BCBusiness

September/October - Entrepreneur of the Year

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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component and licensed it out. "We always ran it like our small businesses—made money, hired people, repeat," says Taylor of the beginnings of Jane. "It was really intended to be sort of a side hustle, and then I think when we got to eight to 10 staff, we realized we had to stop our other jobs." The pair worked to make Jane stand out from some of the other options on the market, which Taylor found underwhelming. "It was all very generic, names like Clinic Server, Clinic Master, Practice Mate, Practice Fusion—just two words kind of put together," she recalls. "You'd ask people what they were using, and they wouldn't even know." Calling their service Jane gave it a more personable feel, and the duo combined that with what Taylor calls a clean and attractive customer experience. "The public school system and health care prob- ably have the worst user inter- faces and software out there," she says. "It was very different back then to have a nice design and user experience." One of the first injections of capital into Jane was a $2-million loan from CIBC Inno- vation Banking, something the institution's Vancouver-based managing director, Joe Timlin, calls a no-brainer. "Jane is one of those types of companies we just love," says Timlin, who notes that the business was originally founded by Taylor for her own use instead of being created as a solution looking for a market. "It was also profit- able out of the gate. They put all the sweat equity into it up front and brought it to market where it was almost imme- E N T R E P R E N E U R O F T H E Y E A R 2 0 2 1 20 21 W I N N E R Ray Castelli C E O W E A T H E R H A V E N n Few elections have changed the fate of Canada like the federal contest of 1993, in which the ruling Progressive Conservative Party recouped only two seats across the entire country. The seeds of change planted then are still evident today, as the Bloc Québécois became the official Opposition in their first election and the PCs merged with Preston Manning's Reform Party to create the Conservative Party of Canada we know today. It also left Ray Castelli wondering what to do next. Castelli had been chief of staff to former defence minister Kim Campbell in his late 20s, helping organize her lead- ership campaign after Brian Mulroney stepped down. Ultimately, he served as Campbell's deputy chief of staff during her reign as prime minister. "It was a great experience," says the Prince Rupert native. "I learned about the country, how government and business work. It was fantastic." But Castelli, who had a business administration degree from SFU and was "always more business-oriented than 56 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 diately profitable without a whole lot of marketing, and the physio community embraced it completely." Today, North Vancouver– based Jane has some 50,000 clients around the world and 217 staff. As for what's next, it looks like more of the same in scaling up a business that's seemingly come out of nowhere. "We're building a tool that helps people who are helping people," Taylor says. "Part of joining Jane is you get a software, but you get a whole team of cheerleaders. Our support team is large, and we do a lot of work to try and create actual content, provide an actual solution." Taylor has a great deal of sympathy for those with their own clinics, having experi- enced it firsthand: "We often say that running a small busi- ness is some of the loneliest work and really underappre- ciated—especially as a clinic owner. It's basically unpaid work for the most part, with low margins and usually not a lot of support. This gives them a support system they don't have when they're operating a small business on their own." More than anything, you get the sense that Taylor is still fairly surprised that she's here. And she's now making sure her kids keep their options open. "This business is like climb- ing a mountain in the dark, and you have a flashlight—you can see the next few steps, but you don't know what path neces- sarily is going to take you to the top of that mountain," she says. "We want to always be growing and expanding and offering more and more helpful services to more and more people. That's the big goal." –N.C.

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