Douglas magazine December/January 2017

entrepreneur Issue

Q+A

with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield

Dec/Jan 2017

STANTEC’s culture shift Nanaimo gets its Groove the Millennial Marketplace Does slow growth mean no growth?

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Contents

Follow us

The award-winning Nanaimo Cruiseship Terminal and Port Authority is a symbol of the new Nanaimo.

Features

28 How Nanaimo Got its Groove

Nanaimo has become a darling of the tech set — now if only its politicians would play nice. BY ANDREW FINDLAY

36 Inside Stantec’s Culture Shift

Douglas explores how this very big corporation keeps its entrepreneurial drive. BY JODY PATERSON

48 The Millennial Marketplace

This influential generation is driving new business thinking. BY ALEX VAN TOL 4 Douglas

42

Special Feature

The 2016 Vancouver Island EcoStar Awards

departments 6 FROM THE EDITOR 9 IN THE KNOW

Update on a film studio for Victoria, better benchmarking and the cannabis biz at street level

15 PEOPLE IN BUSINESS

The who, what and where of the business scene

16 TAKE THREE

Increase your workplace feelgood factor

18 In Conversation

58 LAST PAGE Upcycled fashion

BY ATHENA MCKENZIE

INTEL (Business Intelligence) 53 Entrepreneur

2017’s top trends for entrepreneurs

By Peter ELkins

54 Money

Will you outlive your retirement income? BY STEVE BOKoR

Stewart Butterfield, the man behind Slack BY ATHENA MCKENZIE

56 Growth

24 THE BIG IDEA

BY CLEMENS RETTICH

Creating Fort Common

BY Cinda Chavich

Slow growth or no growth?

We Wecreate create places help placesthat that help communities thrive communities thrive Design in mind Designwith withcommunity community in mind stantec.com stantec.com Victoria: Victoria: (250) (250)388-9161 388-9161| | Sidney: Sidney: (250) (250)656-7966 656-7966 Ogden Master PlanPlan Artistic Concept OgdenPoint Point Master Artistic Concept

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

From the Editor

Enriched Thinking™ for your family, business and future.

A team-based approach for a total wealth strategy that addresses the entirety of your life.

C.P. (Chuck) McNaughton, PFP Senior Wealth Advisor

While nothing truly compares to the furious rumblings of U.S. presidential politics, B.C. does have its own pockets of political vitriol, and the star of the show right now is Nanaimo, whose city council has been making a noise so big it has reached all the way over the Malahat and to the Mainland.

In October, as the Harbour City was having a rock-star moment hosting the annual State of the Island Economic Summit, a bizarre Facebook video emerged of a Nanaimo council meeting that showed a pacing, ranting Coun. Gord Fuller telling Mayor Bill McKay to “bite me.”

Around the same time, in a move that shocked many in the business community, Nanaimo council pulled tourism funding from the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation (NEDC). An apparently blindsided and “perplexed” NEDC CEO John Hankins then went out on a limb and penned an op-ed piece to media. In short order, Hankins’ board fired him.

Amidst this hoopla, our Douglas team arrived in Nanaimo for the Economic Summit, which with 600-plus engaged attendees and top-notch speakers, is always one of the province’s best conferences. My questions to attendees about the antics of city council were largely met with pursed lips, head shakes and nervous laughter. The popular sentiment?

Nanaimo’s politicians were letting down the business community — indeed, the community at large — with their shenanigans.

Amidst this intrigue, writer Andrew Findlay submitted his Douglas feature story about Nanaimo’s entrepreneurial landscape. But with city council and the NEDC in turmoil, our big question was: should we pull the feature or run it? Was Nanaimo really doing so well — or were we totally off base?

We chose to run it, because Nanaimo really is an innovative, entrepreneurial city — not because of its politicians but despite them. It’s just a shame this council can’t get clear on how their behaviour is hurting the city’s brand and economic prospects. When I do an internet search for news about Nanaimo, it doesn’t play well when my research yields headlines like “Fired Nanaimo CEO calls for transparency at city hall” and “Nanaimo city council calls on RCMP to investigate mayor.” (That’s the latest development. The mayor has denied any wrongdoing.)

City council chambers are supposed to be places where elected officials can work within the bounds of civil discourse for the common good of their communities. Regardless of whom is to blame, it’s hard to believe Nanaimo’s common good is at the collective heart of this city council.

Council’s conscious or unconscious emulation of the brash antics of populists like Trump isn’t what this city needs to attract business, investment, tourists or talent.

It’s time this council began to think outside its own toxic box.

I have to wonder what comedian John Oliver would say about Nanaimo’s city council?

Nothing good, I’ll bet.

250.654.3342 charles.mcnaughton@scotiawealth.com

themcnaughtongroup.ca

Scotia Capital Inc. is a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. For more information visit www.scotiawealthmanagement.com

6 Douglas

LOG040-Jul-AD-McNaughton-2x9.indd 1

Oh, Behave, This Isn’t Trump-ville

2016-08-04 12:33 PM

— Kerry Slavens kslavens@pageonepublishing.ca

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www.douglasmagazine.com Volume 11 Number 1

We believe the ultimate measure of our performance is our client's success. It has guided our approach for over 30 years.

Publishers Lise Gyorkos, Georgina Camilleri

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Contributing Photographers Jeffrey Bosdet, Simon DesRochers, Dirk Heydemann, Jo-Ann Loro

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Advertising Inquiries sales@douglasmagazine.com Online www.douglasmagazine.com Facebook DouglasMagazineVictoria Twitter twitter.com/Douglasmagazine Cover Suzanne Bradbury and Jayne Bradbury of Fort Properties in the new alleyway from Broughton Street to Fort Common Photo by Jeffrey Bosdet.

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Printed in Canada, by Transcontinental Printing Ideas and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of Page One Publishing Inc. or its affiliates; no official endorsement should be inferred. The publisher does not assume any responsibility for the contents of any advertisement and any and all representations or warranties made in such advertising are those of the advertiser and not the publisher. No part of this magazine may be reproduced, in all or part, in any form — printed or electronic — without the express written permission of the publisher.

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Juiced for Growth The founders of Jusu believe you have to take your health into your own hands.

Brandon Mullen and his father, Bruce Mullen, started the business just two years ago after experiencing a cancer-related tragedy. The family moved to Victoria from Calgary in 2009, looking to start a new life. But soon after, Bruce’s wife Charlene was diagnosed with breast cancer and passed away a short 10 months later. Then Bruce was diagnosed with prostate cancer. While Charlene’s diagnosis had prompted the family to start eating an organic diet, avoid processed foods and chemicals, and try juicing, Bruce’s time recovering in California introduced him to the juice-bar culture.

“We’re here to make people healthy and to give people products and a brand that they can trust, so they hopefully don’t have

to go through what our family went through,” says Brandon.

Jusu started with three retail stores in Cadboro Bay, Oak Bay and Chinatown. The company then took its product wholesale, and its juices can also be found in grocery stores such as Thrifty Foods and Whole Foods.

And the Mullens don’t want Jusu to just be a cold-pressed juice company. The company has developed a line of hot drinks, as well as Jusu Fuel, their food products, much of which is made from the leftover pulp from their juices.

This November, the company expanded its operations into California in a joint venture with a U.S. partner to form Jusu USA, and into Alberta, with the acquisition of Cru Juice in Calgary.

“We want this to be a respected brand, like Starbucks,” Brandon says.

Douglas 9

Past Efforts

One proposed location for a local studio is the former Thrifty Foods warehouse on Butler Road in Central Saanich.

The film and television boom in Vancouver during the 90s saw productions spill over into Victoria, prompting attempts to set up studios or production centres on Vancouver Island.

1997 action on the set, at last?

The decades-long effort to establish a large film studio in the CRD May finally come to fruition

V

ictoria’s lack of proper film-production infrastructure, such as a sound stage, has long been held up as a barrier to achieving a thriving, sustainable film industry. While there have been many attempts to operate some type of facility in the city, none have succeeded.

“I have a huge file on my desk of the various efforts made over the past 20-plus years,” says Kathleen Gilbert, film commissioner of the Vancouver Island South Film and Media Commission. “And I am aware of three active efforts to build a studio in the CRD right now.”

One on-going project is by Margaret Judge of Pretty Clever Entertainment, who is looking to buy the property at 836 Viewfield Road in Esquimalt and use its 58,645-square-foot building as a permanent sound stage and production studio.

“We’ve put an offer to buy both buildings on the land and we are in the throes of negotiating,” Judge says.

A separate group at Partnered Films wants to purchase the 90,000 square-foot former Thrifty Foods warehouse on Butler Crescent in Central Saanich and convert it into a studio with office space for movie productions to rent out.

“We have brokered a special arrangement to buy the property, and the only thing we are waiting for is the appraisal,” says William Code, CEO and president of Partnered Films.

Bill Lang, chair of the Esquimalt Chamber of Commerce and local economic development champion, was a founding member of the former Victoria Film Council and an active supporter of

earlier efforts to establish a film studio at Work Point in Esquimalt in the late 1990s. He says those early projects faced major barriers to success.

“The big thing at that point in time was getting the business over here from Vancouver, because Vancouver had the tax credit and already had a studio,” Lang says. The other challenges? “Getting skilled workers who were familiar with the movie business and keeping them here. To start a studio, you also needed a series that could be your anchor tenant, then you could build around it.”

Changes have since been made to B.C..’s film tax incentives to be more inclusive. Lang also believes that the efforts of the film commission are attracting a more constant source of work.

For Gilbert, location is key. “It’s the same as with any business — location, location, location,” she says.

“Film crews need easy access... the Thrifty Foods warehouse is probably the best existing warehouse that would be fairly easy to turn into a studio for large productions.”

Judge believes the film industry could have a significant positive impact on the Island economy, citing the industry’s $2 billion in spending in B.C. last year.

“We should have a piece of that over here, it’s just that no one has set in to build the necessary infrastructure.”

fully reclining, luxury seats

10 Douglas

business standpoint and as a way to get people in the doors,” says Capitol 6 owner Andrew Golin. “People love the refreshed look and are responding really well to the reserved seating, which allows them to buy their ticket at home and not have to worry about getting in line to get their seats.

Nearby Cineplex Odeon Victoria,

1998 Deertrail Media Village was developer Albert Yuen’s plan for a big movie production centre on the Sooke River.

His ambitious plan included a production studio, postproduction centre and hotel, and drew comparisons to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in California. Lack of investment thwarted the development and it never got past initial construction. The 160-acre site, which includes several kilometres of river frontage, is held between The Land Conservancy and Capital Regional District Parks.

Then there was Pacific Studios whose lofty goal was to have a site with 13 sound stages, the largest of which would cover 210,000 square feet — over five times the size of any other North American facility at that time. The plans also included an amusement park with “never seen before rides and attractions.” The proposed location was in Central Saanich on reserve lands of the Tsawout First Nation.

1999

movie theatres lure customers with luxury Downtown’s Capitol 6 movie theatre reopened in November as a luxury multiplex, boasting a refurbishment, digital projectors and top-of-the-line reclining seats.

“The theatre needed to be reinvented and these seats have proven to be very popular at other theatres, it just made sense from a

West Coast Victoria Film Studio was the short-lived effort

by Ian Ferguson, Frank Somers and publisher David Black to create a studio in the leased Building 1119 at CFB Esquimalt’s Work Point Barracks.

in operation since 1948, will also be upgrading its seating, giving the city’s theatre stock a substantial overhaul.

According to Cineplex, the theatre will replace all its seating with fully reclining luxury seats by early 2017.

Cameron Avery’s Cruz Studios did operate out of Building 1119 at CFB Esquimalt’s Work Point Barracks for a couple of years.

Multiple factors, including lack of serious investment in its infrastructure and challenges with cross-border business following 9/11, have been cited as reasons for its eventual closure.

SOHO

Creates culture of connection This year’s SOHO summit is a sure cure for the loneliness of the smalloffice, home-office business owner.

Small-office, home-office business owners — known as SOHOs — will be in the spotlight at the 2017 SOHO Victoria on Friday, January 27 at the Victoria Conference Centre.

“SOHO Victoria is about helping small- and home-office business owners be successful by empowering them to efficiently manage and grow their business,” says Chris Burdge, founder of SOHO Victoria, now in its second year and expecting up to 400 attendees.

The summit, which Burdge says is produced by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs and business owners, aims to aggregate owners of small businesses of one to 20 employees. The event provides opportunities for attendees to listen to popular speakers such as: Isabelle Mercier-Turcotte, brand and performance strategist at LeapZone; Alex Glassey, CEO of StratPad and author of Customer Dreams; and Marc Stoiber, bestselling author, TEDx “Running a Speaker, brand strategist small business and podcast host. is hard. Running The SOHO summit a business with also features a trade show the intention and networking lounge, to disrupt or along with free one-on-one transform an sessions with industry industry can be experts in everything overwhelming.” from sales and marketing — Chris Burdge, to critical growth and founder of SOHO productivity strategies.

Victoria

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Cheers to That?

Have you always believed the time browsing your local book store or art gallery could be elevated by sipping a craft brew or B.C. wine? In a move that has many local business owners saying, “Finally!” policy changes from the Province will allow all types of B.C. businesses — such as barber shops, salons, spas, cooking schools, art galleries and book stores — to apply for a liquor licence.

Douglas 11

Business in Action The Summit Restaurant at the Villa Eyrie Resort has hired Terry Pichor as its executive chef. Pichor, a two-time Gold Medal Plates recipient, was executive chef at Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property. Villa Eyrie recently underwent a $2-million renovation following its purchase by GAIN, an auto dealer group that this year opened the Vancouver Island Motorsport Circuit.

Victoria Distillers, a pioneer of Canada’s micro-distilling industry, has partnered with a national distribution and marketing agency, Authentic Wine and Spirits Merchants, which sells over 1.3 million cases annually.

Authentic’s portfolio includes an exclusive collection of some of the world’s finest wines and spirits. The move by Victoria Distillers follows an extensive branding this year and the launch of its new distillery and lounge on the Seaport Place waterfront in Sidney.

The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority (GVHA) recently unveiled North America’s first purpose-built, fully electric doubledecker bus. GVHA has worked with CVS Tours and GreenPower Motor Company to launch the bus in Victoria, serving the Ogden Point terminal through the 2017 season. The bus is now going through road trials and will be evaluated for feasibility, with a focus on cost of operations, emissions reduction, noise reduction and charging-station requirements.

Uptown has received the 2015 Maple Leaf Silver Award for developing one of the most innovative social media strategies by a Canadian shopping centre. The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) award recognized Uptown for its #UptownShoefie campaign. Uptown has won 11 national ICSC marketing awards since it opened in 2010.

Victoria’s Oughtred Coffee & Tea is expanding to join the growing coffee culture in Kelowna and the Okanagan, taking advantage of growth in the region’s specialtycoffee industry. The family-owned, B.C.-based company has over 40 years in specialty-coffee roasting and providing coffee, tea and other products to the hospitality sector.

12 Douglas

Better Benchmarking and a Bolder Approach

New Studies Point the Way for Canadian Entrepreneurs

Pump Up the Productivity A recent BDC study called Productivity Matters: Benchmarking Your Company to Up Your Game found only six per cent of Canadian entrepreneurs comprehensively measure their productivity and benchmark themselves against competitors. To help businesses boost productivity and scale up operations, the BDC recently launched a free online benchmarking tool, developed with Statistics Canada.

In just minutes, entrepreneurs can compare themselves for the first time to industry peers in Canada, benchmarking their productivity performance against five key indicators: overall efficiency level, revenue per employee, profit per employee, productivity of labour and productivity of capital.

The BDC study found SMEs that measure their productivity against formal metrics expect faster growth. To download this free tool, visit bdc.ca.

Measuring the productivity of labour

What’s Happened to Canadian SMEs? Canada is far less productive today than 35 years ago, compared to the U.S.

73%

The GDP per hour of Canadian companies is 73% of that of U.S. companies, down significantly from over 90% in the 80s.

47%

Canadian SMEs are only 47% as productive as large Canadian companies, compared to 67% in the U.S.

56%

Canadian businesses invest just 56% of the amount U.S. companies do in information and communications technology (ICT).

Source: Productivity Matters: Benchmarking Your Company to Up Your Game, BDC, 2016

Business Should Go Bolder Canada’s economy is stuck in neutral because nearly 90 per cent of Canadian businesses lack courage, according to new research released recently by Deloitte Canada.

In the report The Future Belongs to the Bold, Deloitte posits that courageous businesses achieve greater revenue growth and more jobs, while fearful firms are twice as likely to experience falling revenues. Almost three-quarters (69 per cent) of courageous businesses saw revenues rise last year, compared to 46 per cent of fearful businesses.

“Courageous businesses are the high-flyers propelling the Canadian economy forward. When they reach

peak performance, we all benefit. But if we truly want to succeed as a nation, we need more business leaders to be bold and test the limits of what they think is possible,” says Frank Vettese, Deloitte managing partner and chief executive whose firm surveyed 1,200 business leaders from across the country.

Deloitte’s research comes at a time when Canadian companies are trying to compete globally while faced with economic uncertainty at home. Canada’s recovery from the Great Recession has been slow and GDP growth remains anemic: 1.3 per cent versus global GDP growth projections of more than twice that.

Take calculated risks Do what’s right

Be provocative and challenge the status quo

Unite to include Start with yuorself

the Elements of courage

Source: deloitte Canada

Bud Incorporated With the Canadian government saying it will introduce marijuana legislation this spring — possibly legalizing recreational use — and the City of Victoria announcing official regulations for the recent influx of medical-cannabis dispensaries, it’s hard to ignore the street-level impact of this budding industry.

Pot Shops

As of September 2016, there were 38 medical cannabisrelated businesses in Victoria, with approximately 35 of those operating as storefront medical cannabis retailers. (In May 2015 there were only 18 medical cannabis-related businesses.

This represents a 111 per cent increase in the number of cannabis-related businesses over that 15-month period.)

Cost of Business

According to a new city bylaw approved on September 22, all storefront cannabis retailers in Victoria must be zoned as medicalcannabis dispensaries and must apply for a business licence. The fee for a Cannabis Business Rezoning Application is $7,500; the business licence fee for a business with cannabis on-site is $5,000; for those with no cannabis on-site it is $500. Under the bylaw, the minimum penalty for operating without a licence is a fine of $1,000 a day for each day the offence continues.

Economic Impact

A 2016 study by Deloitte puts Canada’s recreational marijuana market near $5 billion per year to start (on par with the spirit market). When taking into account the 17 per cent of people who are “likely to consume” if marijuana is legalized, sales alone could jump to $8.7 billion (similar to sales generated by wine).

When ancillaries such as security, transportation, etc. are factored in, the potential economic impact approaches $23 billion annually. These totals do not account for things like taxes, licensing fees, tourism and paraphernalia sales. By comparison, Colorado (a state one-seventh the size of Canada) saw tax and licensing revenue totalling over $52 million in the last fiscal year.

Big Competition

Shoppers Drug Mart recently made headlines when it applied to the federal government for a licence to produce and distribute medical marijuana. In terms of how pot should be sold, Deloitte’s study showed pharmacies topped Canadian’s preference list by a wide margin. However, British Columbians surveyed put both private marijuana retailers or pharmacies in the top spot. The study theorizes that because these private retailers already exist in B.C., much of the province’s population has been “socialized to the concept.”

40%

of the adult population in Canada favours legalization

Market Opportunities?

17% of Canadians might try marijuana if it were legalized 22% of Canadians are existing users

36% of the adult population is opposed to legalization 24% is undecided Source: Deloitte canada

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Douglas 13

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Myth&Fact Foreign Buyers Impact on Victoria Real Estate Market Some Victorians feared a rush of foreign buyers to the local market following the 15 per cent tax on foreign-buyer purchases in Metro Vancouver, but that rush has not materialized. We asked Victoria Real Estate Board President Mike Nugent for his analysis.

So what happened here in Victoria?

We didn’t forecast a buying rush at the Board — even though there will always be demand for properties in a community as beautiful in Victoria!

Victoria is not an equal to Metro Vancouver, particularly to a foreign buyer. We are on an island, are a small community, and although we have amazing amenities and great businesses, we do not offer the same lifestyle offered by a major international city like Vancouver...

So you don’t see the need for such a tax in Greater Victoria?

Our Board has requested that the provincial government not apply the foreign buyers’ tax to transactions in our area at this time. We do not have the same market conditions as we saw in Metro Vancouver. For example, in the past three years, Vancouver’s benchmark home value increased 70.3 M A G A Z I N E’S per cent.

Over the same time frame, the Victoria area benchmark value increased by 28.6 per cent.

Though both areas saw increases in property values, Victoria saw nowhere near the price appreciation that Vancouver has. Last year, approximately two per centTO of buyers were from out of country in Victoria, WATCH very different than the double-digit numbers we see in areas of Metro Vancouver.

M A G A Z I N E’S

TO WATCH

Enter your Business

Douglas magazine’s 8th annual 10 to Watch Awards Some of the Island’s most successful businesses have been 10 to Watch winners.

If your business is three years old or less, visit douglasmagazine.com to enter this year’s competition. Winners are chosen by an independent panel of business experts and will be announced at a spring gala and featured in the April/May 2017 issue of Douglas.

Deadline: December 16.

In 2013, Nicole Smith launched Flytographer, a 10 to Watch winner that connects travellers with local photographers in 190 cities globally.

14 Douglas

Innovation | Design | Business | Style | People

Honoured

Jeffrey bosdet/Douglas Magazine

RevenueWire CEO Bobbi Leach was named the gold-level winner for Female Executive of the Year at the annual Stevie Awards, one of the world’s most prestigious business awards. Leach has been CEO of RevenueWire since 2009. During that time, the company’s top-line revenue has grown by over 400 per cent and its work force has expanded from 15 to more than 80 employees.

Dr. Donovan Waters, Q.C., of the law firm Horne Coupar has received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award granted by the STEP organization, a worldwide professional association for those providing legal advice to families, from drafting a will or advising family businesses to helping international families and protecting vulnerable family members. The award was presented in London, U.K., this fall.

on the Move Mike Corrigan, B.C. Ferries’ outgoing CEO, has announced that when his contract ends in March he will become head of the ferry association Interferry, which represents more than 200 companies in the global ferry industry. He will succeed Interferry’s interim CEO Darrell Bryan, former president and CEO of Victoria Clipper.

Roxanne Brass has expanded her real estate business to include her husband Ron Brass and sister Suzanne Siller, both licensed realtors. Her business is now operating under the Roxanne Brass Real Estate Group at REMAX/Camosun.

Retiring

Ian Piears has been hired as events manager for the Downtown Victoria Business Association. Five years ago, he moved to Victoria from the U.K., where he worked professionally as a dancer. Piears has worked with the Victoria Symphony and also the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria on Urbanite and the TD Paint-In.

Greg Baynton will retire as the CEO of the Vancouver Island Construction Association (VICA) at the end of March.

Baynton has headed up VICA for the past decade and played a key role in launching the Construction Council of Vancouver Island, as well as amalgamating four Island construction associations under one banner. Baynton has spent his entire career in trades, beginning as a wall and ceiling installer. He launched Frenette Plastering and then Coast Building Envelope Contractors.

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16 Douglas

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Douglas 17

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Douglas 19

At its most basic, Slack is a team communication tool (dubbed the “email killer”) that allows instant messaging through different channels to enable the separation of departments and projects, along with highly functional file sharing and a robust search engine. It currently has four million daily active users, and the company, which has seven offices globally — including one of the originals in Vancouver, where Butterfield keeps a condo — has raised over $500 million in investor funds at a purported valuation of $4 billion.

“If you say to somebody, ‘I have a new enterprise chat client,’ nobody is going to be excited by that, but for some reason Stewart is

able to give potentially dull products a character and a voice that brings them to life,” says Andrew Wilkinson of Victoria’s MetaLab, who designed the Slack app.

“If you look at Flickr, it was really just a photo sharing site. Yes, it was innovative, but the copy was wonderful, the colours were rich, the interactions were really satisfying. It’s all these tiny little details that add up to something special. Stewart really understands those details to a level that most people don’t. He can bring a warmth to a product that otherwise wouldn’t be there.”

Wilkinson describes Butterfield as a demanding and challenging client, who pushed

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MetaLab to do some of their best work.

“We ended up doing more revisions on Slack than many products that we’ve worked on — we did 20 different redesigns,” Wilkinson says. “Once we had done all the extra work and revisions, we realized what he was trying to do, and it was pretty exceptional.”

Butterfield spoke to Douglas from Slack’s office in San Francisco.

In the past, you’ve said the Internet is a place for sharing and creating community. Has that view evolved at all?

I don’t remember that, but it sounds like something I would plausibly say. That’s obviously not the sole intention for [the Internet] any more than the sole purpose of written language is to create poetry. So creating poetry is something you can do with language, creating communities is something you can do with the Internet. I think the highest purpose to which the Internet could be put is creating this network where all members can interact with each other, and I think it’s a very profound shift.

To be clear, there’s all kinds of shitty things that happen on the Internet, but there’s also all kinds of shitty things that happen outdoors and inside of buildings.

Putting it to this highest purpose, does this inform your work at all?

Absolutely. I first got online 24 years ago and have been participating in online communities in one form or another for that whole time, some two-plus decades. All of that informs Slack. The positive aspects of online communication have inspired almost all of the design decisions and why we think Slack can be valuable.

Word of mouth was very important to Slack’s initial success. Are there lessons you can share in how a startup can also use that?

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20 Douglas

That’s a tough one because every company is different, and different products have more potential for that kind of spread. It’s often just the nature of the business and how scalable it is. There’s a new ice-cream shop in Yaletown in Vancouver that’s very popular, and the spread is also happening by word of mouth, but it can only serve so many customers a day because it’s an ice-cream shop. That’s not meant to be facetious; it’s just the nature of different businesses is quite different.

We were very successful [through word of mouth], but we also had a lot of advantages.

We had an existing reputation in the industry, contacts with reporters and high-profile investors and all those kind of things. We also had friends who were influential and would tweet about us. That’s not really constructive advice for people who don’t have all of those resources, but the fundamental thing is, if you make something that is genuinely useful, that is a huge assist. It’s not going to spread for very long if it’s not actually useful for people.

Another thing that is general advice is, to the extent that you can, distill the purpose of your business, your product, your service, your app, whatever it is, to the point where someone you tell about it can go on successfully to tell someone else about it — you’re then in a much better position to succeed.

Has that been a challenge for you, explaining to people outside what Slack is?

I think Slack is unique. If I look back over my career, [explaining the product] was a real problem for Flickr. Was it for social photo sharing among people who had digital cameras, like the population of everyone? Or was it for people who identified as photographers? That’s very different in terms of the design we would make, how we would market it and who might be interested in it. We never really resolved that.

Later, with our game Glitch, there was a huge challenge for us to even explain what the hell it was (and I still can’t do it in under three minutes), which really impeded its ability to be spread.

With Slack, I think we’re in a much better position, but we still go back and forth on different angles. We’ll say things like “messaging app for teams” to give the most boring and literal facts about it. And then at the other end of the spectrum, “Slack is where work happens.”

A little bit more metaphorical. Ideally, enough that people triangulate on what it actually is and

figure it out. Like Glitch and like Flickr, there’s nothing else like it. There are products that are similar, and we will have more competitors in time, but for most people who are being introduced to Slack, they don’t have anything to model it after.

What lessons did you bring to Slack from your experiences with Flickr and its sale to Yahoo?

Part of it was just the state of Yahoo at the time. Shortly after we were acquired, Google surpassed Yahoo’s revenue, which really affected us because it cut off avenues for growth, and when a company isn’t growing very quickly, then the motivations of the people inside of the company change. It becomes more of a zero-sum game that people can play against each other instead of trying to propel the company forward and compete in the market. I definitely learned some lessons about situations to avoid and negative dynamics, and try to ensure that those don’t happen here.

Also, I had never worked at a big company before. Even though I had done a lot of consulting work, that’s quite different. If you’re actually inside, you can see how the sausage is made. Obviously, there was a lot of good experience in terms of dealing with managing people and communications on a global stage and business decisions that have a greater fiscal impact. I probably learned more in that first year

at Yahoo than I did in grad school. It wasn’t all a good experience, but it was most definitely a learning experience.

How would you say you’ve evolved as a leader since that time?

Gradually I’ve gotten better. The things I used to find difficult, I still find difficult, but I’m less reluctant. I’ll do them.

What do you find difficult?

Firing people. I find it terrible. I hate it. But you also have to do it sometimes. I do think my approach to that is much better than it used to be, less filled with dread, and it’s easier to make sure it happens. In that same class, there’s having difficult conversations with people, giving negative feedback. Really, not seeing those things as daunting or horrible anymore makes it much easier to actually have a constructive conversation with someone.

You’ve been described as a serial entrepreneur with failures and successes behind you. Do you have advice for pushing beyond failure?

You can say all kinds of stuff. There’s a lot of “Hang in there!” quotations in the industry and all kinds of aphorisms that one can give, and I won’t give those. It’s just that I’m motivated by a dread of failure and a need to be successful in the end. ■ This interview has been edited and condensed.

Douglas 21

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c r e at i n g F o r t From the sleek, modern patio of The Livet restaurant, there’s a perfect view of the elegant facade of Victoria’s historic Royal Theatre. One floor below, young techies and mothers with baby buggies gather at the mustard-yellow tables outside Discovery Coffee, a bustling café where baristas pull espressos from state-of-the-art Modbar taps. Next door, at Farm+Field Butchers, Rebecca Teskey is breaking down a side of local lamb, cutting chops and making sausages for locals who are shopping for dinner.

It’s the latest and most dramatic piece of an urban renewal project that sisters Suzanne and Jayne Bradbury of Fort Properties envisioned for this strip of Blanshard Street several years ago, turning a downtown “dead zone” into a lively cultural corner and food hub. They call it the Fort Common District, a block on the edge of the city core where locals living in nearby Fairfield and James Bay can dine, shop and gather after a workout at the Y, a visit to the library or a night at the symphony.

“The Royal Theatre is a national heritage site and a cultural experience that should have things around it that enrich all it offers,” says Suzanne. “This was a dead corner that held back the rest of the block — now it’s alive.”

24 Douglas

A Delicious Mix As we walk along Blanshard, from the Bradbury family company’s original office space on Broughton to the corner of Fort Street, the sisters excitedly explain how their plans to revitalize the area unfolded over the last several years into buildings reimagined for a select group of carefully curated tenants. It’s a delicious mix of local entrepreneurs, from La Taquisa’s authentic Mexican tacos to the innovative vegetarian fare at Be Love, Fishhook’s exotic take on local seafood and Chorizo & Co.’s Spanish cuisine, all wrapped around a hidden communal patio with bistro tables and twinkly lights.

There’s a real buzz on the block today, but the motley collection of buildings the sisters inherited when they took over the family business was not always this appealing, especially since they each came from careers in health-care-related fields — not typical landlords or developers. Jayne was an epidemiologist and Suzanne, with her Masters in Counselling, worked in mental health and addiction.

“At first we were not really sure where we were going with the business,” says Jayne. “We were having trouble getting excited about commercial real estate, but then we stumbled upon this body of

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas magazine

4

5 6 All photos by simon desrochers unless otherwise specified

Common research linking health and well-being with urban architecture, describing how good building design can almost act like a vaccine by facilitating healthier behaviours. That really connected our passions with this opportunity.”

The sisters now “work interchangeably” running Fort Properties and seem to think interchangeably, too. The decision to develop a food-focused urban renewal project flows from personal priorities, as working mothers who share a love of healthy, sustainable food and good design.

“You could say our choices of tenants have been quite deliberate and self-serving,” admits Jayne, tongue in cheek. “We are the consumer and the landlord — our own market research group.”

“It’s hard to overstate how passionate Jayne and I are about food,” says Suzanne.

People, Planet, Profit But there are other values at work here, too — a “triple bottom line” business strategy that considers “people, planet and profit” in all development and leasing decisions. Whether it’s rain gardens to manage stormwater or energyefficient in-floor heating, form follows function with architectural features that

A previously nondescript part of Victoria’s downtown has become a vibrant food destination thanks to two sisters and real estate developers with a “people, planet, profit” ethos and a desire to create spaces that aren’t just viable — they’re vibrant.

1) The Livet, a charcoal grill, raw bar and rooftop patio, was developed by Graham Meekling of Stage Wine Bar 2) Discovery Coffee hand-selects green beans from farmers around the world and roasts them in-house 3) Rebecca Teskey Suzanne Bradbury of Farm + Field Butchers, a and Jayne Bradbury whole animal butchery specializing in ethically raised meat and poultry 4) The sidewalk patio at Fishhook, which offers a unique take on the tartine 5) Sopes are popular at La Taquisa, which celebrates authentic Mexican fare 6) Chorizo & Co.’s co-owners Jonathan Lee (l) and Tomas Dosil (r) with Melissa Perron, at their Spanish deli, cafe and pantry.

Douglas 25

are both practical and beautiful.

“The Bradburys had a real vision for this block, ‘a downtown for Victorians,’” says Joe Cunliffe of Be Love, the Blanshard Street restaurant serving organic, local, plant-based cuisine. “They are very unique as far as landlords go — they really care about what they’re creating.”

As parents with deep local roots, Jayne and Suzanne took a long-term approach to developing the Fort Common District, first tackling the two buildings they owned at the corner of Fort and Blanshard, then acquiring and repurposing the vacant Vancity building on Broughton to complete the picture.

Suzanne says they started by upgrading the façade of the art deco building that now houses Fishhook and Chorizo & Co., then restored the old Alpine Grocery building at 1019 Blanshard for restaurants Be Love and La Taquisa, creating a new green, award-winning property in the process.

“That’s a small building with a lot packed under the hood,” Jayne says as we peer into Be Love, a bright, contemporary space with an open kitchen and soaring ceilings. The restored brick façade, with high clerestory windows and solar shades over the streetside patios, brought the circa-1900 storefront into the new millennium. The cornice from

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their neighbouring building at 801 Fort Street was replicated to finish the look, and their thoughtful rehabilitation work garnered a special community and restaurant excellence award at the Victoria Commercial Building Awards in 2014.

The former parking lot behind the historic buildings became the Fort Common, a shared courtyard that epitomizes the sisters’ goal of creating community and enhancing the urban core for locals and tourists alike. It’s a beautiful spot to escape the downtown bustle for lunch and is now linked to Broughton Street and the Royal Theatre with a new walkway.

“It gives the area a sense of place and offers a space where people can relax and connect,” says Suzanne. “It’s not exclusive or private — it’s for everyone.”

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Cultivating Core Values While it looks like everything simply fell into place — and in some cases it did — the Bradburys were careful about choosing tenants who shared their core values. As the project progressed, larger chains were vying for the prime downtown space, but they opted for local businesses, sticking to their “people, planet, profit” mantra.

“We’re constantly refining our exploration of what the people part should be,” says Suzanne.

“A space that contributes to community and a place designed to human scale,” adds Jayne, finishing her sister’s thought.

Beauty and wellness are part of that equation, too, says Suzanne, pointing to the stunning steel-and-glass staircase leading from the street to The Livet. There’s an elevator to make the restaurant accessible, but the design encourages patrons to walk.

“We want to create buildings that people take pleasure being around,” says Jayne.

“Beauty outperforms ugly every time,” adds Suzanne.

Creating viable spaces for small business to thrive is also a priority. “Retail follows rooftops,” says Suzanne, and growth in

downtown residential density makes the location a prime spot for their vision.

“We care deeply about our tenants, and we want to build a platform for their success,” she says. “If they are doing well, we are doing well.”

New Life for An Old Neighbourhood Fort Properties’ contribution is part of a welcome wave of urban renewal in the neighbourhood.

The Fort Street corridor, once a busy Antique Row, was hit hard by the 2008 economic downturn and the subsequent drop in tourism, leaving landlords with empty storefronts. But since then there’s been a resurgence of new business along Fort, from tech startups to eclectic eateries, bakeries and boutiques.

Mayor Lisa Helps has called Fort Street “a microcosm of the kind of economic ecosystem we are trying to build in Victoria,” and Fort Properties was at the forefront.

Suzanne and Jayne can now step out of their downtown office and into the thriving food hub they’ve created — whether they’re picking up artisan sausages to grill, a Spanish tortilla for a family potluck party or a takeout burrito for a hungry teenager.

The connection food makes with local community and culture is a fitting metaphor for their vision of the Fort Common District.

“We are part of this community,” says Suzanne.

“We’re parents, and we’re morally invested in bringing Victoria up to its full potential.” ■

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How Nanaimo Got its Groove Once known as a rough-and-ready city, home to loggers and longshoremen, Nanaimo has now become a darling of the tech set thanks to its great climate, proximity to major centres and real estate prices that still seem, well, reasonable.

Now if only its politicians would play nice. by andrew findlay

A

n aging blues hack, battered guitar case in hand, strides through the door of the storied Queens Hotel on Victoria Crescent in downtown Nanaimo. Next door at Square One, an open-concept shared office, tech nerds stare intently at computer screens or socialize with their lattes and cappuccinos in the upstairs lounge with a view of the harbour two blocks away.

You couldn’t find a more a vivid contrast of old and new Nanaimo. On the one hand, there’s a blues bar in a hotel whose foundations were laid in 1892 when Robert Dunsmuir was building his Island coal empire. On the other, there’s a cooperative work space for entrepreneurs in Nanaimo’s emerging tech and entrepreneurial economy that is causing people to see this city of 28 Douglas

roughly 85,000 and its traditional forest and fish economy in a bright new light.

The New Nanaimo On a sunny September day that could sell Nanaimo to anyone, I meet Ron Hartman, president and co-founder of iDUS Controls, at Square One, where his company rents a desk for one of its employees for the easy-to-stomach rate of $250/month. A sticker on one of Square One’s office windows reads “Do Epic Shit.” It’s as good a motto as any for the new Nanaimo.

Hartman and his two partners sell their innovative soil-moisture-monitoring technology to some of the globe’s biggest players in food technology, including Monsanto and Syngenta — and it all started here in Harbour City.

Rather than sitting indoors, Hartman invites

me to putt around the harbour aboard his sailboat, Sunfish, and learn more about his company and why he loves this city.

With its lean business model and distributed workforce, iDUS Controls may be the classic 21st-century enterprise. In 2005 Hartman, a surveyor turned land developer came to Nanaimo to break ground on the Ocean View Terrace subdivision. He was interested in water conservation and wanted to introduce greywater recycling for irrigating Ocean View with a water-saving device called the Conservepump.

But his partners were lukewarm to the idea so he moved on.

Not long after, he met an old schoolmate, selftaught tech wiz Terry St. Hilaire. Then, in 2008, along with a third partner, Lori Barlow, iDUS Controls was born and pivoted into agriculture

Dirk Heydemann/HA Photography

Pictured at the Nanaimo Cruiseship Terminal and Port Authority (l to r): Rachel Simmons; Emily Work; Frederic Robinson, Legal Shield; Karly Parker, Kallos Design; and Emeka Udeagha, Investors Group.

with technology that allows farmers to monitor soil moisture content and adjust irrigation accordingly. Wineries were the early adopters, but the market has since expanded into all forms of agriculture.

“Water conservation is at the core of the technology, but it boils down to farmers wanting to make more money,” Hartman says.

A business opportunity first attracted Hartman to Nanaimo; lifestyle and entrepreneurial spirit made him stay. “Let’s face it,” he says, “you can do tech anywhere. I live in a 100-year-old heritage house blocks away from downtown, and I can ride to work and walk to my sailboat from Square One.” The Shadow of Politics iDUS Controls is just one of the innovative

companies that’s causing people to view Nanaimo as much more than bathtub races and Nanaimo bars; it’s also a place where bright business ideas are born. However, the city’s business successes are too often being overshadowed by news headlines highlighting Harbour City’s monumentally dysfunctional municipal council. While community leaders work hard to put Nanaimo on the business map, Mayor Bill McKay and city councillors swap insults in a reportedly negative environment where accusations of bullying and personal attacks have become the norm.

Observers like Ken Hammer, a former instructor in Vancouver Island University’s business department and now a realtor and management consultant who helped launch Startup Nanaimo, says this all makes the city

look like a bush-league backwater where personal politics trump the efforts to promote business.

In the latest fiasco at city hall, the board of the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation (NEDC) fired its CEO John Hankins after less than a year on the job when he issued an op-ed letter on October 24, criticizing an in-camera decision by city council to pull responsibilities for tourism marketing from the NEDC’s mandate.

The decision was taken despite a $230,000 taxpayer-funded consultant’s report that said NEDC was performing well. Since Hankins’s dismissal, at press time, 10 members of the 17-member NEDC board had quit.

“With such an adversarial and negative environment at city hall, it’s hard to build community in a positive way,” Hammer says.

Douglas 29

Arrowsmith Aerial Photography

“How is firing the CEO of NEDC going to help economic development?”

Mayor Bill McKay has been in the hot seat since swearing the oath to office in 2014. In an interview with Douglas magazine, he admits “theatrics” have overwhelmed city council.

“I’m at my wit’s end. I have no doubt that all this reflects poorly on Nanaimo,” he says.

He’s right. Andrea Rosato-Taylor is sales development manager at Black Press and a member of the organizing committee for Vision 2020, a group focused on gathering stories about the city’s business successes and projecting a more positive image. She says instead of being proud of mayor and council, citizens “are disappointed and embarrassed.”

Donna Hais, general manager of the construction firm R.W. (Bob) Wall Ltd., is a lifelong Nanaimo resident and associate of Rosato-Taylor’s. She also sits on Vision 2020’s organizing committee. Hais and her team are planning to make a presentation to council at an undisclosed time in the new year with a getyour-act-together message.

“We’re going to ask council if they know about what Nanaimo businesses are doing, and if so, what are they doing to help. And if they don’t know these stories, we’ll ask them why don’t they know about them,” Hais says.

Business Beyond Barriers Thankfully, business often succeeds in spite of politics. Hyas Infosec is one of the good-news business stories that Hais and her colleagues at Vision 2020 want to get people talking about.

As it was with iDUS Controls’ Hartman, lifestyle was the dealmaker for veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur Chris Davis when he decided to relocate to his hometown of Nanaimo three years ago to launch his fourth startup, Hyas.

Davis was a teenage hacker who parlayed his skills into a successful career in Internet security, working for big names like Dell in Austin and Damballa in Atlanta, as well as starting and selling three businesses. His last 30 Douglas

With a benchmark price of $389,200 for a singe-family home, Nanaimo bills itself as the affordable alternative to Vancouver. A proposed passenger ferry will only make the city more easily accessible to the mainland.

stop was Ottawa, where he launched two startups, Defence Intelligence and later Morrigan Research, which he sold three years ago to Irvine California-based CrowdStrike.

“My wife and I didn’t want to stay in Ottawa and we looked around and thought about Austin, which I really enjoyed. In the end, we decided on Nanaimo. It’s affordable, close to my family and big enough to have most of the consumer conveniences you could want,” Davis says over the phone a few days after another meeting with venture-capital funders.

In this case, talent follows talent. Founded in 2014, Hyas employs 10 full-time people, two of whom it attracted from Atlanta and another from Chicago, as well as five contractors. In late September, the company, whose customers include A-listers like Bank of America and PayPal, went live with its first commercial security software, aptly named Comox, staying true to Davis’s intention to make Hyas a WestCoast-branded business.

More than a Pretty Face But it takes more than just cheap real estate, pretty parks, oceanfront walkways and other lifestyle perks to build a tech-based economy, says Paris Gaudet, executive director of Innovation Island.

As part of the BC Innovation Council’s network of venture-acceleration program partners, Innovation Island serves a huge area, from the Malahat to the tip of Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, advising companies in the tech space, connecting entrepreneurs with business mentors and helping secure financing to bring ideas and innovation to market. Cloudhead Games, a fast-growing virtual-reality gaming company based in Qualicum Beach, is one of

Innovation Island’s poster children.

Lifestyle is an important factor. To someone from Vancouver, let alone Silicon Valley, realestate prices that might appear to be missing zeros are attractive. So is Nanaimo’s seaside setting, hiking, biking and other amenities. But many communities can lay claim to similar attributes and “you can only play that card so many times,” Gaudet says.

Investors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists will eventually look under the sheets for extras and incentives, see what supports and programs a city can offer, what, if any, tax benefits exist and how well integrated post-secondary training is with the needs of technology entrepreneurs.

According to Gaudet, earning the title of tech hub is dependent on three key factors: talent, access to capital and achieving a critical mass of entrepreneurs that begins to generate a vibrant ecosystem and creates success. It’s still a work in progress in Nanaimo.

“Is Nanaimo a tech hub? Not yet. But there are some exciting things happening,” she says.

“It took 25 years to build a tech ecosystem in Victoria and Vancouver, and many of these larger centres still struggle with talent recruitment.”

Take Vancouver, for example. Recently Cody Green, CEO and founder of the online carloan business Canada Drives, spoke about the struggles of finding talented engineers and other tech staff, despite moving his company from Saskatchewan to Vancouver in 2014 and growing it from a skeletal operation of a half dozen employees to a thriving enterprise of 200.

A Quiet Revolution So though Nanaimo may not yet be vying for the title of Silicon Valley North, it is quietly becoming an entrepreneur-friendly city where unique business ideas are coming to life. On the Canadian Federation of Business’s annual ranking of Canada’s most entrepreneurial communities, Nanaimo leaped from 77th to 39th in 2015, before dropping slightly to 42nd out of 121 cities in 2016. Cities are ranked on scale and growth of business ownership, optimism and growth plans and government policies on taxation and regulation.

A key part of Nanaimo’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is Vancouver Island University, a growing post-secondary institution with 17,000 students, including 2,100 international learners. Startup Nanaimo, a chapter of the nationwide organization Startup Canada, brings in regular guest speakers and provides space for entrepreneurs to share successes and failures.

In conjunction with VIU, Startup Nanaimo hosts an annual Dragons’ Den-style businessplan competition for budding student entrepreneurs like Patrick Whelan and Jessica Reid, who in 2014 turned their passion for tiny-home construction into a winning pitch

that netted them a business coach and a cheque for $2,000. It wasn’t exactly a windfall for a startup, but it was enough of a confidence boost to launch Rewild Homes, which, according to Reid, now manufactures six to eight tiny homes annually for Pacific Northwest and Alberta customers.

Nanaimo’s port is also getting some attention; in 2015, the Nanaimo Port Authority purchased a Liebherr mobile crane for $4 million as part of a $9.3-million series of improvements, including a new barge berth and expanded cargo capacity.

The Diver Lake Innovation and Technology Park, still at the blueprint stage, will be a 70,000-square-foot centre aimed at IT and R&D firms located in the heart of Nanaimo.

And the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation (NEDC) is responsible for launching the small tech hub Square One, which is serving iDUS Controls’ Hartman and his partners well as a low-cost workspace and is also where they met local tech entrepreneur Michael Reid, who now runs the company’s web service.

I had met NEDC’s former CEO John Hankins in late September, during happier times when he was still holding down his $130,000-a-year job as the organization’s CEO. Despite being fired, he says he still believes Nanaimo is the place to be on the West Coast.

“We’re close to Vancouver but affordable; we have a great lifestyle, a deepwater port and a very interesting mix of companies that people don’t know much about,” Hankins says.

During Hankins’s tenure at NEDC, Chris Seals, an Austin, Texas-based economist, was hired to produce a report released in September on Nanaimo’s clean-technology and green-energy sector. Seals admits that before diving into his research, Nanaimo wasn’t on his radar and might as well have been the name of another planet. What he found surprised him.

“Nanaimo is a bit of an undiscovered jewel.

And what makes it different is that there are companies making plays in a variety of cleantechnology fields,” Seals says.

Hankins says he hopes Nanaimo can capitalize on its diverse clean-tech sector now that clean technology is booming worldwide (in 2014, clean tech generated $1.7 billion in revenue in B.C., and according to the United Nations Environmental Programme, in the same year investments in clean energy across the planet topped $270 billion) and Canada has ratified last fall’s Paris Agreement that establishes a long-term goal of keeping global temperature increases at 2˚C. Seals is likely not the only one to be impressed by the array of players in the agriculture, energy and transportation sectors in the Nanaimo region. Along with iDUS, there’s Pacific Coast Wasabi, which grows a finicky crop in computercontrolled greenhouses. Inuktun Services and SEAMOR Marine both manufacture remote-

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Douglas 31

Is your business worth watching?

APPLY NOW FOR DOUGLAS MAGAZINE’S 8th ANNUAL 10 TO WATCH AWARDS! WINNER, 2016:

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The Douglas 10 to Watch Awards shine a big spotlight on the best new businesses (three years old or less) on Vancouver Island. Now in their 8th year, these prestigious awards provide the publicity and positive “rocket fuel” that startups need in those critical early years of enterprise.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BEING A WINNER? • The credibility of winning a well-recognized award • Positive exposure to 120,000+ Douglas readers • A feature in the April/May 10 to Watch issue of Douglas magazine (30,000 copies in circulation) and on douglasmagazine.com • Recognition at an exclusive awards gala in front of an audience of hundreds of the Island’s business movers and shakers • Social media mentions

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32 Douglas

operated vehicles (ROVs), the former focusing on applications such as nuclear-reactor and pipeline inspection, the latter specializing in underwater applications. SRM Projects and Barkley Project Group are experts in run-of-river hydropower development. And for 25 years, Canadian Electric Vehicles has been designing and manufacturing electric vehicles in Errington, north of Nanaimo.

However, Nanaimo is not a household name among venture capitalists and angel investors.

In fact, access to capital is the Achilles heel of many a startup in B.C., though that picture may be brightening. In December 2015, the B.C. government announced a $100-million techfocused venture-capital fund.

Hartman of iDUS Controls calls it tough slogging for entrepreneurs wanting investment capital to grow beyond startup phase. He and his partners still managed to raise an initial $100,000 from friends and family and a second round of $1.2 million from friends and associates.

Hyas’s Davis says he’s lucky enough to be working in a tech space that venture capital favours, especially in an age when cybersecurity is top of mind. In February 2016, his company secured seed financing from Wesley Clover International. Still, he says, if you choose to start up anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or other so-called tech hubs, you’ll pay a “tax.” Venture capitalists like to keep companies they invest in close at hand, where they can meet regularly, socialize at industry mixers and help connect them with potential customers.

Business Has Nanaimo’s Back After battling rush-hour traffic north through shopping-mall sprawl, another one of Nanaimo’s enduring stigmas, I meet Hammer at the Chapters Starbucks before he has to rush off to a realestate showing. Though Nanaimo can feel hectic and at times disjointed, like a mid-sized city experiencing growing pains, the entrepreneurial community is tight knit and brimming with a sense of opportunity.

Hammer will seize any opportunity to trumpet Nanaimo’s entrepreneurs and tech innovators.

But he’s also realistic, well aware of how shenanigans at city hall are doing nothing for the cause.

“In some ways we’re like a teenager, a little gangly, growing into ourselves and looking for our identity. But we mean well,” Hammer says.

And maybe one of the best things Nanaimo has going for it is a business community that is so passionate about pushing through to success, despite the politics.

When it comes to cheerleading entrepreneurs, Hyas’s Davis is also happy to play that role.

“When I meet with Google, Facebook, Amazon and other companies, I’m going to be talking up Nanaimo, even if they can’t pronounce it,” Davis says with a laugh. “I really think Nanaimo has the potential to be so much more than it is.” ■

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Douglas 35

Inside Stantec’s

Chris Gill, environmental services associate, and Mark Crisp, senior associate, in Stantec’s Victoria office. Locally, Stantec has worked on projects such as the Victoria International Airport, the Kinsol Trestle Rehabilitation and the Atrium Building.

36 Douglas

Culture Shift It’s time to book your holiday parties!

Corporate entrepreneurialism May be considered an oxymoron to some, But that doesn’t Sway Stantec from trying to inject that drive into its very big company.

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Entrepreneurial. It’s a word that instantly conjures a lithe, lively state of being where you’re always trying new things, taking smart risks, dancing on the crest of every wave.

But how does a business keep that vibe going once it’s grown into a vast global entity with enough staff to populate a small town? How does a Canadian firm founded in the 1950s manage to stay nimble and entrepreneurial more than 60 years later?

According to Neal Cormack, principal and regional leader for British Columbia, it’s about creating a culture where employees feel free to jump in on projects that may not be in their areas of expertise, and to step up with their ideas for projects or different ways of doing things. Call it entrepreneurialism through intrapreneurialism.

The huge Alberta-based consultancy has 22,000 employees around the world and a long list of specialties that encompass multi-sector planning, engineering, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, environmental sciences, project management and more.

But despite all that bigness, it’s also got a reputation for getting down to the grassroots in the communities where it operates.

With 140 employees in its Victoria and Sidney offices, Stantec is a big company even at the local level. But while Stantec definitely can “draw from the bench” as needed with its diverse level of international expertise, local offices work hard to keep their feet planted in the community, says Victoria associate Justin Ellis.

Keeping Growth Smart Stantec started out in 1954 as a small civil engineering firm founded by Edmonton professional engineer Don Stanley. The first Canadian to graduate with a PhD in environmental engineering, Stanley launched his company two years later with a specialty in sewage and water management. The company grew modestly in staff and consulting

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

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Big Has its Challenges Ian Robertson, CEO of the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, says Stantec’s commitment to public consultation has been a perfect fit with his own “adamant” views on that issue.

The draft master plan has been through 33 open houses and workshops in the last nine months and through numerous revisions as a result.

“The thing Stantec and I both agree on is we want to be consulting broadly on the plan and operating with a high degree of transparency,” says Robertson.

So yes, Stantec is a very big company doing big work. But big has its challenges, both for how a company is perceived in the community and for ensuring staff feel like their views matter. That Stantec staff live in the community where they work makes all the difference, Robertson adds.

38 Douglas

For its design of Comox Valley’s new hospital, Stantec sought to dramatically reduce energy consumption and achieve LEED Gold certification.

Working with the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority, Stantec acted as building and structural engineers for the design and construction of the curved aluminum post and stainless steel wire railing installed along the Ogden Point Breakwater.

Jo-Ann Loro/Douglas Magazine

specialties for several decades, but in the last 18 years it has been on a mission to grow.

The publicly traded company has grown from 2,000 employees in 1998 to 22,000 employees today, mostly through the strategic acquisition of other companies. It’s now considered a world player in global design — from hospitals and medical centres to roadways, wilderness areas, bridges, mines, power stations, urban spaces, airports and a whole lot more. (“It’s easier to say what we don’t do,” jokes Ellis.)

Here on Vancouver Island, you may know Stantec for its work on the master plan for Ogden Point, the railing on the breakwater, or its subsurface studies for the new Johnson Street Bridge.

In fact, Stantec Victoria has led projects of all sizes up and down the Island, from the design of the two new hospitals being built in Courtenay and Campbell River to the analysis of the Keating Business Corridor, a master plan for parks and trails for the Municipality of North Cowichan, the Sooke sewer system, and restoration of the Kinsol Trestle. Victoria International Airport is an ongoing client for projects large and small.

(Small projects keep a company nimble and connected, notes the team.)

The local office is no stranger to controversial projects, having worked with Schnitzer Steel last summer after a barge overturned in the Upper Harbour and dumped 20 scrapped cars into the sea. Stantec’s work on the master plan for the Ogden Point cruise ship area has been a hot topic in James Bay, where feelings run high about how further development and increased traffic will affect the neighbourhood.

“We’re very aware that we’re talking about a major cruise operation next to the second-oldest community in B.C., and we’re trying very hard to communicate with people and make sure they know we’re listening,” says Mark Crisp, the Stantec Victoria senior associate leading that process.

“It’s kind of an overused phrase, but Stantec thinks globally and acts locally,” he says.

“They’ve got that global expertise to draw on, but a local team who lives here. That was definitely a factor for us in our decision about who we wanted to work with on the master plan.”

Stantec environmental services associate Chris Gill notes that when people live where they work, there’s a “vested interest” in doing a good job.

“Stantec really tries to emphasize that we don’t just mobilize from major urban centres,” says Gill. “We pride ourselves on thinking of our Victoria office as a small consultancy.”

Mark Crisp tells of doing work for one local company, then presenting at an open house for another client where the company CEO just happened to be the head of the local citizens’ interest group. Living where you work keeps a big company accountable, he says.

Energy and Entrepreneurialism As for keeping workplace culture entrepreneurial, Stantec strive to encourage employees to find work that matters to them while also benefiting the company, says Tariq Amlani, monitoring and evaluation manager.

Supporting your employees’ passion to be the best they can be isn’t just a corporate warm-

and-fuzzy, Amlani adds — it’s a smart business strategy that keeps a company growing and changing.

“There’s a commitment in the company to try people out in different roles,” he says. “They get exposed to new opportunities. They blossom.

We put people into positions they like doing.

We want them to find what resonates for them, and then put them where that can happen.”

Senior associate Scott MacNeill says Stantec prides itself on breaking down walls between departments and specialties (in the Victoria office alone, there are 15 different business services).

The Goal to be nimble Whether building a health centre in Qatar or doing a washroom upgrade at Victoria’s Government House, a company’s ability to scale itself up or down is crucial to staying entrepreneurial.

“We need to be nimble, and seen as nimble,” adds Ellis, Stantec Victoria’s senior planner in parks, recreation and tourism. “Yes, there are 22,000 of us, but we deliver boutique-style service.”

“There is a sense of entrepreneurship here, a feeling of opportunity,” says MacNeill. “If someone wants to talk to another section — if they’re, say, an architect with an interest in

biomass — they can go ahead. We also work to include our younger staff and interns in meetings even if what’s being talked about isn’t their area of expertise. It’s a chance to learn.”

Forty employees from Stantec’s Victoria and Sidney offices volunteered at the company’s 2016 Community Day on September 19 to paint, assemble furniture, clean and garden at the Pacifica Housing facility on Gorge Road.

simon desrochers

Taking Down the Walls It’s not only metaphorical walls between departments that Stantec aims to vanquish. Real walls are kept to a minimum as well in Stantec’s scenic fourth-floor digs at the corner of Bay and Tyee. The company was one of the first tenants in 2007 when the building opened as part of Dockside Green’s Upper Harbour II project.

The office’s open plan means Victoria’s 86 staffers can’t help but cross paths in the course of an average day, increasing the chances that everyone gets a sense of who’s up to what.

Small booths and tables for four line one side of the office, inviting group conversations. Communal spaces like the coffee area and materials library are wide open, encouraging easy interactions between those on a mission and those just passing by. If cross-pollination is the goal, then finding ways for employees to bump into each other across specialties counts for a lot. (Not to mention a great excuse for taking in floor-to-sky-high-ceiling views of the Gorge Waterway and the harbour industrial scene below.)

At times, the “co-location” of one group of staffers with another is more overt. When the company was working on the design for two new hospitals currently under construction in Campbell River and Courtenay, it deliberately sat the medical design team next to the building design team, so that

Douglas 39

each would gain an appreciation of how to integrate individual design needs into the bigger picture.

Pitch Your Passion Stantec is so confident that its employees hold the key to staying innovative and entrepreneurial that it puts up $2 million a year for employees wanting to pitch projects.

“If you see a new or better way to do it, you can apply to the leadership teams,” says Jennie Christensen, an environmental services principal in Stantec’s Sidney office and threetime recipient of its Greenlight research and development fund.

Christensen applied for her first grant to test her theory that lasers could be used to analyze grizzly-bear hair for the presence of toxins.

Stantec leaders agreed, seeing such leadingedge work as a good thing for both animals and the company, which consults in the mining sector and other controversial areas where environmental safety is a hot-button issue.

Her laser ablation technique has now been built into the monitoring processes of several Stantec clients working on pipeline development, hydroelectric projects and mines where employees risk exposure to potentially toxic substances.

The company’s philosophy is that keeping

both feet planted in the community where it works leads to good corporate citizenship and more business opportunities,.

When 40 employees from Stantec’s Victoria and Sidney offices stepped up to volunteer at the company’s 2016 Community Day (which saw 8,000 Stantec employees volunteering in their communities worldwide), they not only did good deeds like building picnic tables at a low-income apartment and cleaning up Goldstream River, they networked and connected with people whose own local knowledge just might spark the next big idea for a new Stantec specialty.

Say it in Six To promote entrepreneurial thinking and help employees feel connected to the team, Stantec adapted an Ernest Hemingway idea and launched its own version of six-word stories, in which employees have six words to talk about a project, client, volunteer experience or aspect of Stantec culture. The company has collected more than 1,300 of these microstories.

“Flood disaster evaluation; 10,000 sites repaired,” writes one employee. “Mapped the wetlands. Harnessed the wind,” writes another.

“Designed the school my child attended,” writes a third. The tiny stories not only give employees a chance to find out a little more

about each other, but give the public a creative glimpse into the projects and people of Stantec.

Entrepreneurial companies also stay on top of leadership planning. Amlani is a 2010 graduate of Stantec’s inaugural Emerging Leaders program. He says the facilitated program feels much like an MBA in the way it brings together people across disciplines to learn from each other and work together on a project.

“There’s a huge benefit from the development of connection, the networking,” notes Amlani. “You go back to your day job, but you’re now connected to all these people. And the thing about this program is that nobody at Stantec head office said, ‘Hey, you have to have one of these.’ It was just one guy trying to do cross-pollination. It went from being a small program in B.C. to being company-wide.”

Staying entrepreneurial is ultimately about creating a work environment where the entrepreneurialism of your employees can shine through, says Christensen.

“There really has to be a cultural shift,” Christensen adds. “A lot of the things we’ve been talking about that Stantec does have come about over time, through mistakes and experiences. But time has passed, and what we see happening now is that we have that culture.” ■

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The 2016 Vancouver Island

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

Brett Soberg, head captain, GM and co-owner of Eagle Wing Tours, enjoys the ocean view from the company’s 4 Ever Wild catamaran. Eagle Wing’s commitment to the environment and education earned the company a 2016 EcoStar Award.

Green Business Becomes force of great change

By Alex Van Tol

42 Douglas

Annual EcoStar Awards Showcase Green Leadership A big light was shone on sustainability in our region at the Vancouver Island EcoStar Awards on November 10 at the Inn at Laurel Point. Hosted by the CRD for a decade and revived by Synergy Sustainability Institute in 2015, the EcoStar Awards recognize those organizations that are making strides in doing business in the greenest way possible.

“The Island has so many businesses that lead in sustainability practices,” says EcoStar Awards co-ordinator Kimber Parmar. “The awards are about bringing municipalities, businesses and nonprofits into a room together, and taking the time to celebrate and commend each of them.”

The EcoStar Awards are about bringing together people too — the individuals at the heart of these businesses who are pushing the envelope and challenging the norm, putting themselves out in front as sustainable-minded mentors for the

business community.

The award categories keep growing year after year and now span 15, including Eco-Preneur of the Year, Manufacturing Excellence, Greenest Office, Technology Excellence, Experiential Tourism, Lodging & Accommodation, Maritime Industry, Food Security, Climate Action, Social Impact, Waste Management, and Water Stewardship & Conservation.

Bernhardt Contracting took home the 2016 Leadership in Construction award for its energy-efficient passive-house designs.

“We pay a lot of attention to how we insulate: creating a good air barrier, installing good windows and doors, and orienting the building toward the sun,” explains owner Mark Bernhardt, who cut his teeth on Alberta oil and gas impact assessments before deciding to apply his sustainability know-how in a greener way through construction.

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“It’s an acknowledgment, not just for us but for the community as a whole, that we’re moving forward in the right way.”

For Greenest Retail Store winner Inspire Hair Design, owner Kathryn Genereux says the EcoStar Awards bring her face to face with inspiring stories of other thought-leading companies on Vancouver Island.

“Often it naturally forms new partnerships and ideas for the future,” she says. “Companies like that find a way to fit in with each other down the road.” One example Genereux points to is an EcoStar Award winner from last year whose products she now stocks at Inspire. “In that community, with good exposure to everyone, you can find ways to work together and create better partnerships.”

The EcoStar Awards are a way not only to honour local green businesses,

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

“In construction, a lot of this stuff is easy to do,” says Bernhardt, who is pleased to be a force for change in an industry that is often slow to evolve.

“We found we can really make gains and help along a lot of change within the industry.”

Bernhardt’s Fernwood and Vic West passive houses are certified to the International Passive House standard, a science-based, economically driven standard first derived in Germany.

For many organizations, the EcoStar Awards acknowledge business practices that have been in place for years.

“We started what we’re doing nine years ago,” says Habit Coffee owner Shane Devereaux, whose company was awarded Greenest Small Restaurant.

Devereaux made a deliberate decision to purchase and stream waste as responsibly as possible when the coffee shop first opened its doors on Pandora Avenue back in 2007. Habit diverts 96 per cent of its waste, transports coffee and supplies between its two locations via bike, and made use of reclaimed residential flooring, fixtures and joists in the construction of its Yates Street location.

“The awards are a progression of what we’re seeing in our community and around the globe,” says Devereaux.

Kathryn Genereux, owner of Inspire Hair Design, a 2016 EcoStar Award winner, believes making it possible for clients to experience top-notch hair-care services without compromising their own health and the environment.

The 5 benefits of running a green business

1

Running a more cost-effective office People assume a green office is going to be more expensive but there can be significant cost savings involved, including: saving money by switching to filtered tap water from using bottled water; buying secondhand office products to reduce purchasing costs and keep items out of the landfill; and saving money on your energy bill by switching to LED lighting.

44 Douglas

2

Boosting employee morale Employees who are encouraged to take action in the workplace and share their ideas toward making the company better for the planet feel empowered and become more loyal to the company. This approach is also great for teambuilding.

3

INCREASING Brand loyalty and marketability Green consumerism is on the rise with more people choosing to support brands and organizations that they trust and that align with their personal values and ethics.

4

Reducing risk in a changing world By reducing your dependence on energy and natural resources, your business will also reduce exposure to the uncertainties of shifting prices and regulations related to the consumption of environmental resources.

5

Being a leader in sustainability You may choose to be an ambassador, a supporter or an innovator. Regardless of your approach to green business leadership, all forms result in greater connectivity with the environmental community, setting a positive example for other businesses and showcasing your values.

Source: Greening Your Office: Strategies that Work by Jill Doucette and Lee Johnson from SelfCounsel Press

BDC is where you need us to be: right there with you in Victoria.

As the only bank devoted exclusively to entrepreneurs, we’re here to give you the financing and advice you need to set your business in motion.

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The EcoStar Awards are given to local champions of initiatives, projects and innovations that contribute to a vibrant future in which our communities and ecology both prosper. The 2016 EcoStar award winners are: Award Winner Greenest Office Monk Office Greenest Retail Store Inspire Hair Design Small Restaurant 1-25 Employees Habit Coffee Large Restaurant Big Wheel Burger 25+ Employees Gateway Village Manufacturing Excellence Studio Robazzo The Eco-Preneur of the Year Blue Roots Farm Technology Excellence Carmanah Technologies Experiential Tourism Eagle Wing Tours Lodging & Accommodations Parkside Hotel Leadership In Construction Bernhardt Contracting Water Conservation Finest at Sea Ocean & Stewardship Products

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We’re in this together.

As a sponsor of the 2016 EcoStar Awards and a certified green business, Douglas magazine proudly supports a sustainable approach to business.

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46 Douglas

Douglas magazine headquarters

but to get a wider audience — individuals, families and communities — thinking about how to lessen their environmental impact.

“Vancouver Island has a distinct profile within the province — and being an island, it’s good to encourage ourselves to think like an island,” says Tofino mayor Josie Osborne, keynote speaker for the November event. “The more we can think about being self-sufficient and distinct, the better.

When you live on an island, it’s more front-ofmind; there are natural limits. It causes us to focus on living within our means.”

Do the awards occasionally serve up surprises? “Totally!” says Parmar, who shares responsibility for reading through all the nominations with Synergy Enterprises founder Jill Doucette. “We always find out about a bunch of businesses that haven’t even been on the radar. It’s very exciting.”

Parmar hopes that the EcoStar Awards’ reach and appeal will ripple outward in the coming years, encouraging nominations from even more mid- and north-Island businesses. Devereaux notes that those businesses who are conducting themselves with sustainability at the fore tend to draw others into the fold. “We do it because we think it’s what we should be doing — because it’s the right thing to do,” he says. “We end up having conversations with other business owners to show them it’s way easier and less expensive than people think to start approaching how they do things differently.” ■

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the

millennial

marketplace

by Alex Van Tol

Mike Rowe, Accio

Shot on location at the Drake.

48 Douglas

Carla Smart, Accio

Dylan Gedig, Red Nexus Games

Millennial Mindset Characterized by constant connectivity Desire to collaborate and work in groups No desire to play their cards close; happy to share ideas and gather feedback High need for meaning and happiness in their work Very accepting of diversity in lifestyles and relationships Most-educated generation (and very indebted as a result)

65%

of millennials believe they will start more than one business during their lifetime (34% of these want their business to be huge and famous)

Source: Sage, 2016

Brad Van Vugt, SendWithUs

Kyla Dufresne, Foxy Box Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

Brandon Duncan, Red Nexus Games

Douglas 49

They were born with smartphones in hand.

They use technology like a fish uses water.

They’ve been pegged as the most selfish — and selfless — generation ever to arrive. They’re also the largest since the boomers.

They game; they read online reviews before they buy; they connect with their peers regularly on a variety of platforms; and they, perhaps more than any of us, understand that the world can change overnight.

They’re millennials. And because of all the above, is it any surprise that many of them choose to start their own businesses rather than work for someone else?

Beyond Traditional Careers Born between 1982 and 2004, many millennials (an age bracket that also encompasses Gen Y, depending on which source you consult) were raised by parents who ran their own businesses, thus setting the stage for entrepreneurial modeling.

Foxy Box owner Kyla Dufresne, whose mother was self-employed, agrees that businesspeople were akin to rock stars in her childhood world. Victoria socialpreneur Erinne Paisley, whom you may remember as the Oak Bay High grad who created a stir when she designed her grad dress out of old homework as commentary on the paucity of women’s

education worldwide, grew up with both parents working for themselves.

These millennials want to work for themselves too — and hard.

“People often think the younger generation is lazy,” says Amelia Lee Boutique owner Khloe Campbell, who freelanced for years as a fashion stylist before opening her own downtown store in 2011. “But there are lots that want to work.

With education nowadays, kids are shown and taught that there is more out there than just working for government or being a nurse.”

Dufresne is no stranger to hard work either.

Raised up-Island by parents who instilled a strong work ethic, she opened her first Foxy Box in 2012 as a one-woman show, whipping off Brazilian waxes behind a curtain at the back of a clothing store on Douglas.

She now operates with 26 staff out of three locations, including the new flagship store on Gordon Street, which averages 60 clients a day.

A high-school dropout due to high distractibility, Dufresne launched her first business in her early 20s, which, although it fizzled, was the first step toward creating Foxy Box. “What I was seeking was an environment that would allow me to grow and excel at the pace that I chose without having a superior to answer to or a schedule to follow,” says Dufresne.

That first business failure is often a key step on the road to success. Millennials have learned through watching their elders that failure is a powerful teacher.

“These days, the idea of trying something and failing is not frowned upon in any sense — it’s actually almost a badge of honour,” says Brad Van Vugt, whose Victoria-based growth marketing company, SendWithUs, helps large companies send personalized email.

“To try a business and fail once or twice is highly respected in the business community.

This is the thinking that the younger group brings to the table.”

Forces at Work Undoubtedly the strongest force that’s shaping business for young entrepreneurs is the Internet.

“It’s beyond revolutionary for startups,” says 24-year-old Dylan Gedig, programmer and business developer at Red Nexus Games, which recently unleashed its first local multiplayer game, Friday Night Bullet Arena.

“You can target the whole world with your products,” says the multiple scholarship winner who bootstrapped almost the entire Red Nexus startup with his partner, fellow UVic grad Brandon Duncan. “There’s no manufacturing and no shipping. Things can be created out of thin air.” This lets millennials start riskier

Graduate student Marla Cervantes designs components for the UVic-led Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL) at Canada’s TRIUMF lab.

ARIEL will dramatically increase rare isotope production for scientific research while creating health and economic benefits for Canadians.

“We just put it out there to people we knew so we could see what happened,” says Smart.

“People liked it, and we thought, OK, this could be a thing.” That was in March of 2015. Since then, Accio has brought software developers and more delivery drivers on board. And with the busy little startup enjoying 20 to 25 per cent growth month over month, there’s no sign of hitting the brakes.

The Impact of Millennials

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

endeavours without needing an outside investor to approve their plan.

“There is a low barrier to entry,” agrees Van Vugt. “We’re at a point with technology where someone can take a three-month course and launch an online store, service or mobile app.”

Living in the digital age gives millennials more options for how to shape their careers.

And the options are boundless. The Internet is exactly how Carla Smart and Mike Rowe, owners of on-demand delivery service Accio, found their fast-growing niche: by looking at what other major cities in North America were offering and bringing that same service to Victoria.

“We’ve seen a lot of similar companies in the U.S. like InstaCart and Uber, and they’ll deliver anything,” says Smart. “We asked, ‘Why don’t we have this in Victoria?’ The delivery solutions we had here weren’t as good.”

The pair noticed while some companies delivered just from restaurants and others just from grocery stores, no service existed that would deliver from both, plus liquor stores and pharmacies and clothing stores and more. So they got to work.

Smart and Rowe spent one weekend (yep, you read one) building their business, which essentially consisted of a landing page with a text-only line for customers to place their orders.

Khloe Campbell of Amelia Lee Boutique has stayed nimble to deal with the constant changes in the retail marketplace.

Having grown up with the World Wide Web, millennials have a strong sense of global markets. “You can attract customers from around the world,” says Van Vugt, whose company hires local talent to serve clients in farflung locations. “That mindset impacts how you go about growing a business in the early days.”

Online stores are popping up everywhere nowadays; subscription-based models (think Netflix and Spotify) now subvert the persistent problem of Internet piracy; and social media is the primary vehicle for millennials to create their brand.

Paisley of the paper grad dress knows a thing or two about branding: as a result of her political statement, she signed a threebook deal and launched Pop Activism, an online community supporting and showcasing activism through pop culture.

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“The one aspect which overarches all of my work is myself as a brand,” Paisley explains.

“I believe in the Internet age more and more people are becoming their own businesses.”

It’s all about differentiating and communicating your brand, whether that’s you, your store or your service.

One thing that certainly has changed with this new style of communicating is the voice businesses are using with their customers. Those snappy, casual messages or phrases that leap out of your inbox aimed squarely at you? That’s the communication tide sweeping us away from stuffiness and easing us into a state of … ease.

“Social media has become our number-one marketing tool and avenue for reaching new clients,” says Dufresne. “We don’t feel pressure to speak in a formal way to our client base. We have the freedom to express ourselves in a more natural and casual manner — which has been particularly helpful for Foxy Box because we’re attempting to make an uncomfortable situation more comfortable!”

Social media is changing the way people shop, too. Millennnials don’t hesitate to put their brands out there on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or SnapChat— because social now drives shopping in a way businesses have never seen before. When she was managing a store on Johnson eight years ago, before taking the plunge to open her own, Campbell used to be able to predict sales for a given day to within a few hundred dollars.

“This was before Facebook and Instagram were so important,” she says. “It was busy all the time, and it was all from walk-in traffic.”

It’s not that way anymore. Now, customers tend to find what they like on social media, says Campbell. If they like what you’re posting, they will follow you and then come into your store.

*Starting from Some conditions apply.

Business owners of all ages must be more nimble and stay on top of social channels, says Campbell, or they risk missing out. “If something worked in the past, it doesn’t mean it’ll work three years later.”

Campbell, now 32, watched about 15 similar stores open — and close — their doors between 2011 and 2016 and has lived to tell the tale.

She even moved to a larger space on Yates two years ago. Constant change is the name of the game for today’s consumer market — and it’s an advantage for millennials, as they’re already accustomed to fast-changing technologies.

With their Internet-oriented mindset firmly in place, millenials have the opportunity to use the ever-shifting language of the digital world to create all sorts of new norms in the modern business landscape.

“Millennials are changing the way we do just about everything,” says Paisley. “And we’re just getting started.” ■

INTEL

53 entrepreneur

2017’s top trends for entrepreneurs

54 Money

Will you outlive your retirement income?

[business intelligence ]

56 growth

Slow growth or no growth?

2017 Top Trends Virtual Reality

Machine Generated data

Digital Games

platform economy

Alternative proteins

Angel investors

Artisan Food

Entrepreneur by Peter Elkins

Craft Beer

such as its FIFA series, are increasingly sophisticated and interactive.

2017’s Top Trends for Entrepreneurs 3 For entrepreneurs, staying on top of the trends and taking advantage of them is key to success.

I

don’t consider myself a futurist, but as an entrepreneur and investor, I naturally attempt to stay on top of trends that will shape our future. As 2017 nears, the following trends, many of them fuelled by digital transformation, are where we should look for opportunity and to find ways to create value in our communities.

1 Virtual Reality GetS Really Real

Virtual Reality (VR) is set to explode as this industry continues to find its way and consumers demand more content. Locally, look to VR leader Cloudhead Games, a Qualicum company creating some of the best immersive VR games in the world across all platforms, from HTC Vive to Oculus VR. Their built-for-VR

game The Gallery is a head turner, literally.

2

DigiTal games drive growth Island gaming companies like KANO/APPS, Codename Entertainment and TinyMob Games have done a lot of heavy lifting to build the local game industry, which now employs over 250 people. Another Island company to watch in 2017 is SkookumScript, which has developed a programming language to help game developers be more effective in game development.

The interactive entertainment industry will continue to expand, with eSports on the rise.

Business Insider predicts it will break the $1B barrier in 2017 and points to interactive software giant Electronic Arts whose games,

Big Data Goes Bigger The international demand for operational intelligence continues to burgeon, with no end in sight. With larger companies like Splunk, a leader making machine data accessible, continuing to make acquisitions, we’ll certainly see some great early-exit opportunities. Here on the Island, Silicon-Valley-based company Workday acquired Victoria software firm MediaCore and set up shop. Workday has created a unified finance, HR and planning system for boosted business performance.

4 Platform Economy is a

Launching Pad Look for consumers and service providers to increasingly engage in the “platform economy.”

This economy has taken shape around Uber, Airbnb and Upwork — and it’s now become mainstream. As the platform economy matures, look for more offerings, including local private-parking-spot rentals to on-demand restaurant delivery service like our very own Douglas 53

Accio, a Victoria favourite. Next up? Figuring out how to deliver something like health benefits to freelance workforces.

5 Investment Looks Local

Entrepreneurs will continue to build new kinds of exportable digital businesses to make money — and local-supply artisan businesses will build local businesses so we can spend money in our communities. Until traditional financial products catch up to the entrepreneurial wave we’re on, we’ll need to find alternative ways to fund both sides of these entrepreneurial pursuits.

I believe we’ll continue to enjoy more plentiful and better-organized early-stage angel money for startups. We’ll also see more event-based financing, which essentially draws together a large group of interested angel investors who want to collaboratively invest in great businesses in a managed fund — perfect for bringing community together around great businesses.

Ultimately, I think we’ll also see an investment vehicle that works toward building local economies through microventure capital funds like our own Tectoria Venture Partners.

With this fund, for example, on a $10,000 investment, investors can get back up to $7,400 thanks to two tax incentives, the 30 per cent refundable tax credit from the B.C. government

and a 44 per cent (max) in RRSP deductions from our federal government.

6 Advancing Alternative Proteins

Hello alternative proteins, so long meat? Maybe not quite yet, but do look to 2017 as the year more and more consumers are introduced to plant-based protein products like the Impossible Burger from Impossible Foods, a Silicon-Valley startup.

After five years of scientific research, Impossible Foods discovered what really makes meat unique: from its sizzle to its smell to its juicy first bite. The company found meat contains heme, an iron-containing molecule in blood that carries oxygen. Heme makes blood red and makes meat look pink and taste slightly metallic. Look for heme to start popping up in food offerings en masse in 2017.

7 Artisan Food Tastes Like

progression as this industry becomes more organized with the introduction of co-working facilities for food production and packaging, as well as other such sharing-economy solutions to accelerate the food-manufacturing industry on the Island to service our own needs.

8 Craft Beer gets acquired

Finally, my biggest prediction for 2017 is the mass acquisition of microbreweries by the likes of Tsingtao or CR Snow as they search for the next brand success stories to expand and grow internationally. Nothing yet locally, but you never know.

So there you have it: my picks for what is primed to surge in 2017. So if your family or friends come asking for your support as they enter the world of entrepreneurship, make sure their ideas feel relevant. More importantly, if your favourite microbrewery is looking very polished, like it’s preparing for an inspection, do stock up on your favourites as this might be the last time you can fill your beer growlers.

Success I’ve been watching small-scale food producers like our own Cold Comfort Ice Cream; Bows & Arrows Coffee Roasters; DeeBee’s SpecialTea Peter Elkins is CEO and co-founder of the Capital Foods; and Sirene Artisan Chocolate Makers, Investment Network. as they find their product/market fit and mature into what they want to be.

Starting at Everything I’ve seen gives me hope that the artisan food business is going to leap forward in 2017. It’s a natural Potential Earnings You could end up with

Age 20

$638,231

Money by steve bokor

at retirement at Age 65 based on an annual savings of $3,000 source: pljincome.com

Will You Outlive Your Retirement Income?

Your retirement may still be a long way off — or closer than you’d like to think. Either way, planning early is the best way to ensure your income will support your needs through your retirement years, especially since Canadians now have longer life expectancies than the generations before us.

W

hether you own a business, work for a business or operate as an independent contractor, if you don’t belong to a defined benefits pension plan, the worry of building an adequate retirement nest egg is probably a major concern.

Record low interest rates, rising healthcare costs and longer life expectancy are creating a potential shortfall for current and soon-to-be retirees. If we get another financial crisis, the retirement plans for many Canadians could fall far short of their expectations.

It’s no wonder one of the most common questions I get from prospective clients is: “Will I outlive my retirement income?”

54 Douglas

Starting at

percentage of potential earnings compared to percentage of total investment 

According to Statistics Canada, almost half of Canadians over 65 will live into their 90s. For some, unfortunately, there’s a real risk the last years of their lives will be their worst. Why? Because not enough planning has gone into how their retirement capital will be managed or who will manage it.

To help these retirees prepare for the future, I share with them five risks they could face and then provide strategies to minimize or eliminate these risks.

79%

Risk You may live longer than you think One of the hardest jobs I have is convincing clients, especially women, that they are likely to live into their 90s and therefore need to put plans into place to handle their

$503,231

Age 35

You could end up with

$237,175

Age 45

You could end up with

$110,357

percentage of potential earnings compared to percentage of total investment 

62% 21%

Starting at

percentage of potential earnings compared to percentage of total investment 

38%

46% 54%

Potential earnings at 6% interest per year

$147,175

$50,357

Total amount you invested

$135,000

$90,000

$60,000

DDW_9591_V1_TC_Ad_X1a.pdf

financial situations for a potentially long time.

Realistically speaking, retirement income needs could last for decades, so giving away family wealth in the early retirement years might pose a problem in the final years.

Risk Death of a partner For 30 years of my career, I have watched couples go through the aging process. If the main bread earner dies first, the surviving partner is often left with a difficult economic transition. On the other hand, sometimes theC surviving partner is left financially secure butM has no skills to manage his or her social and Y domestic responsibilities.

CM

Risk Retirement versus inflation One of the most insidious and often-ignoredMY dangers that erodes the value and net CY worth of Canadians’ retirement savings is CMY inflation, which can be defined as a sustained increase in the general level of prices for K goods and services. As inflation rises, every dollar you own buys a smaller percentage of a good or service. In Canada, the inflation rate has averaged about 2 per cent per year.

Unfortunately, health-care costs have risen by 4 per cent per year.

1

2016-09-30

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Risk Age-related health-care costs When I was 20, I didn’t have a medicine cabinet. When I was 40, it was half full.

Now I’m 55, it’s jam-packed and regularly restocked. Three opened tubes of Rub-A535 seem to follow me around the house, and I swear my five pairs of reading glasses have invisible legs because I can never find any of them. Many of my 75-year-old clients laugh and tell me “Just wait; it gets worse!” For some, it gets really bad. A few of my clients are spending over $5,000 per month for longterm-care support. As their conditions worsen, costs go up.

Call 250.220.7311 or visit ddwca.com

Risk A volatile market The compound annual return for Canadian stocks over the last 50 years has been 8.9 per cent. The five-year return is 2.3 per cent — and for 2015 it was negative 8.3 per cent. For many Canadians, especially those between the ages of 55 and 70, this volatility is too great. After all, you don’t want to erode your retirement nest egg in the early years. a Better Retirement First, I strongly recommend consulting with advisers who specialize in this area. In conjunction with your lawyer and accountant, you can speak with professionals who are versed in both financial services and insurance products.

Second, look ahead at your retirement needs. Keep in mind that these needs are likely to change over time, so your retirement plan needs to be flexible to meet those changing needs. I like to divide needs into three groups: basics, variables and unwanted.

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Douglas 55

■ BASICS are food, shelter and clothing, so your first step is to create a budget and identify the basic sources of where your money will come from in retirement years. For most couples, the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Old-Age Security (OAS) are sufficient to manage these expenditures. But that’s not true in every case. If this sounds like something you face, look now at guaranteed investment products to create a steady source of income for your retirement years.

■ VARIABLES are somewhat discretionary needs, which usually wane over time.

Newly retired Canadians often like to travel, spend time with grandchildren, join charity organizations or take up hobbies like golf. In many cases, they have a “spend-it-while-I’myoung-enough-to-enjoy-it” attitude. That’s great, as long as you factor in your potential longevity, investment performance and inflation. Again, planning ahead is essential.

■ UNWANTEDS are somewhat manageable needs. Diet, exercise and preventive medication play important roles in minimizing health-care costs, but for many Canadians, a medical

condition will eventually crop up, causing us to divert expenditures away from our “wants” to our “unwanteds.” Plans need to be in place to pay for health care, either in the home or in a care facility, especially since age-related care costs often arise without warning.

The Legacy You Leave Finally, many retired Canadians have questions about how their money should be used after they’re gone. To ensure your wishes are met, put plans in place to manage the intergenerational transfer of wealth and bequests to charities. You’ll also want to take into account power of attorney, wills and trusts.

These are mandatory unless you want Revenue Canada to reap the benefits.

By starting now and creating a plan, you are taking positive action to create more financial security throughout your retirement years. It may seem easier to put planning off, but the future arrives faster than we ever think it will.

Steve Bokor, CFA, is a licensed portfolio manager with PI Financial Corp, a member of CIPF.

growth by Clemens Rettich

Slow Growth or No Growth?

Businesspeople often worry about growing too fast, but our newest columnist says that’s just an excuse that hides underlying business issues.

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56 Douglas

T

he other day I was sitting with a business owner and he confidently declared, “I don’t want to grow too fast.”

Wait. What?

Was he suggesting that if his business generated a million dollars in profit on Monday morning he would reject it because it was happening too fast?

Truth is, this business owner, like many others before him, was playing a verbal game — tossing out an innocent-sounding cliché that gets heads bobbing in agreement. It just happens to be wrong.

The seductive danger of these verbal games is that they allow us to duck difficult but important truths. Saying “I don’t want to grow too fast” has a homey and safe ring to it, like you just need to “set on the porch and think it through a spell.”

But it’s all a deception. Growth, fast or slow, isn’t the real problem. If you could double your business overnight with no consequences, would you really turn it down?

I didn’t think so.

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Adjusting Our Mindset Language creates a framework for how we think and act. When we say we don’t want to grow too fast, it sets up a misleading mindset that leads us to invest in “managing growth” (which is a euphemism for “slowing”) instead of building capacity.

The phrase “I don’t want to grow too fast” isn’t just sloppy and inaccurate; in business it’s dangerous, because “reasonable” growth really means no growth.

Have you ever sat in a train stopped at a station and thought you were moving, only to realize a few vertigo-inducing seconds later that you weren’t moving at all — the train beside you was? It’s a good metaphor for what happens in a growth-averse business.

Any sense that we are holding our own or growing “slow but steady” is an illusion. All around us, competitors are growing, markets are moving on, star employees are getting restless, consumers are getting bored and technologies are disrupting the very fabric of our assumptions.

What’s the Real Problem?

Growth isn’t the problem. Poor design is the problem — and poor design points to a problem with the very foundation or model of a business.

I worked with a successful furniture maker who was 18 months behind in commissioned work; dozens of projects worth thousands of dollars each. Why was he behind? In the design of his business model, he didn’t factor in the time cost of running a retail storefront — or his own micromanagement tendencies — because he believed every customer only wanted to talk to him and he couldn’t trust or train staff to manage the retail area.

As I pushed him for expansion into the U.S. market, he objected; “I don’t want to grow that fast,” he said. Translation: “The design of my business is already killing me; why the heck would I want even more business?”

So it really isn’t about “managing growth.”

It’s about believing your business model is strong enough to fuel the growth you need to thrive.

What Does “Designed for Growth” Mean?

A business designed for growth cannot only survive double- and triple-digit growth (and the cash that growth eats), but it can leverage that growth. Such a business can capitalize on growth through economies of scale, market dominance, hiring power and attractiveness to outside capital.

The real challenge is how to design something to grow as fast as possible while anticipating cost and risk. The growth I’m talking about is a triple-bottom-line growth: it’s not just about money or market share. We have to understand and invest in social, technological, ethical, emotional, environmental and spiritual growth. Real growth occurs when those multiple domains are understood, invested in and hooked together.

Put simply, if you aren’t growing strongly and sustainably, you are failing. That’s the second law of thermodynamics, and businesses don’t get a pass on that. To design a business for that kind of growth, you need a lot of things to work together, and these three design elements are particularly critical:

requires profit. Want to be the boss? Be the boss of this.

3  A way to delegate Think of delegating as a synonym for growing. You can’t grow a thriving independent enterprise when you white-knuckle the tools. Learn the art of letting go so you can focus on growth. Design every operational aspect of your business to be executed by others as soon after day-one as possible. Michael E. Gerber’s flawed but classic The E-Myth Revisited is still the best starting point for learning to think this way. when growth feels good Sustainable business growth is bloody hard

work, and sloppy, evasive language doesn’t help.

We can play the comforting verbal game of using phrases like “I don’t want to grow too fast” or “work-life balance,” or we can do the hard but beautiful work of growing something remarkable.

Let’s stop playing those comforting but useless verbal games, roll up our sleeves and use language that helps instead of hides.

Clemens Rettich of Great Performances Management has an MBA in Executive Management, with 20 years of experience in education, management and small business.

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1  A business model designed for growth Most new business owners make the mistake of designing business models to sell stuff and hopefully make a little profit. But you really need to design for growth, or you risk everything. If you’ve never considered your business model (not the same thing as a business plan), the Business Model Canvas (strategyzer.com) is an excellent tool.

2  A well-designed cash-flow cycle Growth eats cash. From intelligent pricing to aggressive accounts-receivable management, growth requires cash even more than it

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Last Page

No Downside to upcycled java bags

by Athena McKenzie

Jackie Kitzler turns used burlap coffee-bean bags that would otherwise end up in the landfill into her own line of purses, totes, messenger bags and more.

58 Douglas

Jeffrey Bosdet/Douglas Magazine

“Kitchen-table startup” might be trendy business jargon for a tech company incubated in someone’s home, but it’s also perfectly apt in describing Cowichan Valley entrepreneur Jackie Kitzler’s eco-company Island Java Bag. “When I first started, I just had a cutting table in my kitchen,” Kitzler says. “My husband and I bought our first house in June, and now I have a full workshop — it’s extremely chaotic, but it’s a work in progress.”

Kitzler started her home-based business making totes and purses from burlap coffeebean bags. As the mother of a son with special needs, she was looking for something that could be more adaptable to her schedule.

“Traditional jobs don’t always have the flexibility you need,“ she says. “In the summertime, when I’m really busy with markets, I can still work 10 to 12 hours a day easily. But I’ll spend the mornings with my family and then spend the afternoon and evenings working.”

Kitzler works closely with Synergy Enterprises, which helps her source coffee bags and other reclaimed materials for her designs. Oughtred Coffee is a major supplier.

“I just received a palette of bags from them, and what I can’t use will go to a permaculture farm,” she says. “[The farm gets] all my scraps, so my business is landfill free.”

Synergy has also connected Kitzler with local breweries, such as Hoyne and Spinnakers, and she transforms their used grain bags into growler carriers.

“I’ve taken the tagline ‘Waste as a resource,’” Kitzler says. “People come to me with their stuff and say, ‘What can you do?’”

Oh, the possibilities.

Determination.

Determination.

Bring yours.

Bringusus yours.

You things inside insideyou. you.Let Letthe thetransformative transformativepower powerofofour ourcohort-based cohort-based You have great things learning put your yourwork workand andlife lifeexperience experiencetotogreat greatuse. use.You’ll You’llcollaborate collaboratewith with learning model put like-minded, industry-leading peers every step of the way in an applied, practical and like-minded, every step of the way in an applied, practical and personalized the next nextstep stepin inyour yourcareer, career,and and personalized platform for success. If you’re ready for the life, life,let’s let’stalk. talk.We Wesee seegreat greatthings thingsahead. ahead.

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