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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JUNE 2014 BCBusiness 43 bcbUsiNEss.cA 20 per cent a year—a figure he expects to rise to 40 per cent annually in 2015 and 2016, when and if the LNG projects get the green light. "The key for a smaller contractor is to live within your means," says Forrest. "The massive construction companies will come in and bring three, four, five thou- sand men—but ourselves, being here for 40 years now, we have to bite off what we can chew. After construc- tion is finished—when Alcan is finished and they need a transformer changed—they're not going to call back 3,000 people. They're going to rely on the local resource to still be here." I n t he tow n cent re, another small business is feel- ing the impact of the boom. Vitality Spa and Clinic opened nine years ago in the mall, before moving next door into an expanded 4,000-square- foot stand-alone location. The launch came literally on the eve of Eurocan's mill closure, which threw 535 people out of work. "That was our biggest moment of hesitation," says Andrea de Sousa, the petite 32-year-old owner of Vitality, her four-year-old daughter, Evelyn, in her arms. "We had already made the invest- ment and were ready to open this place." Business at first was slow and steady, but since the Alcan modernization was announced—and with the arrival of advance teams for LNG—things are tak- ing off, with growth in the past three years of 35 per cent. While the clientele still skews female, because of Alcan's generous benefits plan there are a lot more men coming in from the camps for therapeutic mas- sages. The demand for registered mas- sage therapists exceeds supply. "We'd love to bring on another RMT," she says. "Including myself, we only have two full-time and one part-time." In the past couple of years the spa has added a naturopath, acupuncturist, four estheticians and, as of this spring, a chiropractor shared with nearby Ter- race. The Vitality gift shop opened in the fall. The spa is now open on Sundays as well, to accommodate work- ers with only that day off. There is also talk of launch- ing men's-only events at the spa, including one timed to the next Super Bowl. K itimat's growing pains are being felt well beyond the district's boundaries. In Terrace, 60 kilo- metres to the north, Mayor Dave Pernarowski, a former banker, explains how his community of 12,000 is coping with the change. "When I moved here, it was at the absolute lowest possible moment for this community in terms of loss of mills and people moving out of town," says the 54-year-old native of Rivers, Mani- toba, who came to Terrace nine years ago to manage the local Scotiabank and entered politics a year-and-a-half later. "Our school system went to a four-day school cycle, because there weren't enough students and teachers to accommo- date anything more than that. It was a depressed community—not only eco- nomically but also in spirit." We're meeting in Zan- der's Coffee Shop in down- town Terrace, amid Lululemon-wearing moms and hirsute hipsters on their lap- tops: the scene might be straight from a Yaletown café. Terrace is the regional service centre for northwestern B.C.— where people from Kitimat and Prince Rupert come to shop and, increasingly, where people squeezed out of Kitimat real estate live. It too is buzzing, thanks to Alcan and the LNG projects. "Kitimat and Terrace are so closely linked. We have families who work at Alcan living in Terrace—I think it's 400 families," says Pernarowski. "So we rec- ognize the role Terrace has played over the years as a fairly significant service hub. We have the big-box stores here, main street Spa owner Andrea de Sousa with her daughter, Evelyn. p36-49-Kitimat_june.indd 43 2014-05-01 1:30 PM