48 BCBusiness october 2016
Morgan Carey
CEO, real Estate Webmasters
M
organ carey had a hard-
scrabble childhood—bounc-
ing from one foster home
to the next. at 15 and a
high-school dropout, he learned his
then-girlfriend was pregnant. "unfor-
tunately most of the people who grew
up like me, their stories didn't end up
so well," he says. Fatherhood drove
carey to pick himself up, return to
school and build a new life for himself
and his new son.
by 21, carey had a university
degree and had stumbled into a job
doing internet marketing. He started
his own
seo business when his
bosses refused to give him a raise,
and real estate clients soon flocked
to him. in 2004, he officially founded
real estate Webmasters to serve
those clients. He describes his first 10
years as a "lifestyle business"—he
didn't expend great effort trying to
grow and didn't hire any managers. in
2010, another life change—this time,
divorce—made carey re-evaluate his
priorities and decide to go full throttle.
today his company employs 140
people in nanaimo and has revenues
in the tens of millions. –D.H.
J
ohann Starke's digital agency FCV Interactive
has blossomed from a humble start in 2005.
For the company's rst nine months, Starke—
a Rust Belt transplant from Youngstown,
Ohio—toiled alone in his Yaletown apartment
delivering digital strate‹y and other technolo‹y
consulting services. Within months, he had hired
a designer and developer but was still taking the
trash out himself on weekends.
Nowadays,
FCV o™ers a menu of services that
rivals a Chinese restaurant's in its breadth: web and
mobile application development, technical architec-
ture services, systems integration, quality assur-
ance, organizational design, service and product
design, prototyping, data analytics and measure-
ment, customer experience, brand identity, content
strate‹y, user interface design and much more.
FCV has 140 workers in oªces in Seattle,
Washington, D.C., Victoria, Toronto and Halifax.
The quality of the company's work has attracted
a growing roster of corporate and government cli-
ents, including Nike, Inc., WorkBC, the Vancouver
Canucks and
ICBC. —Dee Hon
Johann Starke
President and CEO, FCv Interactive
r u nn e r - u p
r u nn e r - u p
WINNER
M a r k E T I n g T E C h n O L O g y
