his troubled youth and young adulthood (both as abused and as an abuser, he acknowledged) has consistently sabotaged his best business efforts.

Looking back after that "a-ha" moment, Giroux sees a similar pattern of self-depreciation his entire life. When he was almost ready to graduate high school, for example, he said he quit because, "I thought I wasn't worthy to graduate."

Since then, he's finished his Grade 12, taken carpentry and renewable resources studies. He said he'd obtained his Class 1 driver's licence. He is clearly a skilled craftsman. He built his own fishing boat, which sits in his front yard.

But the same internal forces - dark forces Giroux said - that held him back as a young man and got him into trouble, have remained a destructive force in his adult life, despite getting clean long ago.

But Giroux believes he's turned a corner and hopes other people can hear his story and learn from his mistakes.

"Maybe there's other people who are in the same rut as me," Giroux said.

"I'm not doing penance anymore," Giroux added. "I've paid my dues."

And so his new advertisements proudly announce his new high pricing.

Giroux has sold about 10 stoves under his new pricing scheme. He still isn't charging the full $300 a day he values his time at, but he's getting closer.

"I'm planning to soon take another road trip to Lesser Slave Lake, Fort McMurray and into Edmonton," Giroux said.

"I need to have a good adversarial spirit," Giroux said of the need to charge what his time is worth.

"I'd like to come back with a decent amount of money."

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