Arides Cabreira arrived in Atlantic Canada with 37 years of design and construction experience behind him — and found he couldn't hire a single local draughtsman when he needed one. So he hired twenty, from the Philippines, Brazil, Vietnam, and Ukraine. This is how 46North Group of Companies got built.
In the summer of 2021, Arides Cabreira registered 46North Group of Companies in Moncton and went to find his first hire. He posted locally. Nothing. He posted internationally. Within days he had twenty résumés — zero from Canada, every one from abroad. That gap, and what he did about it, is the spine of Episode 58 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast.
Cabreira drove from Moncton to Halifax to record with host Daniel Arsenault — a gesture that sets the tone for a two-hour conversation that is less an interview and more a plainly told founder journey. He grew up in southern Brazil, spent his teens doing industrial design at a metal-shelving manufacturer in São Paulo, moved through large-scale architecture at one of Brazil's integrated construction firms, and eventually crossed an ocean twice — first to British Columbia, then to Alberta, then east to New Brunswick — before launching his own firm during one of the tightest labour markets the construction sector had seen in years.
What comes through, episode-long, is the kind of outside-in clarity that only an immigrant can offer: he sees Atlantic Canada's housing market, its building codes, and its workforce gaps with fresh eyes, and he has a specific, unsentimental answer to each.
Know your floor before you jump
Cabreira spent three years at Atlas Structural Systems in Moncton — an Atlantic Canada manufacturer of pre-engineered structural building systems, part of J.D. Irving — selling and designing engineered wood products. He was good at it. He was also accumulating side clients, designing custom homes on evenings and weekends, until he was effectively running two full-time jobs at once.
The decision to leave wasn't impulsive. Before handing in his notice, he ran what he calls a Plan B analysis. What does he have in hand if the business stalls? What can he fall back on if it collapses entirely? He had carpentry tools in the garage. He had construction contacts from the oil sands. He had a wife who was steady and clear-eyed about the numbers. And when he sat down to count the revenue already committed by clients waiting for him, the answer was straightforward: "I have enough job to carry me for six months six months is guaranteed"
Six months of confirmed work before the resignation letter. That's the discipline underneath the leap.
He also left Atlas the right way — transparently, with generous notice, telling his manager exactly what he was doing and why. The manager's response: "I hope you guys support me on that says now sure I understand". Former employers, handled honestly, are a referral network. Burning them is burning future clients.
The anxiety that kills most founder decisions — the what-if spiral — has a specific cure in his telling: "if something goes wrong what can I do takes away the anxiety". Map the downside first. The upside takes care of itself.
Structure the vessel before you fill it
Within the first month of going independent, Cabreira had four custom-home clients and commissions for 48-unit six-storey apartment buildings in Miramichi. The work arrived fast. The structure to hold it needed to arrive faster.
He set up a holding company before taking his first client dollar under the 46North name. Under it sat a design sub-company, a project management sub-company, and a placeholder for a future construction company. The logic was clean: "let's build an umbrella so this umbrella we can create sub companies work underneath". Liability stays in the operating subs. Tax brackets improve. If one line of business goes quiet, the others carry on. The family home isn't in the same legal bucket as the business risk.
It costs something to do this at the start — a lawyer, an accountant, a few months of paperwork — but the cost of doing it later, once assets and clients and employees are tangled together, is higher. Cabreira had seen enough oil-sands operations and Brazilian construction firms to know that structure is what lets you scale without losing sleep.
When local hiring fails, fish globally
The labour problem was acute. Atlantic Canada's construction sector was running a documented shortage of skilled tradespeople and designers, and Moncton in 2021-22 was in the middle of a housing-market surge that made the gap worse. Cabreira posted a drafting role locally. Zero replies. He posted internationally: "I got like about 20 resumes nobody in Canada oh everybody outside Canada".
He hired Marjorie from the Philippines — her background included US Air Force projects and work in the UAE. He hired Andresa from Brazil. He brought on Janie from Vietnam, who held a French master's degree and had designed hospitals. He added a civil engineer whose portfolio included the tallest building in South America, and a Ukrainian mechanical engineer whose prior work included the Chernobyl new containment structure. By the time he sat down with Daniel Arsenault, 46North had eleven people, spread across four countries.
None of that happened by luck. Cabreira's hiring criterion was one thing above credentials: "they have to have a respect for the team they have to be a team player nobody's better than anybody". A global team distributed across time zones can only work if the culture is flat and the communication is genuine. Technical skills travel; a bad attitude at 2 a.m. on a deadline destroys the relay.
The relay is literal. 46North runs a 24-hour design pipeline for urgent jobs by handing files from the New Brunswick team — who work days — to the Philippines team, who take over when Moncton goes to sleep. "we work in eight hours each day we're working 24 hours on the same project". A three-day turnaround on a manufacturing package that would take a single-timezone team a week.
Know the code ceiling — and plan to raise it
Growth in architectural design in Canada runs into a hard regulatory wall. The National Building Code divides buildings into Part 9 (houses and small buildings) and Part 3 (everything bigger). The line sits at 600 square metres of building footprint and three storeys: "the footprint of the building cannot be more than 600 square meters and cannot be more than three stars". Cross either threshold and you need a licensed architect's stamp — which a building designer without that credential cannot provide.
For a firm doing custom homes and small multi-res, Part 9 is wide enough. But Cabreira was already being approached by Ontario developers wanting ten multi-residential buildings a year across Atlantic Canada, and the modular home work for a Texas client — a production line cranking out five houses a week — was pointing toward buildings that would eventually need Part 3 sign-off. His stated plan at the time of recording was to convert 46North to a licensed architecture firm by partnering with a licensed architect — a 2023-24 goal that would let the firm take any project regardless of scale.
Understanding the limit isn't a pessimistic exercise. It's a planning tool. If you know where the ceiling is, you can design a path through it.
Design the manufactured home before the line runs
The Texas modular work taught Cabreira something that custom-home designers rarely confront: a production-line home is not a faster custom home. It is a different design problem entirely. Every decision that a custom-home team can adjust on site — framing details, plug locations, roof assembly sequence — has to be resolved on paper before the factory starts, because the factory can't stop to figure it out.
Hinge-truss roofs, pre-shingled for transport. Electrical rough-in mapped to the production sequence. Assembly instructions that a factory worker can follow without a designer present. "everything has to be taught before it goes to the production it's not like a custom home". The discipline is closer to manufacturing engineering than architecture, and it requires the kind of obsessive pre-thinking that most residential designers have never needed.
The time-zone relay paid off here. An urgent revision package for the Texas client went from NB to Philippines and back in three days because the two teams could work in parallel on what would otherwise be a sequential process.
The part that kills firms in year three
Cabreira is candid about where small design firms fail. It is almost never the quality of their work. It is almost never their client list. "it's not because they don't have the service they don't have the client it's the demonstration is the biggest factor for the company to fail". Invoicing. Proposals. Payroll. The back-office functions that a skilled designer ignores because they are not what got them into the trade.
A firm that has great work and great clients but cannot issue an invoice on time, cannot track its receivables, cannot make payroll without a panic — that firm dies in year three. He had seen it happen to peers. He built the administrative scaffolding in from the start.
46North Group of Companies
If you are building in New Brunswick — a custom home, a small multi-res, a modular project — 46North Group of Companies (formerly Cabreira Design Co., now operating the consumer-facing brand 46North Design Studio) offers architectural design, drafting, 3D rendering, and project management from Moncton. The firm is structured as a holding company with separate design and project management subsidiaries, and it runs a globally distributed team of eleven designers. Their work includes custom residential, multi-unit residential, and manufactured-home packages for US production clients.
Also featured in the episode: Atlas Structural Systems, the Atlantic Canada manufacturer of pre-engineered roof systems, floor systems, and engineered components — a J.D. Irving business — where Cabreira worked before launching 46North.
Guest: Arides Cabreira, CEO, 46North Group of Companies Inc. Featured on Episode 58 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Atlas Structural Systems. Building Code Part 9 scope confirmed via multiple sources including the City of North Vancouver, Thomas Drafting, and the Building Code Forum.