Bluestreak was founded in May of 2005 as a partnership and later incorporated in 2011. 

Years before that, Tony Bouk, our current President & CEO, was managing one of the largest greenhouse operations in the USA and the business had a problem with flat tires on its fleet of vehicles that operated in and around the facility.  The main problem was flat tires on a fleet of 16 estate size tractors that pulled racks through the facility that were getting flats from stray box staples inside the facility and stray nails from pallets in support areas and outside the greenhouse.

After ruling out a number of ways to address the root causes of stray staples and nails getting on the ground in the first place it was decided the next best option was to somehow pick up the staples, nails and other problem pieces of debris on a routine basis preferably without adding any additional costs to operations. 

It was decided that the best way to do that was to mount an industrial size magnet underneath three of the tractors that routinely operated around the facility on a daily basis. As the tractors performed their normal daily operations of pulling racks of product around they would also passively be sweeping for metal debris.

The magnets were 3”x3” in profile size, looking at the magnet from the end, and they were the width of the tractors and hung between the front and rear wheels of the tractors.  The magnets themselves had wheels on the end to prevent the magnets from hitting the ground as the tractors went up and over inclines that were present in some areas of the facility.

It wasn’t possible to find a solution with the strength needed and with wheels on the ends and so the magnets had to be custom fabricated. 

The magnets worked at cleaning up the debris and preventing flat tires on the tractors and other vehicles such as maintenance golf carts, and pickup trucks operating around the facility.  And that was that.

A number of years later after leaving the greenhouse industry, ready to start onto something new, Tony thought about the magnets once again, and performed a new venture template analysis of the idea with the objective of rating the potential of the possible new business on a scale of 1 to 10.  It turned out that the business only rated a 4 or 5 out of 10. 

“It wasn’t exactly a home run based on the NVT analysis rating.  However, I saw a lot of inferior quality products on the market, with few features and had the personal experience of not being able to find something suitable myself once before.”  – Tony Bouk

At about the same time Tony ran into Brian Weber, who was the nephew of Steve, a long time friend of Tony’s and also the person who had manufactured the magnets for Tony years before for the greenhouse operation.  Brian was looking for a change and was interested in the idea.