Celebrating Local Businesses

This is the third in our series highlighting innovation and creativity within our region’s business sector.

Transitioning With offices in Vancouver, San Francisco, London, Paris, Hamburg, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Boston, Bucharest, and more than 11 million users, including 744 of the Fortune 1000 companies, Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social media management platform. And it started right here in British Columbia.

When discussing alternatives to an economy fixated on oil and gas I turn to a vision of a province that fosters growth in a diverse range of industries, including nascent sectors like clean tech, bio tech, and high tech. British Columbia has a highly educated workforce that is prepared to take up the challenge and capitalize on the opportunity that transitioning to a 21st century economy presents. We have beautiful cities that talented individuals from around the world want to live in and the potential to increase our renewable energy production to support companies striving to lower their carbon footprint.

While it is easy to talk about these concepts theoretically, it was a great pleasure to see them in action when I visited Hootsuite headquarters in Vancouver last month. Hootsuite is a program that allows people and businesses to manage their social media programs across multiple social networks from one integrated dashboard. In essence, it organizes your social media presence, say on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, onto one screen that allows you to monitor and post content efficiently.

Hootsuite has grown incredibly fast since it was founded in 2008. When it first began the average employee age was 26. That has increased slightly over the years, of course, and with a global staff of 800 and counting the average age is now around 36. It is a young, energetic company that supports the community they have created and the values they share. The health and well-being of Hootsuite employees is clearly a priority and their Vancouver offices have a gym, fitness studio, music room, and nap room, which staff are free to use any time of day or night. There are yoga classes held in the studio five times a week and employees are encouraged to ride their bike to work. A healthy work-life balance, they say, is key. Not surprisingly, they also have a 96% employee retention rate.

Along with caring for their staff, Hootsuite also tries to contribute to the larger community. They hold 200 events, workshops, and lectures annually. Millions of non-profits and small businesses are provided with discounted services and training to help them maximize their social media impact. Hootsuite has provided free social media education to thousands of students through their Higher Education Program and Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes co-founded The Next Big Thing, a nonprofit foundation that “empowers young entrepreneurs with the peer and mentor network, alternative education, work space and technology they need to succeed.”

Having a minimal environmental impact has been foundational to Hootsuite since the beginning. Their office is largely paper-free, they use energy efficient appliances and lights, have teleconferences to reduce travel emission, source the food (and beer) in the kitchen locally when possible, and have a workforce that largely commutes by bike or transit.

Hootsuite tries to look at business more holistically than just revolving around shareholders, they say, which in turn, actually creates more value for shareholders. A recent milestone in their quest to use business as force for good, Hootsuite is now a certified B-Corporation. There are currently over 1,300 certified B-Corps across 41 countries and 121 industries that are leading a global movement to redefine success in business by voluntarily meeting higher standards of transparency, accountability, and performance. B-Corps aim to use business as a solution for social and environmental problems.

I asked representatives at Hootsuite if complying with the rigorous B-Corp standards for environmental and social excellence was difficult for the company, but they said “actually, we were already meeting a lot of their requirements.”

They began measuring their environmental footprint across all offices, implemented emission reduction plan, and evaluated the diversity of their workforce. After all, they said, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure and the B-Impact assessment compels companies to identify areas for improvement. It provides guidance for what companies  should pay attention to.”

Hootsuite is setting a wonderful example for businesses in B.C., demonstrating that companies do not need to compromise their environmental and social values for the sake of their bottom line. “We became a B-Corp because we were looking for a way to measure our impact and see how we stacked up against other socially conscious companies,” said the company’s CEO.

As we transition to a diversified 21st century economy, I hope more B.C. companies will follow suit and be supported as they align with this admirable business model.

This is the second in our series highlighting innovation and creativity within our region’s business sector.

Transitioning to a green economy, one in which businesses prosper symbiotically with the environment, is a concept that has proven easy to romanticize, but difficult to bring to fruition.  The cost and logistics of making environmentally friendly adjustments to an established operation often seem prohibitive to business owners. On top of that, the specialized knowledge needed to tackle challenges like reducing a cooperation’s carbon footprint, water use, energy consumption, or waste output can be overwhelming for people already balancing a full schedule and a tight budget.

Helping businesses navigate these obstacles and reach their goals – from local sourcing to increasing efficiency to carbon neutrality – is an ambitious small company called Synergy Enterprises, founded in 2008 in Victoria by Jill Doucette. Jill grew up in Grand Forks, a community of 4,000 in the interior of B.C. built largely on farming and family-run businesses. At 17 she came to Vancouver Island to study biology at the University of Victoria. She was off to a strong entrepreneurial start when, shortly after moving here, she decided she would start a house painting company to pay for school. Jill organized contracts during the school year and spent all summer painting. Still a teenager, Jill was working 100 hours a week, had 17 employees, and was saving enough to finance her degree.

While at UVic Jill took a course on climate and society. It was during that class, she said, that she decided “if you’re going to do business, it has to be a business for good.” She took every environmental elective she could find and volunteered with organizations she admired in an attempt to learn as much as possible. After going to Japan for the World Student Environmental Summit, an experience she said gave her a global perspective and really stressed the need for environmental action in the business sector, she learned how to calculate carbon footprints and got to work. She developed a carbon footprint report format that she used to tell companies what their total emissions were, where they came from, and how they could be reduced. Black Stilt Coffee (now Hillside Coffee and Tea) was the first business Jill made carbon neutral – and the first carbon neutral coffee shop in B.C. She helped them reduce their energy use by 20%, shrink their carbon footprint by 66%, divert 98% of their waste away from landfills, and saved the business far more than they invested in the process.

From a marketing perspective the shift was hugely beneficial. Jill measured customer loyalty and staff retention throughout the transition and found a twofold increase in both. Staff stayed twice as a long, no small feat in the restaurant industry, and they no longer needed to advertise to attract new customers – now they had a story that people wanted to be a part of. Figure 1: Synergy’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report for their client Monk Office, a company that reduced their total emissions by 79% between 2007 and 2012.

Since then, Jill and her team have worked with dozens of other companies from a wide range of industries including The Bay Centre, The Village Restaurants, Eagle Wing Whale Watching Tours, Cascadia Liquor Stores, Canoe Brewpub, Big Wheel Burger, Habit Coffee, and Monk Office. Jill has also been involved in the design and direction of many local non-profits such as the Food Eco District Restaurant Society, an organization of sustainable restaurants in Victoria, the Vancouver Island Green Business Certification program, a sustainability certification program used to evaluate and verify environmentally friendly businesses, Synergy Sustainability Institute, the non-profit branch of Synergy Enterprises that develops sustainability initiatives, and she launched the Vancouver Island Green Economy Hub website to help people find companies and initiatives working to build a green economy on the island. In addition, the proceeds from her two books, Greening Your Office: Strategies That Work and Greening Your Community: Strategies for Engaged Citizens, go to supporting local environmental non-profits.

Synergy’s innovative and enthusiastic approach to creating a green economy in B.C. has helped dozens of local companies reduce their impact on the environment while being mindful of their bottom line. Using data and metrics to quantify a business’s operating practices and their potential for change, Jill and her team take a business perspective to environmentalism. “We appreciate a business’ constraints and work within them,” Jill said.

Transitioning to a green economy may be a daunting concept, but Synergy and their clients are proof that it is not only possible, it’s already happening.

Figure 2: Jill, far left, at the 2012 Eco Star Awards with Synergy’s clients Agenda Office Interiors and Oughtred Coffee & Tea.

Building on the success of our Celebrating Youth in Our Community series, we’ve decided to initiate a series highlighting innovation and creativity within our region’s small business sector. This is the first of our series where we celebrate an innovative partnership between Russell Books and local schools.

Meeting at the sunny entrance of Russell Books, I joined the store’s manager, Andrea Minter, and very passionate group of teachers and parents to discuss their vision for inspired book fairs in Victoria schools – fairs that move beyond the corporate Scholastic model to integrate student’s interests with a small local business and sense of community. Sarah McLeod (a constituent of OBGH), the teacher-librarian at St. Margaret’s School currently doing her Master’s on the transformation of libraries to learning commons, Jennifer van Hardenberg, the communications coordinator for St. Margaret’s School, two of their Parents’ Auxiliary members, Victoria Davis and Stephanie Neilson (a constituent of OBGH), and I sat amongst great literary company in the vintage books section while they told me about the budding partnership between Russell Books and local schools.

Russell Books was started by Andrea’s grandfather, Reg Russell. He was a banker, she explained, with a book collection that outgrew his home. Andrea’s grandmother suggested he take all his books and open a small store and, in 1961, Mr. Russell did just that, starting with a 300 square foot book shop in Montreal. The store packed up and moved to Victoria in 1991 where it was run by Andrea’s parents. It has continued to expanded from its humble beginnings and now consists of 16,000 square feet of new and used books, all managed by Andrea and her husband.

Fed up with plastic book fairs that seemed designed to push stuff on their kids instead of celebrating the joy of reading, Sarah and Andrea joined forces to host their first-ever non-scholastic book fair at St. Margaret’s elementary school, building off similar fairs Andrea had hosted at Sir James Douglas where her children were students. On all levels, they said, it was a huge success. “We wanted to start slow,” Andrea said, “to make sure we were doing it right.”

“There is waste [associated with Scholastic fairs] and the books are also quite expensive,” added Sarah describing the metal boxes that would follow the shiny pamphlets to her library, chock-full of individually wrapped erasers and posters. “Russell Books provides a variety of prices [$2-20], a sense of community and warmth. It’s just a different feeling.”

70% of the books at Russell Books are used and readers can swap them back for store credit at the store once they are done, an element that provides students with a valuable lesson in sustainability and sharing.

The team working to grow and expand Russell book fairs to more schools is keen to keep kids involved. Over the past few years, the weeks leading up to their fairs are spent exchanging countless emails and phone calls about special books students are hoping will be at the fair.

“It’s all about forming connections and relationships – connecting the virtual and physical worlds found in stories, connecting schools with their community, connecting kids with books,” said Sarah.

Students have been engaged and excited about the fairs, and so have the staff at Russell Books. Before we wrapped up our meeting I asked Andrea what their capacity for expansion would be if other schools came forward interested in collaborating for their own fair, “absolutely,” she said, “we have an amazing staff here and everyone is keen to work at the book fair.” Not to mention they have over a million titles to choose from. The next fair at St. Margaret’s will be at the end of this month, coinciding with grandparent’s day.

It’s exciting to envision the potential whereby local booksellers partner with local schools to host book fairs that cater to the specific interests of our school communities. Thank you Russell Books for being an innovator in this regard.

Related reading on St. Margaret’s website.