What I've Learned

Globe and Mail

3 days ago

Showcase (Brampton, Ont.)
Kulkarni's family business has its hands in all sorts of industries, from manufacturing to tech to finance. In 1999, it bought part of a quirky Edmonton-based retailer with 12 stores. Now it has 150 outlets in Canada and the U.S., and a devoted following among trend-addicted shoppers.
I grew up under the guidance of my father and uncle. I'd go with them to the office starting when I was six or so. It put business into my blood.
In 1999, I was finishing my graduate degree at Yale, and all my business-school friends were headed either to Wall Street to be investment bankers or to Silicon Valley to be dot-com mavens. It was a contrarian move at that time—one, returning to Canada, and two, going into the old-school business of brick-and-mortar retail.
We envisioned creating a mutual fund of trends, using the principles of investment management. Diversification—not overly concentrating on one asset class. Momentum trading—assessing demand, and knowing when to get in and when to get out. Cost averaging—so as a trend declines, demand might drop, but the cost might drop, too.
A lot of the buying was based on gut feel, relationships with vendors, visiting trade shows and taking bets on products. That's not reliable, and it's painful when there's a mistake.
With the advent of big data in 2008, for the first time we could access online search data, analyze it, and put math and science behind consumer demand. We started to stumble across patterns of correlation between search volume, social posts and mentions, and demand. That's when the business transformed from instinctual buying to data-science-backed buying.
Every trend starts with a demand driver. In the old days, that may have been a TV commercial or radio ad or celebrity mention. As social media has grown, the demand driver has become social—primarily Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
The challenge with social media is everyone has a hyper-personalized experienced. I may see something blowing up on my feed and think it's the hottest thing, and my neighbour may have never heard of it.
We built a trend watcher using generative AI that watches 50,000 social media videos every day to help us identify objectively what's trending.
Our entire organization is aligned around the trend model. We can buy a product within hours, and get it on shelves in a week or two. For trends where there's no product or distributor—just a viral video—we can design and develop a product, and bring it to market within 53 days.
Dubai Chocolate was popularized last year by TikTok influencers. Our team strategized this trend and developed a shelf-stable recipe along with local producers, and helped them scale up. We launched it under our Oasis Treasures brand, and we're now the leading retailer of Dubai Chocolate in North America.
Tariffs are definitely negative for retailers and will most certainly lead to inflation, which is a bit tragic, because after all the challenges of the past few years, including the pandemic, this is an entirely man-made problem.
Seize opportunity. The market is moving faster than ever. By adapting more quickly than others, you can win.
With speed comes the risk of failure, but a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. Failure is part of R&D.
Durabuilt Windows and Doors (Edmonton)
When Sunner was just 19, he and his dad moved from England to Edmonton to take over a small, poky window company with 10 employees. Three decades later, Durabuilt manufactures 1,000 windows and doors a day, and employs more than 750.
I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I was a high-risk high achiever, thinking too fast. My father is more conservative, more reserved. He thinks of the worst-case outcomes more often than needed. So, one optimist and one pessimist—that alignment has worked really well. You can make well-informed decisions when you have two different sets of eyes, two different thinking methods, as much as those conversations are tough or frustrating.
For $600,000, you could be in the window-and-door business. Nowadays, you need $20 million or $25 million just to be in the game. You can't be a mom-and-pop shop the way we started.
Automation comes in stages and phases. You need to have a five-year plan. Where are your bottlenecks? Where is simple human manufacturing not working or not efficient anymore? We still employ 750 people, but we compete with bigger organizations across the globe. Fifteen years ago, we probably would've needed 1,500 people at this scale.
Innovation is in our people, it's in software, it's in the building envelope, it's in our product, it's in how we do business. It's systemizing our business every day, and it's talked about every day. It's a constant process.
Out of all the G7, we're the country with the least manufacturing. Canada doesn't even make its own glass anymore. All our glass comes from U.S., Mexico and around the world.
How do you lead an organization when you go from 100 people to 300 to 400 to 700? There are times when you look at firing yourself. Just because you own the business doesn't give you the right to the CEO seat.
Human capital is the most important thing. We're in the people business—we just happen to make windows and doors.
We've had our years of pain and rain, where you chase growth and you're not making any money, and it's kinda senseless. We've been there and done that. Now, it's more about deep, entrenched planning. If we want to grow by 20%, we unpack everything that's going to be impacted: people, leadership, equipment, software, logistics, capability. What needs to improve?
At this moment, the impact of tariffs is quite minimal, but if the next phase is enacted, we're looking at substantial inflation on products. It's pretty black and white—it gets transferred to the end user.
We're constantly seeing who's doing better than we are. I thrive on being in a room where I'm not the smartest person.
We have a very young, energetic leadership group, including my daughter, who leads our marketing division. We've pivoted the whole company around leadership and succession.
Learn the power of people. A lot of times I hear from entrepreneurs, 'I can't grow—I have 35 people, and I have to do everything.' And they get stuck. You have to be prepared to delegate.
My dad is the chair now. When we're having a bad day, he comes in and says, 'You may think you're having the worst day of your life, but you're not.' He's that guy.
Germain Hotels (Quebec City)
Germain and her brother, Jean-Yves, opened their first hotel in 1988. Today, they own 19 sleekly designed properties across the country, from St. John's to Calgary.
My parents had two restaurants—one was the first steakhouse in Quebec City, in 1962. When we'd go for dinner there on a Sunday evening, as soon as people were waiting in line to get in, we'd have to finish our meal and leave the table. Serving people has always been in the DNA of our family.
I've always worked with my family—I don't know anything else. It hasn't always been easy, but then again, is there anything that's easy all the time?
My brother and I had run restaurants. The day we opened our first hotel, in Quebec City, I went to the door to greet our first guest and took him directly to his room instead of the check-in desk. I was used to welcoming guests and taking them to their table. All this to say, I didn't know much about the hotel business, but I learned quite rapidly.
One of the things that set us apart was our bathrooms—instead of having regular bathtubs, we had these really large glass showers. At that time, that was very unusual. Design set us apart.
You have to find your niche—what makes you different. But you also have to really feel that thing. It has to be in line with who you are. Never underestimate the value of the human component of what you're doing.
Technology, no matter how you apply it, has changed many of the ways we do things. We used to have phones in all the rooms, and guests making phone calls was a good revenue generator. And we lost that. You have to adapt—sooner rather than later.
Airbnb did affect the business, but I don't think we lost customers. More people started travelling because Airbnb existed, and maybe some of those travellers would want to try a hotel, too. I have no problem with Airbnb. My problem is more related to the rules not being the same for them as they are for us.
The pandemic almost killed us. We had to lay off 1,000 people in a couple of days. It was a bad dream. We had to close five of our hotels, but we couldn't even lock the doors, because a hotel is always open. We didn't have locks. It was crazy.
I've always been someone who relies on intuition. You can't teach that. With almost 20 hotels now, you have to come up with a way of doing things that you can put on paper. Then you have to hire good people and teach them how to do those things.
You have to know how to make money, but making money should not be the reason for starting a business. You have to be patient and make decisions that are good for the future of the organization.
I remember my parents telling me, 'You have to set an example, whatever you do.' And that can be tough. At times, I was too strict with myself, always thinking about what was good for the organization and forgetting about me.
So many women try to be perfect at everything, and it drives them crazy. You have to let some things go.
Now we're working with our children—my daughter and three of my brother's kids. Sometimes you have to stand back and let them make their own mistakes. But it's the same for them as it was for my brother and me. This is their life.
Acadian Seaplants (Dartmouth, N.S.)
Deveau's dad, Louis, started Acadian in 1981, harvesting a long, stringy seaweed called Ascophyllum nodosum. Today, it ships a variety of products to 80-plus countries, including a crop biostimulant; additives used in animal feed; multicoloured seaweed used largely in Japanese salads; and several products that find their way into the human food chain.
I walked into my parents' house after finishing my engineering degree and my mother said, 'You don't have a bedroom anymore—your father has started a business, and you're welcome to sleep on the couch.' That was the beginning of Acadian Seaplants.
Today we have employees in 22 countries, and subsidiaries in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Ireland, Scotland and Italy. We have two research facilities, in Canada and England, with about 50 researchers on staff, including 15 PhDs, and four manufacturing sites in Canada, plus one in Ireland and one in Scotland. So we've grown since my old bedroom.
Seaweed is fixed. It doesn't swim away. So our scientists can quantify it, we can measure its growth rates, and we can then manage it properly. By doing that, we assure our own long-term supply. It's money well invested.
We've been doing sustainability for the past 25 years. Irrespective of what the current political people are saying, those initiatives are here to stay, and those that embrace sustainability will do better in the long run than those who do not.
When we started, we were only buying wet seaweed, drying it, baling it and sending it to the Americans to create value. My father understood we needed to invest in technology to differentiate ourselves and add value. It's not simple, it's not easy, it's not cheap, but it works.
In the early days, I had a good lead in Japan. But we couldn't afford for me to go—it was too expensive. My dad goes, 'Get on the plane, go over there, get in front of the client, and watch what happens.' So I did. I met three or four potential customers, and we're still doing business with them today. That's how we've built our business over the years. We've lived by that lesson.
I'm a 30-year seaweed guy. But I realized we were morphing from a seaweed company that made agricultural products into an ag company that has seaweed as its primary material. We needed to bring in ag management that knew how to develop these markets. We hired this one guy, Nelson Gibson, and 52 people he'd worked with have now joined us, along with their Rolodexes. So now we do business with the largest ag distribution companies in the world because we brought these people on.
A lot of family values go into a family-run organization. You feel it. The people feel it. If we have to do something that's painful, it hurts. So there's a level of passion that is quite different.
You gotta put together a plan. You gotta have some meat behind the plan. Once you get that plan, then you gotta execute that plan. Invariably you will deviate from that plan, then you gotta put together another plan to get back on track with the original plan. And you will do that over and over again.
What do you do in an environment where you're not sure what the rules are going to be? You don't want to fall into a trap of 'I'll wait till it settles down,' because that becomes paralysis. And it's not gonna settle down.
Odlum Brown (Vancouver)
Doucette didn't plan on spending her career in financial services. Then she landed at Odlum Brown, a century-old independent investment firm that felt like family. She spent 17 years as CEO—a role she's just handed off to her successor, Trevor Short—but remains executive chair.
I got the lowest of the lowest jobs in an investment firm when I was very young, and I loved it. I loved how every day was different.
The golden rule was something instilled in me at the dinner table. But at Odlum, you see it play out in so many ways. I'll give an example: We encourage our analysts to own the stocks they recommend. And not only do our analysts eat their own cooking; all of us do. Unfortunately, you don't bat 1,000. If something doesn't work out, we own it. We're invested personally right there along with our clients.
What I learned during the dot-com crisis and relearned again in '08—and we're seeing it again now—is that what clients want to hear is not that you've got the solution to everything. They want to hear that you're just as worried as they are.
You can't hide from a problem. You've got to stand up and say, 'Today I know this, and today I'm going to do this.' People just want to know you're on it.
In 2023, we did a client survey for our 100th anniversary. We got 500 or 600 personal anecdotes, about how either their adviser or the firm had helped them through a difficult moment—the death of a spouse, a divorce, a life-altering thing. They felt that shoulder squeeze. When I'm having one of those days, I pull those answers out, and it reminds me what we're actually here to do—and that we're doing it.
When I first started, we had a person on the trading desk who key-punched orders all day, and we'd have to wait till the following morning to see the trades. But the actual relationship side of the business is the same. You know your clients, and your client knows you. And I think that's what will sustain our business going forward.
I'm not one to feel anxious. But it feels like the world is shifting. I know this will sound a bit Pollyanna, but I fundamentally believe you can't control what will happen—you can only control how you react to it, stay true to your values and make the best decisions you can with the information you have at the moment.
I've always told my team, 'Ski the black diamonds first.' I tackle the hardest thing on my desk first thing in the morning.
Make a call—most often, doing something is better than doing nothing.
I jokingly say I've gone from being the decider to the opiner. It's hard to give up the CEO title, but it was time. People need to see rejuvenation. I'm still gonna be around as chair, but it's been really gratifying and a lot less scary than I thought it was gonna be.
Your time is valuable. Have the Top Business Headlines newsletter conveniently delivered to your inbox in the morning or evening. Sign up today.