BCBusiness

TOP: SUPPLIED BY IGOR TRNINIC JUNE 2017 BCBUSINESS 17 from his colleagues, renting an aordable luxury apartment in the city of Medel- lín and socializing with a group of North Americans. It's exactly the life he imagined in 2015 when he and Danny Kerr founded Break- through Academy, which oers busi- ness training to home-services companies. They designed the startup to be location indepen- dent. Coaches, whose job is to help entrepreneurs in industries such as landscaping and renova- tions improve in areas including planning, budgeting, sales and marketing, consult with clients via the web. Sta use tools like Slack and GoToMeeting to keep in touch. Of Breakthrough Academy's 10 current employees, two work out of Calgary, one is in Victoria and another recently spent three months working in the south- ern French city of Montpellier. "When you're not geographi- cally bound, you're not limited in the talent pool that you're hiring from," Trninic says, add- ing that location freedom is a big perk for potential hires, particu- larly millennials. Temporary relocations— Trninic hopes to visit another Central or South American city in 2018 with a group of his O ne morning in early March, Igor Trninic was setting up interviews for a position in his fast-growing startup, Breakthrough Academy. A key bene"t to joining the com- pany, he told applicants, is the ability to work from anywhere. Case in point: while mak- ing those calls, the 28-year-old was lying in a hammock at a guest house on the lush, rolling grounds of a coee plantation in southwestern Colombia while his girlfriend read by the pool. As he scrolled around on his laptop, a peacock wandered by. "For a long time I've loved travel and enjoying dierent cultures," says Vancouver-based Trninic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia. "When you think of a job with two or three weeks of vacation a year, and you think about the number of years of life you have, you're like, 'Wow, it could be very di˜cult to see everything that there is to see in one lifetime.'" This spring Trninic spent "ve weeks in Colombia away Global Oce Forget working from home. Leading by example, Igor Trninic wants his staff to make the world their desk by Marcie Good WORKPLACE TRENDS employees—goes a step further than telecommuting, a trend embraced by many North Ameri- can companies, including Telus Communications Inc. and even the BC Public Service Agency. However, some organizations have pushed back: IBM Corp.'s new chief marketing o˜cer recently ordered work-at-homers to report to the o˜ce. Trninic says no technolo®y can replace face-to-face connection, and his company plans events for all employees four times a year. He's also building a "proper" Vancouver head o˜ce. There's a downside to work- ing in exotic locales, he admits. In Medellín, which oered an abundance of cheap, high- quality food and a culture that is "known for fun," it was hard to think about work. "You're in this incredibly beautiful place, and there are historic things to be seen. You're in 12 hours of meetings and you're like, 'What the hell am I doing?'" PERKED UP 56% Share of B.C. busi- nesses that say they employ cyber- security measures such as "re- walls to protect data To attract talent, employers are getting more inventive with the benefits. Here's a few you wish you had: • Unlimited vaca- tion: construction e-tailer BuildDirect Technologies Inc., Vancouver • Free trip to Las Vegas for all employees to celebrate meeting annual profitability target: manufac- turer Great Little Box Company Ltd., Burnaby • Daily platter of fresh fruit and veg- etables: health care software developer QHR Technologies Inc., Kelowna • Lunchtime yoga: auditing software maker ACL Services Ltd., Vancouver 93% Share that are con"dent they're eectively pro- tecting customer data LAPTOP OF LUXURY Trninic, co-founder of Breakthrough Academy, working in Medellín, Colombia 160% Year-over-year rise in cybersecurity incidents in Canada in 2015, despite an 82 per cent increase in spend- ing on safe- guards 33 Number of Canadian class action lawsuits pending at the start of 2017 related to privacy breaches

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