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/526329
july 2015 BCBusiness 75 BCBuSINESS.CA would aim at a more upscale market with pricier lens technologies.) Several years earlier, Coastal had set up an employee share ownership plan ( ESOP) in which the company matched an employee's purchase of shares. Ninety- two per cent of eligible employees—those who had worked there for six months—had enrolled. Even those making $14 an hour in the warehouse, a board member says, were able to cash out with $50,000 when the com- pany sold. "I don't necessar- ily understand people who always own 100 per cent of the things they're in," says Hardy. "The first time I sold the company it was great for me but no one else. [This time] I liked the fact that we had an ESOP and we could get them all on board." Coastal was gone, but definitely not forgotten. Hardy remembers the early days of going to the bank every day with invoices to pay. Fast-growing busi- nesses need capital, so through Hardy Capital Cor- poration, Hardy now invests in young businesses—between two and three years old—that are growing more than 100 per cent annually, with $10 million to $20 million in sales. Those numbers tell him the market's big and receptive, and by then he can see how the management team is doing. It's also a good time for the kind of advice he got early in his career, from people like Stuart Belkin ( CEO of Belkorp Industries Inc.) and Jeffrey Mason (former CFO of Hunter Dickinson). He generally invests between $500,000 and $5 million, although so far he has contributed $10 million to Shoeme's par- ent company. Two of his more recent investments include Mogo, a "socially responsible" personal lending company, and Payfirma, a platform for online and in-store transactions. After selling Coastal, Hardy turned more of his attention to Shoeme. In July 2014, Hardy Capital acquired the Seattle- based OnlineShoes.com, and in December picked up the St. Louis-based Brown Shoe Co.'s online d iv ision, Shoes.com. These two, along with Shoeme, operate as sepa- rate entities under Shoes. com Technologies, of which Hardy is CEO. Clark is chief revenue officer, responsible for driving growth throughout the organi- zation, and runs the Seattle office. This year Hardy estimates the com- bined entity will net $265 million in sales. The sites follow the Coastal model of customer service, offering more selec- tion than any physical store, free ship- ping and free returns. In Toronto, where Retail, Hardy says, is going beyond the tra- ditional store, which measures itself strictly in sales. He points a few miles north to Venice Beach's Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which calls itself "the coolest block in America"