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.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1406705
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 77 a look at a studio space advertised on Craigslist. While some retailers had shuttered stores and focused on online sales, Daub + Design went the other way, taking advantage of a soft rental market to establish a streetfront outlet that opened this June. That meant hiring new staff; Daub & Design now has three in the Vancouver store and two working the digital channel. Will Soukoreff go back to flogging her wares at craft shows? Perhaps Circle Craft in Vancouver and the huge One of a Kind show in Toronto, she says, but running a store is a full-time proposition; she sees that and online as her main sales channels going forward. "Staying home and having a routine is great. I think my days of travelling every other weekend are done." A C C E L E R A T I N G M A R K E T S H I F T S An important consideration for companies forced to fundamentally alter their business models is whether the changes in consumer behaviour wrought by COVID will linger after public health orders have been rescinded. Before the pandemic, Raging Elk Adventure Lodging in Fernie served an international cli- entele of mostly young budget travellers, sleeping 49 on a single floor. COVID didn't force the hostel to completely close—there were still willing guests coming out from Calgary for a few days at a time—but it meant only one customer in a room designed for four, six, eight or even 10—giving the whole establishment a capacity of just six people. Given that each guest now effectively got a private room, the Raging Elk hiked its prices for a night's stay from $30 to $50, but that wasn't going to make up for the revenue shortfall. So staff started researching ways to make the hostel not only compliant with the public health orders then in place but also appealing to travellers wary of infection even after the COVID threat had subsided. They noticed the trend in Japan of self-contained individual hotel pods—smaller and more affordable than a hotel room but with their own elec- trical outlets, dimmable lighting and so on. In March of this year, the Raging Elk began ripping out the old dorm rooms in time to reopen for Canada Day. Now there are 24 beds, half as many as before, in self- contained pods. The Raging Elk opted to maintain its private-room pricing. "It is more expensive than a dorm bed, but you get more," explains general manager Sadie Howse. So far, the guest feedback is positive, and Howse is looking forward to international borders open- ing in the fall. The real test will be winter, peak season for recreation in Rockies. Howse thinks the private pods will appeal to a slightly older single traveller, in their 30s and 40s, compared to the bunk-bed format. H E R D I M M U N I T Y For some businesses, survival wasn't something they could do alone; they needed their whole industry to make it through. Such is the case in the meetings sector, which depends on businesses and associations continuing to view B.C. as an attractive site for conferences after COVID worries recede. The grounding of international travel "immediately meant the can- cellation of all of our business," Jennifer Burton says flatly. Her com- pany, Pacific Destination Services ( PDS), was a boutique event planning and incentive travel company catering mainly to U.S. companies and associations. After help- ing clients rearrange previously scheduled meetings in the spring of 2020, PDS staff held a brainstorming meeting. They decided first to retrain the firm's event production department in virtual meetings. Later in the year, PDS succeeded in staging a global virtual conference as well as a one-day speakers series. It also drilled down on small-group events for Canadian cli- ents at off-the-beaten-track destinations like Nimmo Bay Resort, Sonora Lodge and the Wickaninnish Inn. But PDS owner Joanne Burns Millar had a bigger ambition: to be part of the solution to the plight the meetings and events industry found itself in. She formed the BC Meetings and Events Industry Working Group, a coali- tion of event planners, venue operators and service providers dedicated to getting the sec- tor back on its feet. The group worked with the Office of the Provincial Health Officer to create operational guidelines that have since been adopted in other provinces and devised a restart plan for when immunization could permit events to proceed. As a side benefit of its work with health authorities, PDS was invited to help support vac- cination clinics in different health regions. In the Lower Mainland, it helped set up and staff four ongoing clinic sites with parking attendants, patient service reps and other non-medical staff. In the Interior and Northern Health regions, it provided logistics for travelling clinics— everything from community outreach before SMALL CHANGE In Fernie, Raging Elk Adventure Lodging installed Japanese-style hotel pods BCBUSINESS.CA