For close to 20 years, the Grand River Rafting Company, co-founded by father-and-son team Chad and Garth Pottruff, has become one of the most popular and respected outdoor adventure companies in the world.
Garth Pottruff explained how the company started in Paris, Ontario, and developed a unique premise.
“It was my son’s idea…. he was 22-years-old at the time, and I thought he was absolutely crazy, as there were companies already here doing it. At first, I really didn’t want to do this…but then as I considered it…We knew we had to do something different. I’m actually a professional forester, but I also teach the First Nations indigenous history…so that was one of the things that we wanted to do…to teach it …to become a floating classroom,” he said. “We started with four family rafts…and now 20 years later, we have eight operations going with 65 people on staff while doing up to 1,500 people a day and 50,000 people a year. We are the largest company of its kind in Ontario and ranked in the top 10% out of all the outdoor adventures in the world now,” he said.
Despite some challenges early on, the company made its mark by thinking outside the box.
“Many of the other companies out there in this industry were keeping their success a secret, and it was different stepping into the back of that ballpark. And what has made us different is we’ve taken the exact opposite approach. We’ve used our success to help other people be successful. Over the years, we’ve started up 16 other companies [and] what we do is we mention them free for two years on our website…as you know, you can have the best idea out there, but if you can’t get found, you’re invisible. And our website averages about half a million hits a year. So, when we are putting up another company on our site, we are helping them get found. We’ve gotten good at getting found,” he said.
One of the biggest highlights happened around nine years ago when someone from an online publication decided to try out turbo tubing.
“One of the most interesting things that happened to us was in 2017, when a blogger from Narcity in Toronto showed up and tried turbo tubing. He didn’t tell us who he was…[and] experienced turbo tubing down the Grand…which was the new buzzword out there at the time. He would go on to write a short article about his experience, and in five weeks that post generated 232,000 shares on Facebook [and] we went viral and the phone was ringing nonstop,” he noted. “People talk about experiential tourism, but I think what’s really given us our success is that we are dedicated to building relationships, whether it is with our staff, our customers, or our business partners. So here we are now, stepping into a situation where we could have easily herded people like cattle to maximize our bottom line, but that’s just not the way we do business. We went out and bought more turbo tubes, hired more staff, and we pulled off that summer by the hair of our chinny chin, chin…to give the best experience for our customers!”
However, the Grand River Rafting Company offers an array of options for people to choose from.
“One of the marks that fascinates me is that most outfitters offer a 10-to-15-kilometer trip. That is what we call a day trip. And we tried a new market. We went after a five-kilometer trip, and we designed it for people with grandparents or little kids…but when we were doing this, we saw that it’s where people without grandparents or kids showed. The first time we opened this trip, we thought we might see about 2000 people. We saw 10,000 people…. we’ve actually opened up another new five-kilometer trip in 2025. So, we’re offering people two of them,” he explained. “Then we have our average day paddle trips, which are ten kilometers to 15 kilometers in length. We want people to leave their watches behind and forget about time. So, how it works is they park at the end, we suit them up, we do a full map talk, and then they hop on a bus or van. They shuttle upstream and get their boat. So, the idea is, take as long as you like. When you’re done with your trip, your car’s there and you’re home free.”
Pottruff also explained the educational aspect of the packages as well.
“We discovered that when we got the rafts, they would normally hold eight to 12 people, so you’re stuck with them for three hours. And what’s neat is, I wanted to use this time for everyone to experience together. So, if you’re going down the river, if you see a blue heron, everybody sees a blue heron in the raft. If you see an eagle, they all see the eagle too. And we quickly discovered this was an amazing teaching tool, which really also tied into our love of relationship building. To be honest, after the three hours together, you are bound to have built a relationship with the other people in the raft,” he said. “We also do hiking classrooms too. We wrote the guidelines for the school boards of Ontario on paddle rafting, and even though we have these kinds of credentials, principals still will not let their kids go rafting. So, we’ve also designed a hiking classroom…where we hike for about a kilometer, teaching edible medicinal plants. We hike into a 13th-century Attawandaron village site, where the students get to dump all the drinks out and fill their containers with ice-cold spring water from the original village springs. And then we do a competition. We give them a bag of cooking rice, a bag of wild edibles, a frying pan with all the utensils, and a two-pound trout. And on the word go, each team of six has to build a fire, gut the trout, stuff it with rice and edibles, and do a master chef cook-off. It’s amazing to watch, because, as you know, kids today have become accustomed to so many modern conveniences, so when you get them out there and put them in this environment, they’re learning together, but they’re also having fun, and that’s what we want to do while helping them create memories.”
The company also offers other programs, including the To Roll on the Grand, which educates people about the rich and important indigenous history in the region.
“It’s called To Roll on the Grand 10-day paddle with the Haudenosaunee down the Grand River. Everybody meets in Cambridge, and they paddle down to Lake Erie, the Haudenosaunee supply the campsites, all the food, and all these indigenous experiences for 10 days. And when you’re done, at the end, the idea is to repolish that chain of friendship, and it’s amazing, as this is our 10th year of running it. We normally take about 75 to 100 people. It sells out in two weeks, and it’s a one-of-a-kind experience in Canada,” he said.
Grand River Rafting is also about helping other companies, as reflected with SNIPE, which stands for Six Nations Investigating Paranormal Encounters, a business that has successfully grown over the last 14 years.
“Todd [Thomas] and Artie [K. Martin] wanted to start it up, and knew about my work in tourism, so I met with them and they told me their idea, which I thought was amazing. But I told them that they need to understand that if you do something now and it goes wrong in tourism, it stays wrong. So, what we did for SNIPE was we gave them all the rafts, the trailers, all the equipment, free for two years, and we mentored them too…because their idea was….one of a kind in Canada,” he noted. “After continuing with the company…Todd came to me with a box around Christmas time, and he pulled out this carving of a Hopi wearing an owl set. He told me that wearing the owl head among the Hopi represents wisdom. And then he held it up to me and said, ‘You’re the man of wisdom in our lives, and this is us, thank you for helping us.’ That moment brought tears to my eyes. I was not expecting that.”
Nevertheless, one of the biggest goals is to continually offer new experiences to people, which includes developing a new app.
“We invested in an app which our customers download…as they paddle down the river, the app alerts them to different areas where they can go swimming or notifies them of wildlife like a Blue Huron in a certain area. It educates you and teaches you while you’re paddling down the river. And then at the end, it opens up to this map, which gives you different places in the area…If, for example, you click on the restaurants…it will show you, from where you’re standing, every restaurant around you and how far they are,” he noted. “This is what tourism is! When people are finished with the trip with us, they can go and discover other places…it was a huge $10,000 investment, but my goal is to take this template and again, share it in the tourism world, because this just creates an exceptional experience of what to do next.”
