Shannon Warren went bankrupt in year three of his first company. His father opened a new one under his own name so Shannon could keep working. That pivot — staying strictly in labour staffing — has held for twenty years. The result: zero debt, record revenue in 2022, and a contract at the Halifax Shipyard paying wages that finally rival Alberta. This is the operational manual behind it.
Shannan Warren grew up in Rexton, New Brunswick watching his uncles run a construction business. At 20, he took a one-way ticket to Vancouver, framed houses for $8 an hour, moved to concrete formwork, and eventually launched Warren's Contracting in Calgary. It grew fast for two years. Then he bid a complex hospital formwork job, got in over his head on capital, and went bankrupt in year three.
His father's response was to open Matrix Labour Leasing under his own name so Shannon could keep the crews running through bankruptcy protection. That structural constraint became a strategy. Instead of returning to self-performed contract work, Shannon stayed in the one lane he could control: supplying and paying labour. He has held that discipline ever since.
Twenty years later, Matrix HR — the company rebranded from Matrix Labour Leasing Ltd. — is a Calgary-based national staffing and payrolling firm serving construction, oil and gas, manufacturing, shipbuilding, aerospace, and defence. It carries no debt, holds ISNetworld, ComplyWorks, and Avita accreditations, and works with some of Canada's largest general contractors and industrial owners. The 71-minute conversation with host Daniel Arsenault is equal parts founder biography and operations tutorial — the mechanics behind labour leasing, payrolling, wage parity, and what a staffing firm actually does when a client's cheque doesn't arrive.
The bankruptcy lesson: stay in your lane
The failure of Warren's Contracting was not a skills problem. Shannon knew the trade. The problem was capital: he took on a formwork scope that needed more cash than his balance sheet could hold. The lesson he took from it was precise. "I just wanted to make sure I stuck with what I knew and obviously didn't want to fail again."
In staffing, you don't carry the contract risk of the work itself. You supply workers, bill by the hour, and collect from the client. Shannon has never moved back into self-performed work, never tried to vertically integrate into general contracting. That discipline — knowing exactly where the risk boundary sits and refusing to cross it — is what allowed him to build without taking on debt.
When the 2014 Alberta bust hit, competitors cut corners on overtime and CRA compliance to stay competitive. Shannon paid his workers fully and kept his local suppliers whole: "What I was able to do is make sure that all the employees and also my local suppliers were paid — so therefore keep my name intact." He absorbed the margin hit. When the market turned, the relationships were intact.
How the service actually works
Matrix operates three tiers. Hourly labour leasing puts Matrix workers on a client's job site; Matrix is the employer of record for payroll, WCB, and compliance. Hourly-to-permanent lets a client trial a worker before making a direct hire. Permanent placement is a straight recruitment fee.
The payrolling tier is the most operationally complex and the most valuable to a smaller client. When Matrix takes on the Employer of Record role, it absorbs the full stack of employer liability. "We're becoming the employer of record when we're doing that — any WCB, wrongful dismissals, any claims, we're taking them right off their hands." For a GC managing a large project, that transfer of liability is material: one WCB claim or a wrongful dismissal dispute can consume management bandwidth for months.
The cash-flow piece matters equally. Large industrial projects run on 30-to-60-to-75-day payment cycles, and smaller firms often can't bridge that gap to make weekly payroll. Matrix can. "We're able to offer that 30 to 60 to maximum 75 day payment terms which is really helpful for our clients." A client who can bill on a 60-day cycle but can't self-fund payroll in the interim can take on the work precisely because Matrix absorbs the float.
The back-office that makes this possible is People2.0, the global Employer of Record platform Matrix partnered with in 2019. The partnership offloaded cross-province compliance, WCB registration in multiple jurisdictions, and US expansion without building internal infrastructure. The growth that followed was unambiguous: "Since we've formed that relationship with People 2.0 we grew almost 500 percent organically back since 2019."
Wage parity: the rule that holds job sites together
On a shared job site — GC's direct hires working alongside Matrix-supplied workers — pay rates have to match. Shannon is categorical about it. "Make no mistake they're talking about their wages before coffee break." A worker who discovers the contractor beside them earns more will have questions; a site where those questions fester loses productivity. Matrix pays the same rate as the client's direct hires. Non-negotiable.
That parity principle has a direct bearing on the Atlantic Canada story. For years, the wage differential between the east coast and Alberta kept Red Seal welders and metal fabricators on a one-way westbound highway. A Halifax rate at $35/hour against an Alberta oil-sands rate at $50 wasn't close. That gap is now closing. Matrix holds a contract at the Irving Shipbuilding Halifax Shipyard at $43 an hour — against Alberta industrial rates of $45 to $50. "For so many years the wage differential is insane going from Alberta to the east coast — and now we're starting to see that gap close very quickly."
For a certified welder or metal fabricator who left home for Fort McMurray, that arithmetic is now worth running again. The Halifax Shipyard is a federally funded, decades-long programme — the National Shipbuilding Strategy. Work there is stable in a way that oil patch cycles are not.
The shortage nobody is solving fast enough
Matrix filled 75 to 80 percent of client requirements last year despite a severe labour shortage. The miss rate — one in five or one in four positions unfilled — is the operating reality the industry is managing against.
Shannon diagnoses three compounding factors driving it: "You got less population coming in, less immigration, Baby Boomers retiring — take that combination of three, you're gonna have a major problem no matter what." The 2020-era border closures that slowed immigration have worked their way through the pipeline, but the Boomer retirement wave is structural and ongoing. A declining birth rate means the domestic supply side doesn't replenish quickly. Those three forces compound — slower in-migration, smaller cohort entering the trades, large cohort exiting — and no near-term policy tool closes the gap.
Matrix runs a continuous job-fair circuit out of its 14-person Calgary office alongside LinkedIn and Indeed campaigns. Its candidate database runs to 40,000 workers; its social following reaches 60,000. The recruitment function is industrialized — it has to be.
Compliance accreditation adds another layer. Maintaining current status across ISNetworld, ComplyWorks, and Avita requires weekly and monthly internal processing. "We gotta process information every week every month internally making sure that we're compliant — having all these accreditations speak to our credibility." For a major industrial owner, that accreditation stack is a qualification threshold that most smaller competitors can't clear. The overhead is real; so is the barrier it creates.
The equity question — and what it costs to carry a company
In 2020, during COVID, a large client failed to pay a $1.6 million receivable. Matrix survived. The people who made survival possible were VP Mike Lago and business development lead Claudia Navarro. Shannon's answer to that: "I'm going to make them both small owners of Matrix — without them I wouldn't have been able to get here."
The ownership offer is partly gratitude and partly alignment. Shannon is now hunting for merger or acquisition targets in the staffing space, looking at what a 2023 deal could do for scale. Before any of that makes sense, the people who built the thing with him should have a stake in what it becomes.
He closes on something quieter: a morning gratitude practice, a tribute to his father — who died during the company's growth years — and his involvement with the Calgary Flames Foundation poker fundraiser and the Kids Cancer Foundation. The company that exists now is built on a structure his father created when Shannon needed a second chance. That fact has not faded with the growth.
The businesses behind the work
Matrix HR is the Calgary-based staffing and workforce-solutions firm at the centre of this episode — recruiting and placing skilled trades and industrial labour for construction, energy, manufacturing, shipbuilding, aerospace, and defence across Canada and the United States. It provides payroll administration, payroll funding, and Employer of Record services.
Pomerleau Inc. — one of Canada's largest general contractors, delivering building, civil, and infrastructure projects coast to coast — is among the clients Shannon references, including a naval base contract at CFB Esquimalt in Victoria.
Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is the Halifax Shipyard operation under Canada's National Shipbuilding Strategy — the federal programme building combatant vessels for the Royal Canadian Navy — where Matrix holds its $43/hour contract.
Guest: Shannon Warren, Founder & CEO, Matrix HR. Episode 47 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Halifax shipbuilding wage rate sourced from the January 2023 Unifor Local 1 collective agreement at Irving Shipbuilding (Halifax Examiner).