BCBusiness

bCbusiness.Ca June 2015 BCBusiness 29 pants out•ts. "I used to think that a good pilot was the one who got you there when no one else would," he recalls. "Pilots were patted on the back for taking chances. It's a fron- tier culture, all about risk-taking." Romantic perhaps, but a sus- tainable business model it isn't. Small f loat-plane operations do almost all their business in a three- month period when the lodges are busiest. (McDougall's original partner left to start a •shing lodge of his own.) And they are aected by downturns in resource industries. "Upstart car- riers eventually die on the vine," he says. "The ones that are still around are just making wages, and at any given time they're pretty much all for sale." The precarious nature of his business was brought home to McDougall in the early '90s when the B.C. lumber industry hit a serious downturn. "The Japanese economy was collapsing and the Japanese housing market with it," McDougall says. "The market for raw logs dropped. A lot of our busi- ness at the time came from tim- ber surveys—taking a f loat plane instead of a water taxi to check out sources of raw logs. That business disintegrated very quickly." McDougall saw an existential crisis looming. "If we were going to survive, we had to make the operation more sophisticated," he says. "We had to take the bush out of it." That meant shifting the business model to scheduled ‡ights. Harbour Air had started that process in 1984 when it began ‡ying regular Gulf Island routes. Acquiring more planes was another key step: in 1986, when Jimmy Pattison's Air BC decided to concentrate on wheeled air- craft (eventually partnering with Air Canada), Harbour Air bought up its ‡eet of nine ‡oat planes. With his lumber industry business cratering, McDou- gall needed a more dramatic shift into scheduled opera- tions. By 1996 they had begun regular ‡ights to Victoria, with Nanaimo added soon after. It was a gamble. "There was an 'If you build it they will come' aspect to it," McDou- gall recalls. "We had to institute a regular ‡ight schedule so that people knew the service was there and they could rely on it, and then hope the customers came." Schedules weren't the only element that needed to be stabilized. There was also the corporate culture. "We had to professionalize," McDougall says. "We had to institute safety management systems." They not only had to change; they had to be seen to have changed. Advertising now trumpeted an airline— not an ongoing reality show adventure, as had been the case. "The pilot used to be a guy in a T-shirt with a ciga- rette hanging out of his mouth," McDougall says. "Now they were in uniform." Along the way Harbour Air has acquired competitors, among them West Coast Air, Cooper Air and Whistler Air. The motivation is not just equipment but access. "Whis- tler Air had the only dock space available in Whistler," McDougall says. "Cooper owned a great facility in Victo- ria Harbour. It made sense." Now Harbour Air has a new business: international consulting. Japan, Bali and in particular China have all sought advice on building up ‡oat-plane opera- tions where airport facilities don't exist. "In China you have cities of millions with no air- ports," McDougall says. "But they have water. It's a way of starting air service quickly without having to build all that infrastructure." Meanwhile Harbour Air planes come and go from Coal Harbour almost as regularly as the SeaBus. "We've become a very important part of the regional transport network," McDougall says. And if Harbour Air had stayed in the bush leagues? "There's no way we would still exist." Creation Technologies BORN AGAIN H ow does it feel to buy a business and •nd out in the ±irst week that you have just lost your biggest client, half your revenue and your line of bank credit? "Fun!" says Barry Henderson. "I was jump- ing for joy." Henderson, the former president of Creation Tech- nologies, is being serious, mostly. "You never feel more alive than when you're about to die," Henderson says. "It frees you to •gure out what you really want to do with your life." What Henderson wanted to do was build better music technolo y. In 1986 he came west from the University of Waterloo and joined Anatek Microcircuits, a North Vancouver-based manufacturer of hybrid circuit boards. Henderson helped Anatek branch into music equipment with accessories called "Pocket Products" that attached to MIDI keyboards to make them more versatile. After Anatek was purchased by Gennum in 1989, Gennum decided to move most of the company's manufacturing back east. Henderson contacted Geo Reed, an old friend he'd met in a Saskatchewan bible college (then working for Ernst & Young in Toronto) and suggested they buy Anatek's local operation. Henderson sold his house, Reed got a loan from his father-in-law, and they brought THE GREAT TURNAROUND

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