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: KEVIN PILAR 62 BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2023 3 3 UNDER A V I H O R W I T Z AGE: 29 President, Sterling Floor & Tile Ltd. LIFE STORY: After growing up in Vancouver to immigrant parents who fled South Africa in apartheid, Avi Horwitz took his talents to Western University, where he enrolled in the school's business program. He dropped out after a year and a half. "I felt lost in the first year of university, and it turned into depression," Horwitz says. He remembers coming home at 19 years old and sitting on the floor of his parents' basement with no idea what was next. In 2016, after a couple stints in the restaurant industry, Horwitz caught on with a Vancouver office furnishing company as a sales associate for its new flooring division. He spent six months there and, as he recalls, the company did $500,000 in that time. "On a macro scale, we were doing a really shitty job, but we were still doing half a million in revenue," he says. "I didn't know what a good job was, but I knew how to not do a bad job; I knew our workers shouldn't get caught drinking alcohol on construction sites, we shouldn't be not responding to emails and we shouldn't fire some of our own clients." Horwitz, 22 years old at the time, had a proposal for the owner of the business: fire his director and give him 50 percent ownership of the flooring division: "He told me to fuck off, so I did." In October 2016, Horwitz started Sterling Floor & Tile. In the first year, the company did over $1.5 million in sales. "In the construction industry, there's a lot of messing around," Hor- witz says. "If you want to mess around and not pay your bills, it's very easy to do. We run our business straight as an arrow—we've never missed a payment or been one day late on any payment to any supplier once in six and a half years, and I wear that on my sleeve. In an industry where everyone is screwing over everyone, people appreciate that." BOTTOM LINE : The company just purchased a massive Richmond office—its fifth move in six years— as rapid expansion continues. Sterling Floor & Tile has some 20 office employees and anywhere from 60 to 80 workers in the field every day. Clients have included Walmart, T&T Supermarket and Arc'teryx. Horwitz sees sales hitting $50 million in a couple years. –N.C. H A N I E H Z A H I R E M A M I AGE: 25 Co-founder and CEO, Edee Care Inc. LIFE STORY: In 2019, Hanieh Zahiremami was visiting her home- town in Iran when she saw a woman at a restaurant fall to the ground and start seizing. As someone who had no idea what seizures were, all Zahiremami could do was panic and yell for help. "But the guilt of not knowing what to do always stayed with me," she says. Five years later, Zahiremami is co-founder and CEO of Edee Care, a Vancouver-based health-tech company leveraging AI, biometric monitoring and behavioural data to help people with epilepsy manage seizures. But the CEO's love for building things goes further back than her degree in mechatronic systems engineering from SFU in 2021—as a child, she says, she loved "destroying" toys and piecing them back together. After that first encounter with seizures in 2019, the Vancouverite did a deep dive on epilepsy and came to learn that her own best friend used to have seizures but had never told any- one because of the stigma associated with it. "People think that you have a problem, whereas you're having a seizure and they just don't know it," she explains. What sets Edee apart from other companies in its space is a focus on detecting, predicting and preventing all types of seizures. "We create a personalized algorithm for [patients] that can really tailor to their triggers and conditions and can help them out in thier own way," says Zahiremami. BOTTOM LINE : Since launching in 2021, Edee (Early Detection of Epileptic Events) has raised $200,000 in capital and partnered with BC Epilepsy Society, a VGH epileptologist and the U.S.-based Epilepsy Foundation to develop its solutions. Its flagship product, IDEA (Interactive Daily Epilepsy Assistant), is a SaaS service that collects behavioural data, sends medication reminders and gener- ates reports for physicians. Edee is preparing for clinical studies and seeking clearance for IDEA and the Edee Sensor (a wearable device) to be able to predict and detect seizures. –R.R. . n