Debra Lykkemark, CEO, Culinary Capers
Q: Did you always know you wanted to own a business?
A: I wanted to have my own business since I was 30. I’d been in the restaurant business since high school – I was a hostess and then I got into waitressing and bartending and then management of restaurants.
Q: How did you make that dream a reality?
A: By the time I was 29 I didn’t have enough money for a restaurant, so I decided that I would take over this little coffee shop and I talked a couple of my girlfriends into coming into business with me.
We each put in $5,000, and I didn’t have that kind of money, so I borrowed it from my husband. … That gave us enough money to renovate, and we got a small loan from the bank.
Q: Why did you want to take on that challenge and all that responsibility?
A: My dad was an entrepreneur, and I was the eldest of six kids, so I’m really good at bossing people around. I wanted to be the one that was in charge. I got into management at a very early age; I was managing a boutique leather store when I was 17.
And I really enjoy having staff. A lot of entrepreneurs say, “If I could only do this without staff,” but I love growing a team and love having my staff grow with me.
Q: What has been the most challenging time for the business?
A: The toughest things I’ve been through are times when the business has shrunk. Right after 9/11 I lost half of our business – people were just not coming to Vancouver for conferences, people were not doing home parties, businesses were not entertaining. The toughest thing for me, and I think most entrepreneurs, is when you have to lay off people. Fortunately I did it early. A lot of people I know kept thinking it was going to turn around, and it didn’t and they ended up losing their companies.
Q: What’s one thing you wish you’d known when you started your career?
A: I should have had some kind of marketing plan and I didn’t. I didn’t have any money for marketing, so my business grew slowly over the first five years and it could have grown a lot faster.
Marla Kott, CEO, Imprint Plus
Q: How did you get involved in the business?
A: I joined in 1990, and it was almost an angel investment. The business ended up not doing that well – the bank called me and said, “We want to call our loan.” So I called in a consultant and they looked at the business. We also called Business Development Bank of Canada and they helped us out. Then in 2000 I became the CEO and started running the business, and we started having more successes.
Q: How did the company achieve that turnaround?
A: We sat down and said, “What’s our end goal?” We started to look at who the customers were and what the opportunity looked like and had to start to develop unique products that would be significant to these customers.
We developed a name badge system, and then we hired a PR firm in New York who got us into Fortune magazine. We developed an innovative product, and then we did the marketing in the space to try to launch it.
Q: Do you think your company has benefited from being run by three women?
A: I think the advantage has been in the last few years with the federal government supporting diversity and women as part of that diversity program. The federal government has introduced an American program where you certify a business as a women-owned business. Those certifications have given us a shortcut to selling internationally.
Q: What advice would you give to someone else just starting out in business?
A: I would say one of the biggest advantages you can have is if you join a group that enables you to grow your business, [like] GroYourBiz.
And getting the right bank is important. I think people are scared of banks and I understand that; they even scare me. But I think if you think about banks as the same as any other supplier … you have to go and actually go see three or four banks and meet the managers.
Kriston Dean, vice-president, merchandising and marketing, Purdys Chocolatier
Q: How did you get started in your retail career?
A: I’m a third-generation retailer. Both my grandmother and my mom were retail executives during their career, so I kind of grew up in that environment. Our kitchen table conversations were always about what’s happening in retail and customers and learning about gross margin and how products are costed.
My very first job was fit modelling. When clothes would come in and need to be sized and tried on, I would go in and try them on for the quality assurance team. [Then] I was on a retail sales floor selling clothes.
Q: What’s the benefit of having that kind of on-the-ground experience?
A: There’s no replacement in my mind, especially in retail, to understanding the front-line customer experience and how the two worlds come together.
When you work in a store, you have what the company is telling you – they’re sending you product, they’re sending you floor plans, telling you how to merchandise, how to sell – everything’s coming at you. Then you have the customer, who’s really telling you what they want. Sometimes those two things don’t come together the way everybody planned them.
Q: Is there a time when you had to make a decision about the course of your career?
A: At one point in your retail career, you hit a point where you’ve learned all those different roles and you need to decide whether to continue on the operational side or get into the more creative merchandise side.
It was very clear where my passions were, but … my skill set was really developed on the operational side. So I was very fortunate that I had a mentor who took me under his wing and allowed me to learn and explore the merchandise and brand side.
Q: What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the beginning of your career?
A: When you’re starting off you think everybody’s looking to you to have all the answers, and what you quickly realize is that it’s more about the team around you and developing the answers together.
