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/1501233
TOP: JANICK LAURENT; BOTTOM: DEKKO U STUDIO 32 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023 3 3 UNDER E D W A R D T U N G AGE: 29 Co-founder and CEO, Storagehotel LIFE STORY: Edward Tung has always been interested in tech and entrepreneurship. He started coding at 11 years old, but even before that, when he was delivering newspapers as a nine-year-old, he employed his friends with a portion of his $5 pay- cheque so he could scale the business into neighbouring streets. "I remember doing that and then finishing elementary school," he says. At 16, Tung and a friend started a landscaping business (aptly named Hardwork Yard Work), and ran it for five years. "We started off pulling weeds and mowing lawns, and ended up doing everything from completely overhauling gardens to trimming—the whole nine yards," he says. Tung enrolled at UBC Sauder School of Business in 2011—but between then and graduation in 2016 he became frustrated with having to drag things back and forth from his dorm every year. "Half the items I was moving, I didn't even need to use during the summer," he says. Together with his brother, Jensen, Tung co-founded Storagehotel in 2019. With 10 employees, the moving and storage company helps UBC students stow physical items for fixed periods of time. Tung says that Storagehotel is different from others in the industry because it provides free boxes and tape, and charges by the item instead of by the hour: "We offer on-demand pickup and delivery, flexible storage plans and no surprise pricing." BOTTOM LINE : In its nearly five years of operation, Vancouver-based Storagehotel has served over 5,000 people in B.C. Tung calls his company (which is achieving six-figure annual recurring revenue) "a technology- enabled storage service" because its software can facilitate the entire journey, from building custom storage plans to scheduling pickups/deliveries and organizing inventory. –R.R. R A V E E N A O B E R O I AGE: 29 Owner and CEO, Just Cakes Bakeshop LIFE STORY: As a 16-year- old getting bullied in high school, Raveena Oberoi remembers turning to the kitchen. "I quickly became really obsessed with things like Food Network, Cake Boss and just making anything out of cake," she says. She began Just Cakes as a home business, but after moving to Vancouver to study psychology at UBC, she lost access to a kitchen. So, every weekend, she would commute home to Abbotsford to complete incoming cake orders. A year after her 2015 graduation, Oberoi briefly moved to Paris to study pastry arts at Ecole Bellouet Conseil. Upon returning, she opened the doors to Surrey's first Just Cakes Bakeshop ( JCB) in 2017. It was fast, but not easy. "People didn't take me seriously— [they] thought it was my father's business and just didn't give me the time of day," she recalls. But she's happy she stuck with it, because now Oberoi is a judge on Food Network's Wall of Bakers, runs two JCB storefronts and distributes to over 85 retailers in the province. She's proud to represent the young South Asian community through her brand, and tries tapping into nostalgic flavours with creations like the carda- mom dream mousse. And, as of April 2023, JCB's popular cakes in a jar (the company's "claim to fame," as the CEO puts it) are available at all Blenz Coffee locations in B.C. and Alberta. "I was doing maybe 100 jars a month from my mom's kitchen to now doing close to 15,000 a month just from our one facility," she says. BOTTOM LINE : Since opening its first store in 2017, Just Cakes has scaled to 30 staff and made $2.2 million in revenue this fiscal year. It's known for creating Canada's first cake jar vending machine, the Jar Bar, currently available at Burnaby's Brentwood Mall and Abbotsford's Sevenoaks Mall. –R.R.