In Pictou County, where word travels quickly and good work travels even faster, Allan Dauphinee has built AD Quality Contracting Limited into the kind of business customers call long before they need the job done. Based in New Glasgow, the company now handles new home construction, renovations, kitchens, and custom cabinet work. But Allan’s story started long before the company name, the employees, or its new cabinet shop.
It started many years ago in a workshop.
“My grandfather was a master carpenter and woodworker,” Allan says. “From the time I could barely walk, I was in his workshop, hanging out with him and doing stuff with him.” By the time he was eight or nine, Allan had an old bandsaw his grandfather had given him and was making small painted pieces to sell at the flea market. “It’s been with me a long, long time,” he says. “I guess it probably did all start with my grandfather.”
By 14, Allan was working part-time for a local construction company in the Valley where he grew up. He spent evenings, weekends, summers, Christmas breaks, and March breaks on job sites. After high school, he worked in construction full-time for a couple of years before taking a different path into the printing business. Still, he never really left carpentry behind. “It was always my passion,” he says. “After a while, I realized that was my passion, and that’s what I love doing.”
An Unexpected Twist
The turning point came in a way Allan could never have planned. A little over 11 years ago, while working for a local woodworking and millwork company, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. He went through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Doctors told him he likely had 12 to 18 months to live and might never work again.
Then, slowly, the scans began to change the story. Every three months became every six months, then yearly. “I don’t know what happened,” Allan says. “I ended up beating it. I don’t know how.”
When doctors eventually told him he could likely return to work, Allan found himself asking a question he had not expected to be able to ask: “What do I do now?” The answer became the beginning of his business. After years of working long days for other people, he decided life was too short to go back to the same arrangement. “After what I’ve been through, I’m not gonna back to that,” he remembers thinking. “I’m just gonna try doing my own thing and see how it goes.”
A Helping Hand
That’s when CBDC NOBL entered the picture. Allan connected with Mary Fennel, who helped him develop a business plan and access the Self-Employment Benefits program. The support allowed him to draw income for 40 weeks while he built the business, and Allan used that window carefully. Because word-of-mouth work started coming in almost immediately, he lived on the program support and banked what he earned from jobs. “Without that support, I really don’t think I’d be where I’m at now,” he says. “It really did help me out.”
At first, Allan pictured something modest: small jobs, maybe one employee someday. Instead, reputation did what reputation does when the workmanship is strong. The jobs grew. About three years in, AD Quality Contracting built its first new home as a business. “That was a big milestone,” Allan says. Before the house was finished, three more potential customers had already approached him. “It just kind of took off from there.”
A Flourishing Company
Today, the company has nine employees and often has three or four new homes underway at different stages. It also completes kitchen renovations, bathroom renovations, and other projects across Pictou County. The work ranges from smaller two-bedroom homes on slabs to large custom builds, including a five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 4,000-square-foot home. Allan’s customers span generations too, from first-time homeowners to retirees and even an elderly homeowner rebuilding after a fire.
More recently, CBDC NOBL helped Allan take another major step: purchasing a building and opening the cabinet shop he had long wanted. With AD Quality Contracting completing roughly 10 to 12 kitchens a year, waiting on outside cabinet suppliers had become a bottleneck. So Allan decided to bring that work in-house. “I kind of took the plunge and said, you know what, we’re gonna build our own,” he says.
The cabinet shop is already operational, with about half a dozen kitchens completed since last fall, and Allan is planning equipment upgrades, including a CNC router. The space is useful, but in true growing-business fashion, it is already feeling tight. “It’s a good size shop,” he says, “but it’s still not big enough.”
For Allan, growth has never simply meant getting bigger. It has meant building capacity, training people, keeping jobs moving, and protecting the quality that earned the company its reputation in the first place. Finding workers remains one of his biggest challenges, but he has also seen what can happen when younger employees are given time and opportunity. A couple of workers who once started below the skill level he needed are now capable, trusted members of the team, with one becoming a lead hand.
Several employees are going through apprenticeship training, which is a story Allan enjoys telling. After several unsuccessful attempts to find a Red Seal carpenter to apprentice his workers, he decided to become Red Seal certified himself. “I had more than enough hours of experience to write the exam, but with business being so busy I hadn’t made the time. I’m proud to say I received my certification last spring, and I can now apprentice up to four workers at a time.”
Business Comes Full Circle
That family thread that began long ago in his grandfather’s workshop continues today. Allan and his wife built their own home in Beaverbank in 1999, when they were only 22, doing nearly everything themselves except the electrical. Now their son works for the company, learning on job sites, going through the apprenticeship program, and showing interest in taking over in the future. “He’s definitely interested in taking the business over someday,” Allan says. “For now, he’s on the job site, working alongside all the other guys and learning as much as he can, as quick as he can.”
Allan is realistic about the future. He does not want the company to grow beyond what he can manage well. His goal is to make the cabinet shop more efficient, develop two or three full-time people there, and continue strengthening the construction side. These days, his work is less about swinging the hammer himself and more about making sure materials arrive, subtrades show up, employees have what they need, and jobs keep moving.
The business has also become part of the local community, supporting hockey teams, players, and tournaments. Allan knows that world personally; his son played hockey growing up, and he remembers what it was like to look for sponsors.
What began as a childhood love of woodworking has become a company built on skill, survival, family, and trust. Allan did not set out to create a nine-employee contracting business with a cabinet shop and a full schedule. He simply wanted to work on his own terms, doing work he cared about, after life gave him a second chance.
“I had no anticipation that it was going to grow to the point that it’s grown now,” he says.
But it did grow. One small job, one home, one kitchen, one recommendation at a time.