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
BOTTOM: ROBIN NUBER 58 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023 3 3 UNDER S A B R I N A R A I AGE: 29 Accounting faculty, Kwantlen Polytechnic University; sessional faculty, UBC Sauder LIFE STORY: When Sabrina Rai says "education is really important to me," it's easy to believe her. After graduating from UBC Sauder, Rai, who grew up in Prince George and Abbotsford, went on to a master's in accounting at the University of Saskatchewan while getting her CPA designation. Eventually, she got a job at accounting firm KPMG, where her goal was to differentiate herself. "A lot of students go through the same program," she says. She set out to learn more about AI and data analyt- ics and became one of the leaders in KPMG's digital community. She felt like she wasn't progressing as much as she wanted to at the company and parlayed her master's degree into teaching jobs at both Kwantlen Poly- technic University and UBC Sauder, where she's spent a good amount of time developing courses around data analytics in accounting. Rai recently returned from a trip to India where she spent two weeks teaching 150 female MBA students through a program with Global Affairs Canada. Rai is also one of the faculty leaders of the LIFT program at Sauder where she works with entrepreneurs in Kenya. "With COVID, we had a lot of challenges and couldn't travel to Kenya, but we've expanded the program quite a bit and reached out to more than 300 entrepreneurs, provid- ing them with basic business skills." BOTTOM LINE : Rai teaches roughly eight-to-10 courses a semester and strives to create a mentor-mentee relationship with her students. "Yes, I'm teaching them financial accounting, data and analytics, but at the end of the day, students are going to come away with a connection." –N.C. R Y L E A H R E S L E R AGE: 29 Founder, Ryleah Shae Creative LIFE STORY: Ryleah Resler thought she had found her dream job at a Vancouver startup that represented designers—until one day she woke up in a panic and was convinced she had to quit. "I had a gut feeling... I woke up from a dream and was like, Quit your job now!" Resler remembers. "I loved that job, so I was like, What, that's so silly. But I ended up quitting by noon—it was just in my gut." Fast-forward two months later and her old boss had stopped paying employees. Resler, originally from Edmonton, had no backup plan but ended up merging her education in interior design with her experi- ence in hospitality and joined the burgeoning field of event design by starting her own firm, Ryleah Shae Creative, in 2017. "In [interior design] school, they were constantly saying, You're just going to be Auto CAD monkeys, don't expect to do anything but be on a computer for the next 10 years," Resler recalls. "I was like, Hah, I can't do that. I'd been a server for 10 years and found this niche pocket and haven't looked back." Resler explains that, "any time a client needs to physically touch or interact with a brand, that's where I step in. Event design used to be something that the planners were involved in—flowers, décor, etc. But with social media, event design took on a world of its own; people needed to hire someone who specialized in that full-time. It became a bit more in-depth, working closely with marketing teams to make sure the brand is staying true." BOTTOM LINE : Resler has worked with some 35 brands, including names like Lululemon and Bosa Properties. She recently got the keys for a new 800 sq ft studio in East Vancouver where she has plans to build more designs and host her own events and small concerts. –N.C.