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/1471305
A N I L K U M A R AGE: 26 Founder + CEO, Future Tech Transport LIFE STORY: When Anil Kumar was in Grade 1, his older brother was diagnosed with a brain tumour. "He says to me on his deathbed, 'Look, I'm going to die, nothing we can do about it. I need you to stay strong and take care of mom and dad,'" remembers Kumar. His parents were immigrants from India, who both worked minimum wage jobs and, a few years later, when Kumar was in high school, they separated. He got a job at Value Village in East Vancouver at the age of 13 for the employee discount to save his family money on clothes and started working his way up the ladder. After a year at Capilano University, he decided to drop out and "reinvent myself, find my purpose." Kumar started working full-time at Value Village, where he was promoted to the head of donations and eventually became head of warehousing and trucking for the company's flagship location on Hastings Street. That was his foot in the door into the industry of logistics. From there, he worked as a trucking dispatcher at Speedee Transport before launching his own transportation and logistics venture in Future Tech Transport. BOTTOM LINE : Kumar bills Burnaby-based Future Tech as "the only freight brokerage company in the province owned and run by millennials. Our entire demographic is millennials. I don't know of another freight brokerage in B.C. that has that." The company has access to over 500 trucks and does business in both Canada and the U.S. –N.C. 46 BCBUSINESS JULY/AUGUST 2022 Anil Kumar T A L I N E A I N E I N AGE: 29 Co-founder + principal technical recruiter, Invenio Talent Partners LIFE STORY: Taline Ainein stud- ied finance and human resources at Sauder, but by the time she graduated in 2016, she realized that a career in finance just wasn't for her. "I was never excited by the job descriptions or by people describing what their day-to-day looked like," she says. "I noticed myself always being drawn to the recruiter's job there." Landing her first internship at local gaming studio A Thinking Ape, Ainein, who moved to Vancouver from Lebanon at 13 years old, fell in love with tech recruiting. With an inherent desire to create something herself and be her own boss, she co- founded Inveni o Talent Partners with Mathew Low in 2021. The four-member company now partners with high-growth tech startups to help scale teams. Inveni o becomes an extension of its clients, with access to accounts, Slack and applicant tracking systems: "When we sign on a new client, we're onboarded as if we were hired internally to their team," says the co-founder. This way, the recruiter gains an in-depth under- standing of the client's culture, values and needs before placing candidates. For her company, Ainein's goal was to combine internal recruit- ing (which she loved) with agency recruiting (which was too transac- tional for her). As a result, Inveni o charges clients a weekly rate as opposed to following a contingency model where clients are charged a percentage of the candidates placed. "The single most important thing for me was to find a job that I would wake up to on Monday and be excited to go to work for," she says. BOTTOM LINE : In its first year, Vancouver's Inveni o Talent Partners scaled from zero to 12 clients and generated $1.3 million in revenue. Ainein credits the growth to client referrals, most of them being based in the U.S. The company's projec- tion for its second fiscal year (based on the current number of staff and clients) is $3 million in revenue. –R.R. Taline Ainein