December/January 2017/8
In this issue
Competition in the commercial and industrial transportation realm in Canada is more fierce than ever thanks to technology that allows newcomers to the brokerage business to have access to a vast network of shippers and, of course, a growing number of clients demanding fast delivery with comprehensive and transparent tracking. Only one thing is certain in this tumultuous environment: carriers and...
Once next year’s 4 per cent allowable rent hike takes effect in B.C. (and renovictions and lease renewals push average rents even higher), help-wanted signs will grow dustier as street-level businesses chase the increasingly rare soul who can afford to live on a cook’s wages. “Vancouver is a different beast,” says Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at SFU’s School of...
Dean Handspiker, VP design for Indochino, is used to quick moves. When the Vancouver-based online custom menswear retailer opens a retail showroom—18 to date, eight in 2017 alone—the design team usually takes possession of the space on a Monday and the store opens on a Thursday. So when the company relocated its headquarters from Railtown to the corner of Robson...
About 35 years ago, I had been the marketing manager for Salomon, the ski binding and ski boots company. I went to an organization known as Montreal Creative Centre, in its day the cutting edge for creative and design work for advertising in Canada, and said, “I’d like to work for you guys and learn about creative conceptual work and...
It is Tuesday morning, June 10, 2014. At the False Creek end of Vancouver’s Davie Street, grocery shoppers come and go at Urban Fare, and a woman pushes a baby carriage up the street toward Pacific Boulevard. A thick-set man with a grey beard, wearing a bike helmet and a large yellow backpack, comes around the corner from Marinaside Crescent...
For most retailers, sales peak in November and December, accounting for 20 per cent or more of annual revenue, according to the U.S.-based National Retail Federation. But for B.C.’s Big Box Outlet Store, Christmas arrives later. “The volume in January and February goes up by 50 per cent,” notes co-founder and president Mark Funk. “It’s the busiest two months of...
You may blink when you glimpse the from the gravel service road: a pale slab floating like a rogue iceberg on a stark chunk of rock about 16 kilometres off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Open the inn’s massive red-knobbed front doors and the interior—and the welcome to come-from-aways—is ridiculously warm. There’s a riot of colours on nubby textiles, a...
From 2,000 feet above the city of Dawson Creek, snow-dusted Peace Country shows off its riches in the afternoon sun. The rolling landscape is a patchwork of fields and forests, criss-crossed with finished and unfinished pipelines. Scattered in all directions: huge natural gas processing and compression plants, oil and gas wells large and small, and drilling rigs, many sitting on...
THE STARTUP WAY: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-term GrowthEric Ries, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which introduced the term “pivot” to the business lexicon, has pivoted himself. Now Ries looks at how established enterprises from General Electric and Toyota Motor Corp. to Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. can...
What are British Columbia’s top places to build a career? Start by following the money, but that isn’t the whole story. In our fourth annual Best Cities for Work in B.C. ranking, compiled with research partner Environics Analytics, we measure a city’s attractiveness as a place to work by putting a two-thirds weighting on how much residents earn and where...