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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1498118
MAY/JUNE 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 27 R U N N E R - U P Ami McKay F O U N D E R , P U R E D E S I G N I N C . AMI MCKAY started her interior design business in 2000, when she was in her 20s carrying her newborn around in a sling. "People would look at me with my baby and think I wasn't a serious designer," she recalls, her voice more wistful than annoyed. "I felt that judgment when I would walk into showrooms. And here I am all these years later—that's just life I guess." These days, McKay has three com- panies under the same umbrella in North Vancouver, with the interior design biz operating side-by-side a project and construction management arm that executes the former. A retail store was added to the mix last year to sell both lo- cal and global goods and artisan wares. Originally from Niagara Falls, McKay calls herself a true entrepreneur—"I dropped out of everything I did." That included interior design school and a UBC costume and set design program. But that never stopped her from working in those fields, as she spent years doing costume, set and production design for theatre and film. "I can't believe that after 23 years, I'm still as excited, if not more excited, about everything going on in my life," she says, recounting a path that included living in Alberta for five years where she worked in a fire tower during the summers. "I climbed up there and sat all day and painted, wrote, did all this reflec- tion, read almost a book a day. It opened me up and got rid of all my fears. I'm an interior designer, but I'm also just an art- ist—interior design is my outlet." –N.C. K aren Dosanjh has undoubtedly grown over the course of her 30- year professional career, but the characteristics that led to her first job are still very much intact. As a huge hockey fan raised in Richmond, Dosanjh had the dream of working for the Vancouver Canucks. "In those days, you knock on the door and show up with your resume," she says. After being informed that the team wasn't looking for students or interns, she found another way in. "The founda- tion, the nonprofit, they're always going to take hands. I learned really quickly that to get your breaks, you have to pay your dues." She used that to gain experience and leveraged it into an internship in me- dia relations with the Canucks, where she produced the team's media guide for the 1993-94 season—a memorable one if you were a fan of the club at the time. The local papers covered the project. "That tenacity to never take no for an answer, keep pushing through and creating space for myself where there wasn't space be- fore has stayed with me," Dosanjh says. It's hard to argue with her. After work- ing in communications for a couple of industry organizations, Dosanjh became the marketing communications manager for ISM-BC, an IT services consultancy that was partly owned by Telus. A few years later, Dosanjh played a critical role in setting the company up to be fully acquired by the telecom giant. She ended up spending some 15 years there, be- coming a media spokesperson for Telus. "There was no one who looked like me at that level," she says. After that, she joined a Burnaby-based company called Bit Stew Systems as senior director of marketing and commu- nications. "I walked into a small startup of 20 software engineers in their ski jack- ets," she recalls. "And I'm like, I'm going to help you build your brand." Dosanjh says that, as a female walking into male spaces, she had a lot of skills and talent that they needed. "I helped them build a brand from the ground up," she says. "They had a great idea—the data intelligence platform—and all the brand- ing that came around that, the market- ing, the structure, that was my team." Bit Stew was acquired by GE Digital—a sub- sidiary of American conglomerate Gen- eral Electric—in 2016 for US$153 million. "Early in my career, if you asked me in the late '90s, I tried very hard at that time to fit in, to be like the others around me, to take on more masculine qualities," she says. What I learned over time was to bring my natural, best qualities as a woman to work; things like empathy and intuition, nurturing, being a good men- tor—they made me a better, more authen- tic leader because that's who I am." Currently, she serves as vice presi- dent, marketing and communications, of California-based management con- sultancy OSI Digital and recently wrote a book tracing the origins of the first Sikhs in Canada. When she was originally in talks to take on the role at OSI, she told her hus- band that she was going to ask for it all. "I've been conditioned culturally to ask for nothing and to not raise my voice, so I wanted to go in and ask for everything." —N.C. E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L L E A D E R W I N N E R Karen Dosanjh V I C E P R E S I D E N T , M A R K E T I N G A N D C O M M U N I C A T I O N S , O S I D I G I T A L