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To coin a cliche, W. H. "Bill" Loewen has come the full circle in the past 17 years.
Loewan, a chartered accountant, was the only employee when he launched Comcheq Services in 1968 in a small office in the Northwest Commercial Travellers Association Building at 291 Garry St. in downtown Winnipeg. This spring he arrived back in the same neighborhood with 85 employees when Comcheq moved its head office and Winnipeg branch to the three-storey Freed Building at 298 Garry, directly across the street from the company's birthplace.
Comcheq purchased the Freed Building because it had outgrown its former Winnipeg premises in the Mall Centre. Since his modest debut, Loewen has built a national company that annually prepares more than four million payroll cheques by computer for about 2,000 Canadian employers. In the beginning, there were only a few Winnipeg clients, but today Comcheq has 11 branches, 185 employees and yearly sales of $8.7 million across Canada.
Because of increasing business and the need for more room, Comcheq officials examined a number of purchase and leasing possibilities earlier this year when they were searching for a bigger headquarters. Loewen, who has an interest in historic buildings and is a former director of Heritage Winnipeg, ultimately picked the Freed Building which was erected in 1909 by a mortgage company. It is one of a number of elegant Winnipeg structures that were built at that time to house the financial institutions that helped develop the west.
"I wasn't at all afraid of an older building," says Loewen. "We chose the Freed Building because it is in excellent shape and has a layout that is just what we require. The building also gives us 10,600 square feet, compared with the 6,500 square feet we had at the Mall Centre."
Since Comcheq moved...