My name is Mark Wiebe and I am the founder of The Garage Door Company Ltd. We are a family-owned and operated business serving the greater Calgary region; operating in a wide ranging corridor extending from Airdrie to Okotoks, and from Cochrane to Strathmore.

I grew up on the Canadian prairies in southern Manitoba, and can lay claim to a culturally rich Mennonite heritage. And with 12 older siblings and one younger brother, ours was a loud and boisterous household. My father died of cancer when I was two, and so my strong and independent mother reared her 14-strong clamorous brood by her wits and sheer strength of will!

We were poor folk. And being the second-youngest of this sibling multitude, I learned first hand about Darwin’s principle of survival-of-the-fittest. We survived on charity and prayer. And there were foster homes—with the family broken apart and then finally reunited again. But through it all my boyhood was filled with “Hardy Boy” adventures and “Tom Sawyer” mischief.

As a lad my own peculiar specialization was the disassembly and re-engineering of any and all electromechanical contraptions found about the house—from the kitchen toaster, to the Maytag wringer washer, to our family’s Zenith shortwave radio set. Looking back, I reckon this was a portentous foreshadowing of my destiny in the overhead door service industry!

I moved to Alberta in the mid-1970’s, and completing high school in 1979, began life as a young sailer in the Canadian Forces Maritime Command. I saw a bit more of the wider world and grew into manhood. And several years later, discharged, I enrolled in a small fundamentalist Bible college in southern Saskatchewan. But it seemed that my destiny was neither a soldier nor a preacher! Several years later I moved back to Calgary and began an independent garage door service company. I was following in the footsteps of an older brother who was already in the industry.

In 1992 I met my future wife, Pierrette—to whom I spoke only briefly on the telephone before departing for a month long adventure sailing in the Galapagos Islands and trekking through the Amazon rain forest! And I thought about her a lot during my South American adventure. As it turns out, our first son was born in 1994, followed by three more lads in orderly fashion. And after sending me a nice Catholic girl, the Lord God saw fit to convert me to the Roman Catholic faith.

And now after 25 years serving the greater Calgary community in the overhead door service industry, I look forward to passing the torch on to the next generation. Because we are still a small family business, we are very flexible and responsive to the needs of our customers. We’re grass roots. We always answer our phones and we’re always available when our customers need us the most. And much like a lifeguard or a firefighter or a surgeon, we’re always on call for immediate emergency response.

We consider our humble, everyday job to be our God-given vocation.