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/1494678
ON THE RADAR ( the informer ) A t the beginning of March 2020, Jeff Leung was running a thriving bus and shuttle company with $5 million in annual revenue. A month later, with lockdowns in place, he had laid off all of Vanwest Charters' staff and parked all its vehicles. "We went from big and busy to noth- ing overnight," says Leung, president of Vanwest. "I didn't know what I was going to do." A serial entrepreneur—Vanwest was his ninth business—Leung went looking for inspiration and ended up down a YouTube rabbit hole. "All the 'what to do with your life' videos said to turn your passion, your hobby, into your business," he says. "I love to fish." Three years later, Leung's Westcoast Fishing Tackle is hooking avid fishers and gob- bling up retail shelf space across British Columbia. Leung credits a lot of the company's growth to timing, but his suc- cess also offers lessons for any small fish finding themselves swimming in a big pond. "It's hard to break into the fishing tackle market, to win the trust of anglers," says Finn Goodlife, a salesperson at Campbell River fishing and hunting shop River Sportsman. "But customers love Westcoast Fishing." Early on in the pandemic, Leung knew he wanted to start a fishing business of some kind, but it was through bing- ing Gotham Garage, a show about a California car shop that does custom paint jobs, that he found his niche. He was going to make custom fishing lures. The only problem: he didn't know how. So, back to YouTube. "This is the first time in history that we have the abil- ity to learn any skill we want without having to go to school," says Leung. In his garage/fac- tory/office/warehouse, Leung watched DIY videos on how to make the lures, how to paint them, how to set up a Shopify store and how to use social me- dia for marketing. "It was exciting for me to figure it all out for myself," he says. At the same time, he no- ticed that, like in a lot of stores, the shelves at his local fishing Hooked on Passion When the pandemic left him out of work, Jeff Leung waded into the sport fishing industry and caught a lunker by Ryan Stuart R E C R E AT ION TOP: ADAM BLASBERG; ON THE RADAR: ISTOCK BIG FISH Jeff Leung delved deep into YouTube to break into the fishing tackle market MARCH/APRIL 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 15 SOMETHING'S FISHY 152,042 Number of annual adult salt- water fishing licences issued in British Columbia from April 2021 to March 2022 Up 23.8% from 20 years prior and 17.6% from 10 years prior 9,722 Fishing-related employment (primary harvesting, processing and aquaculture) in B.C. in 2020 That's the fourth-highest in Canada, behind Nova Scotia (18,220), Newfoundland and Labrador (13,565) and New Brunswick (11,229) $498 million AMOUNT SPENT ANNUALLY BY B.C.'S FRESHWATER ANGLERS, ACCORDING TO A 2019 REPORT CAPTURE FISHERIES IN B.C. BY REGION, AS OF 2016: Vancouver Island/Coast: 143 Mainland/Southwest: 105 North Coast: 27 Thompson-Okanagan: 7 Kootenay: 3 Northeast: 1 SOURCES: STATISTICS CANADA, BC STATS, FRESHWATER FISHERIES SOCIETY OF BC