A little felt puck holds in its many-layered depths a great big dream.
Local inventor Mark Poruchny, sick of getting hit with a hard orange plastic ball during recreational games of floor hockey, decided to soften the odds a bit and invented the Precision Puck.
He recently auditioned for Dragons' Den when reps came to Prince George last month to check out what the locals had to offer.
This isn't Poruchny's first attempt. He made a pitch to Dragon's Den in 2003 with an earlier model of the puck.
"I failed miserably at that audition," Poruchny said. "Just like almost every other person there."
He took all the advice he was offered during his pitch and used it to further develop his product to be market ready.
This time Poruchny, born and raised in Winnipeg, had all the right stuff at the audition and takes his shot to score a sales and marketing strategy with the Dragons in Toronto on Wednesday, May 16, with the show airing at a later date.
"Everyone in front of me at the audition was in there for five to 10 minutes," Poruchny said. "I was in there for half an hour and when the producer asked me to autograph a puck for her, I knew I had done fairly well. She said I'd hear from them in three to six weeks and I got the call a week later."
It took years to create the perfect indoor hockey puck that could stand up to the pressure of the robust sport and Poruchny is so confident he's got a winner he put a U.S. patent on both the product and the process by which it is made.
He started creating the specialized puck by sewing them together but they couldn't withstand the wear and tear so then he decided gluing them together would work better and it did. It's taken more than 20 years to develop his Precision Puck and the reason he's just coming back to it now is heart breaking.
After battling a brain tumor in one young family member for two years and just coming out on the other side of that in a positive way, Poruchny's beloved wife Leah was struck with a brain aneurism. She ultimately survived four brain aneurisms. Against all odds she lived through three brain surgeries to fix what was damaged and Poruchny spent years by her side teaching her how to eat, walk and talk again. Now Leah is a walking, talking, breathing, laughing testament to what can happen when two people in love refuse to give up.
"My wife needed my focus for years and so I put the business aside," Poruchny said, who has worked at the local pulpmill for almost three decades. "But now it's my time to be a success in business. I finally produced a floor hockey puck that actually shoots, slides and flies like a real ice hockey puck. Our lives have turned around and I'm ready to devote myself to make another run at this."
