BCBusiness

25 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M AY 2 0 24 W hen Angela Doro was embarking on a career after graduating from SFU in the early '90s, she thought she'd like to get into HR. The problem was that HR as we now know it didn't really exist yet. "There was a personnel department that typed up paycheques and hired people, but the psychology of it was sort of emerging," she says. In one of her first jobs out of school—as an executive assistant— Doro started talking about some of the industrial and organizational psychology practices she had learned about in university. "The president said, 'Why don't you start bringing some of those things into our busi- ness?' I got some certifications and got involved in developing people." She left that job in 2007 (as HR director) to join Langley-based Freybe Gourmet Foods as its director of orga- nizational development. Eventually, she oversaw the brand, operations and marketing departments before becoming president in 2021. Food manufacturer Freybe has around 450 employees and Doro oversees the brand side of that and its 75 or so staff. "I'm most proud of bringing a strong mental health culture to the company, prior to it becoming a thing that people talked about," she says.–N.C. ANGELA DORO PRESIDENT, FREYBE GOURMET FOODS A fter graduating with a bach- elor's degree in international business from the University of Alberta, Shelley Gray headed west to Vancouver, where she got a job as the director of business develop- ment at Canada 3000 Airlines. "I landed in a leadership role right out of university," she says. "The one thing I know how to do is lead." Though Canada 3000 went out of business after 9/11, Gray found leadership roles at both Yellow Pages Group and SkilledTradesBC, where she started as director of customer experience and was promoted to CEO in 2018. The organization has about 170 employees and works to advance the province's trades training system. "It's a complex stakeholder environment—I was told that before I came into the role," says Gray. "There are very diverse opinions about the work we do and you're always managing those tensions between employers who want people to spend the minimum amount of time in school while getting the maximum benefit and training providers, union folks, multi- ple layers of government. It's about coalescing, finding common ground, consensus building and moving things forward."–N.C. SHELLEY GRAY CEO, SKILLEDTRADESBC R U N N E R S - U P Following that, Jarrett held a number of man- agerial and executive positions in the industry, including director of operations for the Fairmont Empress and general manager of both Osoyoos- based Watermark Beach Resort and the Royal Kelowna, as well as board positions with Tourism Victoria and the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association. In February 2020—a month before the pandemic—she accepted the role of president and CEO with the Vancouver-based BC Hotel Association. (And you thought shag carpets were going to be the scariest thing in this article.) "All those skills I developed in my career set me up for the last four years, which have been incredibly challenging but incredibly rewarding," she says. "Every day was a crisis. But the ability to develop relationships and partnerships served us well." The B.C. hotel industry, says Jarrett, hasn't fully recovered from COVID because of the amount of debt many businesses still carry. And while occupancy rates have improved greatly since then, she argues that B.C.'s hotels aren't close to full. "There's no city, town or region in B.C. over the last five years that has been full, except for several days in a row if Vancouver has a huge con- ference," Jarrett says. "In January, Vancouver's average was under 43 percent." That's also part of the argument she offers to Airbnb advocates who are distressed about the new provincial regulations (which Jarrett lobbied hard for) that restrict short-term rentals to primary residences only. "Research showed that BCers paid $3 million in extra rent due to lack of available housing," she says. "I'm not against short-term rentals at all—I stay at bed-and-breakfasts when I'm travelling. But everything shows that if you do what the legislation allows, there will be legal short-term rentals that will grow in the right place at the right time." The BC Hotel Association has eight full-time staff plus a team of contractors, and it oversees some 700 hotels and 300 suppliers. "The industry is so grateful and that's the best compliment that I could ever have," Jarrett says. "Getting a thank you from the people that we're doing all this work for is so rewarding. It's an incredible feeling."–N.C.

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