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.
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50 B C B U S I N E S S . C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 tive. "People in Canada have a very well- balanced view of the world," he says. "Therefore, they learn to appreciate differ- ent perspectives. I can share with my team, for example, cases of very large U.S. com- panies that come to Canada and basically assume Canadian consumers are going to be the same as they are in the U.S. market, and that's not the case." (Durrios declined to target any particular U.S. retailer as an example.) Jodi Evans, vice chair of Deloitte Van- couver, thinks Vancouver ought to be a natural fit for international CEOs. "It's a great city," she says. "We have some great talent. It's strategically located on the West Coast, a gateway to Asia." Still, Evans notes that the city has often failed to keep its talent at home. "We are pretty good at starting companies— environmental, health tech, biotech, ag tech, clean tech. They get to a certain size, and then those companies end up going to the U.S. or to Europe, where a lot of their customer base is. We don't have the same high-level investments coming from the venture community." Durrios says that becoming a Vancou- ver-based CEO does involve particular challenges, one of them being a talent pool that pales in comparison to the U.S. or even Toronto. "It obviously isn't a fair comparison, because Canada is about 30 or 40 million people now and the U.S. is, like, 400 million. You also have a much larger number of startups [in the U.S.]. I think a challenge for Vancouver is finding talent that has that startup experience. A lot of people we have today at Bench are super bright, super smart and genuinely care about our mission and our customers, but for many of them it's their first startup. A lot of what I do with my management team is help educate them on what it is to be the startup, to maximize the potential." Evans also cites the tax issue—for U.S.- based CEO candidates in particular—as a barrier to attracting talent to Vancouver. "People who are building companies can go elsewhere and can get much better tax situations," she says. Hootsuite is a Vancouver-based com- pany that has brought in consecutive international CEOs, evidently to deal with turbulent situations. In 2020, Tom Keiser took over from founder Ryan Holmes. Keiser, the former COO at San Francisco firm Zendesk, then oversaw substantial staff cuts before being replaced in Janu- ary 2023 in favour of Ukraine-born Irina Novoselsky, formerly of Career Builder. According to Evans, Novoselsky is an example of a new post-pandemic phenom- enon in the corporate world—the remote executive. "She's not actually living most of her time in Vancouver, as far as I'm aware," Evans says. (Hootsuite representa- tives declined to comment for this story.) Remote work has taken off in the last few years, Evans says. "You're seeing U.S. leaders coming to Canada but not actually relocating, flying in and out a couple days a week." She cites Lululemon as a Vancouver- based company that has relaxed its rules regarding the location of top executives. "They had a mantra about, 'You have to live in Vancouver,'" Evans says. "Their CEO [Calvin McDonald] came here, most of their executive team is here. But they have had a hard time getting some really specific top retail talent, so they've opened up a little bit for some key roles. It's created a talent pool for them. You can't always attract people willing to move." Nate Kelly is a Vancouver CEO who does not live in Vancouver. As the boss of Miraterra, a company that sells state-of- the-art soil analysis technology to agricul- tural operations, Kelly is usually based in his hometown of Santa Barbara, Califor- nia. While he had been travelling north a couple of days per week, he did recently establish a local base. "I am temporarily renting a place in Birch Bay," Kelly says of the census-designated place in Washington State, about 50 kilometres from Vancouver, "so I can be closer to the team during this critical year." Even so, Kelly doesn't think remote work is a major issue. "I find the remote, hybrid or in-office debate to be a bit silly," I N T E R N AT I O N A L C E O S "PEOPLE WHO ARE COMING FROM A DIFFERENT CULTURAL BACKGROUND OR HERITAGE HAVE HAD DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES. AND IT ALLOWS US TO TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THE NEEDS OF OUR DIVERSE CUSTOMERS, BECAUSE WE'RE SERVING ENTREPRENEURS COMING FROM ALL DIFFERENT CULTURAL HERITAGES AND LOCATIONS. THAT IS A STRENGTH, IN MY OPINION." –J.P. Durrios