Finding The Light

Stuart McIntosh remembers vividly the last thing he ever saw. Lying on a hospital bed, there was a team of surgeons hovering over him, frantically rushing to stop the blackness that was suddenly invading his sight. The blackness came from the periphery and seeped inwards. Pain pounded in the back of his head. He could see only a pinpoint of light, shrinking by the second.

And then there was only darkness.

“At that moment,” recalls Stuart, “you have no idea what’s going on.” The 52-year-old underwent a routine operation 14 years ago to remove cataracts that were plaguing his vision. But after a massive hemorrhage during surgery that flooded his retinas with blood, damaging them beyond repair – he walked out of the hospital weeks later, blind. And he was awake through the surgery to see it happen.

The years that followed he calls the darkest time of his life. “That event changed my life – and my family’s life – forever,” he says. It meant the end of a successful sales career in a Fortune 500 company, a failed marriage that left two young daughters in his care, and for a while, the loss of a lifelong passion for owning and racing horses. “You have this darkness you can’t get used to,” Stuart shakes his head. “You just want to tear it away. I was 38 years old.”

Now the president of a rapidly growing employment service provider called Insight Enterprises, the owner of 10 racehorses and a proud grandfather of two, Stuart has moved far beyond his days of darkness, even if he will never regain his sight.

“I was born in a barn,” Stuart jokes, remembering when his involvement with the racehorse industry began. His father Bill kept livestock on a farm in Wheatley, Ont., and had his hand in horse racing for years. “He was passionate about it,” Stuart recalls. “He owned race horses. He always had three or four horses on the go.”

When Stuart had time off of school, he and his family would follow his uncle, Jack McIntosh (who was involved in harness racing) wherever he was stabled. “We always went to where he was racing,” says Stuart. “That was our summer vacation.” He remembers those vacations leading him everywhere from London, Ontario to Montreal, Quebec to New York.

So it was natural that the youth would follow in his family’s footsteps. In his late teens and early 20’s, he worked for his cousin Doug McIntosh, a successful trainer in Wheatley. When he landed a sales manager job with Ralston Purina in 1980, he worked part-time at another stable with his father and his brother Scott McIntosh, where they raced locally, in Windsor, Dresden, London and Leamington.

He thought he’d landed on top of the world. He married and had two children, Abbey and Andrea. He enjoyed his work, and he still kept tabs on his family’s horse business when he could. “I did a lot of travelling across North America and even got to go to Hawaii and the Bahamas,” he says. “When I was around I’d have a lot of fun helping with the horses on race night. I owned some and I was involved as much as I could be.”

It all came to an agonizing halt when he lost his sight in 1994.

After two years on disability leave where he re-educated himself through the Canadian National Institue for the Blind to walk with a cane, read Braille and use a computer, he lost his sales job. “They just ­couldn’t see what I could do,” says Stuart. “There was a lot of downsizing at that time and ignorance about what I was capable of.” He tried using his contacts at other companies to land a job, but he heard the same refrain. “It was always the same sort of excuse – ‘I don’t know where we’re going to fit you in.’”

While Stuart was struggling to find employment, his situation at home was deteriorating. His marriage failed, thanks to the added pressure of his disability, and he worried about his children, who stayed at home with him. “It was very difficult for them because one minute they had a dad playing ball with them and the next they had a dad with a disability,” he says. And without a job to pay the bills, he wasn’t sure where he’d find the means to raise them. “That was about the darkest moment. I was really wondering how I was going to make a living.”

It took relentless support from friends and family, like his brother Scott, to keep him from falling apart. “I spent part of my day with him, every day, getting him out of the house,” Scott remembers. “I took him to the farm when I was training.” But the trainer, who still works with their cousin Doug, stresses that his efforts were only part of the solution. Many people fought to keep Stuart involved with the world.

With their support, Stuart landed a motivational speaking gig with Essex Optimist Club, which led to other speeches at service clubs, schools and corporations. “The first ones were really awkward, really difficult, really emotional,” he says. “But that became my living,” he adds, “along with playing guitar, singing and playing in bands.”

Some years later, a woman seeking help finding employment for her disabled son approached Stuart with her dilemma. It took him just a day to find a job for the young man at a warehouse. After struggling through his own job search, Stuart saw in this single request a world of opportunity – and in 2000, Insight Enterprises was born.

“I started it at my kitchen table, with myself as the sole employee,” he says. His goal was to help the disabled find gainful employment, and in 2001 he hired his first employee, Laurie Garrod, to scope out job opportunities and help clients establish new career plans.

Now working with the government, private insurance, the Ontario Disability Support Program and the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, Stuart has between 400 and 500 open files, he says, and offices in Essex, Windsor and Chatham. He hired more staff, including his new wife Paula, who he married in 2005. He’s even added job training and development to the services he offers.

Two of his clients, Debbie and Rosanne, spend three hours a day sitting at an ergonomically adapted computer desk, typing messages in Microsoft Outlook as they learn computer basics. Debbie used to work in a factory, making parts for Chrysler minivans. Rosanne comes from an assembly line that produces plastic parts for General Motors and Honda. Both women live near Essex, both have four children, both are in their early 50s and both suffered repetitive strain injuries. In both cases, they lost their jobs.

For these two, school is not an option – their injuries mean they can’t wear heavy backpacks or carry books, and they need to work at their own pace, sometimes taking frequent breaks. So they opted for retraining through the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and were referred to Insight Enterprises. “Stu understands more than someone who doesn’t have a disability,” says Rosanne.

And it’s cases like theirs that keep Stuart going. He maintains that even after eight years in business, he still learns from his clients. “They might have a greater disability than what I have,” he says. “They might have constant pain. That just motivates me further.”

But it was Laurie, his first employee, who gave him the motivation to return to harness racing. She and her husband Les started breeding and raising standardbreds in 2000 as LLCM Stables just outside of Essex, and had been building their business for a year. One day she told Stu she had to get home because one of their horses was racing. “I didn’t know that he had been involved in racing, and he didn’t know that I was doing it,” she laughs.

Stuart had all but forgotten his roots in the industry. “I wasn’t involved but I talked to other people about it,” he says. “I missed it, but it seemed like an impossibility to get involved with it at that point.” So when Laurie and Les bought Maharajah Hanover in 2003, Stuart couldn’t turn down their offer to co-own the horse who went on to make over $100,000.

“He just needed someone to give him that little push to get him back into it,” says Laurie. “Now he and my husband are best friends and all they talk about is horses. For hours.” Five years later, they’ve co-owned about 15 horses, including R Devilish Dude — who’s set a track record at Western Fair Raceway and made close to $300,000.

Stuart’s involvement increased yet again when Scott found out about another horse a year ago, a yearling his cousin Doug discovered. Scott called Stuart, who was immediately interested, and the brothers bought the colt. “He looked like a throwback -- like an old football player with a leather helmet on,” laughs Scott. “Later on, we found out my cousin had named him in honour of my father.”

Like his namesake, who passed away in 1996, Uncle Bill Mac has been doing well at the races in Toronto as a two-year-old, where Stuart expects him to come back as a good three-year-old in the spring. “This colt has a big, big heart, which my dad had,” he smiles. “My dad loved life and lived it to the fullest and I’m trying to take his lead.”