BIV at the beginning: two guys walked into a bar

In 1986 I moved back to Vancouver from Victoria, where I had been editing Monday Magazine, an “alternative” weekly newspaper. My plan was to team up with the owners of Monday to launch a competitor to the Georgia Straight. Instead, we started a monthly business magazine, designed to be more street-level and gossipy than the two glossy business magazines of the day, BC Business and Ron Stern’s Equity.

We cobbled Vancouver’s Business Report together month by month out of a shared office in Bentall 2, squeaking into profitability just long enough for my sales manager Bev Geisbrecht to make me a generous offer to buy me out in 1988. (Tragically, Bev was murdered by the Taliban in Afghanistan a few years ago.) That payout was the seed investment for Business in Vancouver.

Like numerous other cities around North America at the time, Vancouver was ripe for a weekly wedge between the monthlies and the dailies. Back then, the frequency of a print publication meant something.

George Mleczko, coming off being general manager at Equity, and I decided to jump in. After spending a year crunching the business plan and chasing investors, we rounded up 42 of them to put up the $1 million we needed to launch. The turning point was a meeting over beer at Shenanigans on Robson with the late Art Rennison. (Vancouver’s Starbucks-style coffee shop explosion was yet to come.) A friend of Mamie Angus, Art was a tall, staunch, straight-ahead engineer who managed Primex, an investment portfolio for a group of his friends and former colleagues at Wesdrill Equipment. A strong supporter of anything local, he (to my amazement) bought in. Like another partner, John Collison, Art later died in a plane crash in the B.C. hinterland.

“Our aim is to provide information not readily available anywhere else, and to make every issue pay off for every reader,” I wrote in the first issue. “FINALLY—THE MISSING LINK” boasted the cover.

To my chagrin, I was in court, utterly exhausted, when that issue was streaming off the Burnaby press owned by one of our investors, Mike Abbott, founder of Buy&Sell newspaper. Art director Randy Pearsall, the only person from that day still at BIV, had worked 24 hours straight to get that issue ready – all paste-up in those days. We had been sued by the owners of Vancouver’s Business Report – my old colleagues – for using a name too close to theirs. If we had lost, we would have had to recall 100,000 copies of our preview issue and print them again with a different name. We dodged that bullet.

We also had the former publisher of BC Business, Joe Martin, breathing down our neck with the first issues of a competing weekly doing exactly the same as us – but without enough financing to last long.

Within months of our first issue in September 1989, we won best publication under 20,000 circulation at the Western Magazine Awards. The plan was working!

Nothing was easy. Our first office was a temporary sublet at 835 Cambie that we shared with Maureen Fleming’s PR business, which regularly attracted her friend and then-Canucks coach Bob McCammon to the office. We were ecstatic to launch the first Forty under 40 in this region, then brought down to earth with a run-in with the Vancouver Club for cheekily listing “must have balls” as their membership criterion in our first Most Expensive Clubs list. We bought more titles, then ran out of money and had to strong-arm our investors for another round. By the time the Madison Group – later morphed into Glacier Media – stepped in to buy out Art Rennison’s investors, we were established and rolling. (I sold my shares in 2006 after I went into politics.)

The new owners and relentlessly hard-working staff have taken the “paper” to ever-more-impressive digital places none of us could have imagined in those days. I remember doing a cover story in the 1990s on then-hotelier Hart Molthagen holding a fax machine – it could actually transmit a document without using a courier!

The real power of this and every business is the people who work there every day and dedicate so much of their lives to making it better. My thanks and congratulations go out to all of them.

I am proud – and consider myself privileged – to still be able to share my views in these pages. When I really think about it, that was a big part of why I got into it in the first place. Happy 25^th, BIV! •

Peter Ladner ([email protected]) is a founder of Business in Vancouver and a former Vancouver city councillor.