BCBusiness

BCBUSINESS.CA APRIL 2019 BCBUSINESS 31 W I L L S O N C R O S S Co-founder and CEO PATTERN LABS AGE: 26 LIFE STORY: Willson Cross calls his latest venture a startup lab. Launched late last year, Pattern Labs is a Vancouver-based fund that tests consumer technology ideas in indus- tries from travel to home services to food. "We will build an enduring com- pany around the winner, and that's a product that will improve the lives of millions of people," Cross says. The Vancouver native attended New York University's School of Professional Studies, dropping out after his third year to join Shoes.com back in his hometown in 2016. Before the e-tailer went bankrupt, he left his job as a product manager to co-found GoFetch.ca, an online platform offer- ing dog walking, daycare and other services. The company, which raised $3.4 million in funding and grew to some 45 employees and more than $1 million in annual revenue, was acquired by pet-tech player Future Pet Animal Health last spring. BOTTOM LINE : Pattern Labs, which employs about a dozen people, has closed a pre-seed funding round led by Silicon Valley investors. –N.R. A N D R E W H A N S E N Founder and CEO SITE MARKETING PARTNERS AGE: 27 LIFE STORY: Rather than follow his dad and his twin brother into medicine, Langley-raised Andrew Hansen earned a business administration degree from Trinity Western University in 2013. Soon he was an operations manager for the resources and transportation division of Vancouver-headquartered construction giant Ledcor Group. In 2016, he left to become VP business development with Surrey-based marketing firm Agency Media. Hansen noticed that no agency specialized in the industrial market, which he defines as "blue-collar"– everything from construction to mining. So last spring he launched Site Marketing Partners, using his construction network to land some clients. Specializing in an industry he and his team understand gives Surrey-based Site a big advantage over other firms, explains Hansen, who bills the company as a hybrid marketing agency, management consultancy and investment firm. "We can step into any construction client and we'll know their business," he says. "We can walk in there and we can shoot a video the next day." BOTTOM LINE : At any given time, Site has 25 to 30 clients, most of them on retainer. B.C. customers include Frazer Excavation, Ledcor and construction software startup SiteMax, and the 10-employee com- pany sees opportunities in Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle and Toronto. Site is also building a fund to help clients with matters such as mergers and acquisitions, Hansen says. –N.R. C I C E L Y B E L L E B L A I N CEO CICELY BLAIN CONSULTING AGE: 25 LIFE STORY: When Cicely Belle Blain launched her Vancouver-based diversity and inclusion consulting business early last year, she quickly attracted customers, thanks to con- nections she had made as an activist. Changing attitudes helped, too: "My clients are from so many different industries, and it's great to see how people value building more inclusive workspaces and more respectful environments," says the co-founder of a local chapter of Black Lives Matter. Blain grew up underprivileged in Southeast London, where at 15 she joined forces with other young resi- dents to secure an $8-million national grant for a local leisure centre that now offers employment training and other services. After winning an International Leader of Tomorrow Award to study at UBC, she earned a BA in modern European studies and Russian in 2016. She often advises organizations that have tried to become more diverse and inclusive but aren't sure how, partly because they lack the tools to measure results. There's some denial in Canada about the dis- crimination that women and people of colour still face at work, Blain argues: "It's systemic issues that we have to recognize that have historically held certain people back." BOTTOM LINE : Blain has worked with more than 50 clients. In B.C., they range from UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health to Electric Company Theatre and e-commerce outfit Elastic Path. She has customers in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea and the U.K. –N.R. F I O N A M O R R I S O N Founder and owner WOLF CIRCUS JEWELRY AGE: 28 LIFE STORY: The name inspires curiosity, and so does its creator. Fiona Morrison was a second-year student at UVic's Peter B. Gustavson School of Business when she learned how to wire-wrap crystals from You- Tube. She started selling her creations to friends and local boutiques under the moniker Wolf Circus. "I was really into wolves, and had this wolf head ring from another designer I was really into," the Victoria native admits, shyly. "And then I put 'circus' next to it because my dad told me that if I start anything in life, it's going to turn into a circus, just because of my personal- ity. I'm always on the go, playing sports, running around, always travelling–that slightly scatterbrained mentality." Morrison wrote her final entrepreneurship business plan for school on the endeavour, moving to Vancouver in 2014 to run it out of a Railtown manufacturing space. BOTTOM LINE : Wolf Circus has 11 employees and sells its products at retailers worldwide, including Simons and Blue Ruby. The company topped $1 million in revenue last year. –N.C. J U A N O R R E G O Co-founder and CEO CUBOH SOFTWARE AGE: 22 LIFE STORY: At 22, Juan Orrego is a serial entrepreneur. Growing up in Barranquilla, Colombia, he sold ice cream door-to-door at the age of five. When he was 17, he moved to B.C. to get a BComm at UVic and started an online jewelry business, paying his youngest sister to make deliveries back in Colombia. His two sisters have since joined him in B.C. Orrego started Cuboh Software as an analytics software firm for res- taurants in 2017 because he couldn't find a company to do an entrepre- neurial co-op with for his degree. The following year, he rejigged it with the help of a new co-founder, Sinan Sari, who had worked for online food order- ing and delivery service Just Eat and had a strong tech background. Cuboh is now a subscription service that helps restaurants streamline online ordering, menu and inventory management, and point-of-sale order transferring by combining meal delivery applications like DoorDash, Grubhub and SkipTheDishes on a single interface. BOTTOM LINE : Cuboh, which was on track to grow from eight to 11 employees by March, expects annual recurring revenue to reach US$1 million in 2019, with a goal of US$5 million in five years. –F.S. THIRTY UNDER THIRTY

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