Roy Caro is a serial entrepreneur — and proud of it. At 47, he has already lived on three continents and launched a handful of flourishing businesses. He has imported medical equipment from the United States into Venezuela. His chain of hip Montreal cafés anticipated the Starbucks phenomenon. After a stint in the corporate world, he recently reembraced both his entrepreneurial spirit and his family’s heritage of craftsmanship: Caro padre y abuelo were furnituremakers in his native Madrid, Spain.

The new Caro brainchild — conceived along with his business partner, renowned interior designer Scott Yetman — is the Celadon Collection, an elegant furniture boutique on historic Peel Street in downtown Montreal. It’s the first of his ventures that is being run on Mac computers — and it’s his most successful so far. Since opening its doors in May 2005, Celadon has tripled its showroom space, hired three more employees, and strengthened its computing power from two to eight Mac computers.

Elegance Revealed

Roy describes running Celadon with the Mac as “a revelation, crucial to our rapid success and development. The contrasts between running a business on Windows and Mac — the differences in the true utility of the hardware and software — are amazing.”

Bottom-line factors also swayed Roy’s switch to the Mac. For about CAN$17,000 (approximately US$15,000), he recalls, “I was offered a Windows point-of-sale package with a basic PC, a low-end monitor, and some off-the-shelf POS software — that’s it. Well, for that same money I got my first iMac (which includes a beautiful computer and elegant display), a great color printer, and a robust and versatile POS and business management application, Xsilva LightSpeed, customized for my business by the developer himself.