Alberta Business Marketing

Boost Employee Morale

In late 2008, the employees at Flextronics, a Calgary manufacturing plant, learned the plant would be closing. It probably seemed that the news couldn’t get any worse. But since the plant had to be dismembered, the 370 employees would be laid off in batches of 30 over the course of five months. Cheryl Bakke Martin, the career counsellor brought in to help, likened the atmosphere to that of a morgue. But with the concerted effort and support of the company’s management, the initial gloom lifted and employees put in their remaining time in a professional manner. If Flextronics could stop the mood sag, any workplace can. Here’s how.

Take a Midweek Break
Morale-boosting strategies in the news range from the prosaic (Friday afternoons off) to the bizarre (office fight clubs). But you don’t need to get fancy. Offer what you couldn’t in boom times: a weekday break. Ashleigh Demulder, Accountemps Calgary branch manager, says the surveyed managers were offering more flexible schedules and holding staff socials or Friday barbecues, and suggests “soliciting ideas from the staff themselves. People like to have input.”

Practise What You Preach
When considering how to conduct yourself, you could do worse than follow the example of General Electric’s CEO. He forfeited a multimillion-dollar bonus last year (yet pushed for his worthy managers to get their bonuses). If you’re asking your staff to work harder, longer and for less money while you’re living like Donald Trump, don’t be surprised if people feel unenthusiastic about their work – and don’t leave your coffee cup unattended either.

Take Care of the Laid Off
Layoffs affect the people who leave and those who remain. Those who escape the pink slip have to deal with the fear of future layoffs and the extra workload placed on a shrinking staff. “When you walk in and you’re anxious and stressed, it changes the atmosphere,” says Martin, the co-owner of EWE Unlimited. At Flextronics, Martin says the managers improved the situation by acknowledging people’s fears, keeping everyone fully up-to-date and offering practical job-seeking tools. Don’t have the money to hire someone to conduct resumé-writing workshops? Step up to the plate yourself, or help find mentors.

Start a Newsletter
According to accounting staffing agency Accountemps, 90% of chief financial officers surveyed had morale-boosting plans in place as of last January. Unsurprisingly, considering the need for many companies to cut costs, few of them included financial rewards. One of the most important ways to boost morale, says Demulder, is also one of the cheapest: enhanced communication. “Without it, people fill in the blanks themselves and may jump to more conclusions,” she says. “Send out more internal memos, hold one-on-one meetings – especially if you see people struggling.” She also suggests a newsletter, which can highlight positives in the company and offer a way to thank employees for their hard work.

Declutter
A messy desk can be a constant source of stress that starts as soon as people sit down in the morning. Georgina Forrest, owner of Smartworks Office Organizing Services, says even if people know the benefit of everything in its place, they probably don’t feel they can justify taking the time to do it. Give them a couple of hours; shut down the office email and phones. “If you can’t close down the whole office or department, I’ve had clients that will close down half of the office,” Forrest says. “It’s worth the time. Decluttering is one of the quickest, easiest, most inexpensive ways to reduce stress and increase efficiency.”

Tags: Action Plan, Management
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How Chickwagon helped feminize the Calgary Stampede

by Stephanie Sparks

Chuckwagon racing is one of a few old-school Wild West events still attracting spectators throughout Alberta. It continues to be a highlight of the yearly Calgary Stampede and, surprisingly, a springboard for an unusual women’s charity. This July’s Stampede marks the 10th anniversary of the Chickwagon!

Foundation for Women, a collaboration that has branded itself in the memories of its founders and helped add a feminine touch to a once-macho Alberta institution.

“How Chickwagon started was really quite amazing,” says founder and race enthusiast Arlene Flock, president of Flagworks Inc. Attending a race with fellow enthusiast Bill Sying, she asked why the boys get to have all the fun. “So Mr. Sying said to me, ‘Why don’t you buy a wagon?’”

After thinking about this remark, Flock decided to gather some women together to sponsor a chuckwagon. “And it would be called – and this little light went on – the Chickwagon.”

Lynda Hay, of TD Waterhouse Investment, was quickly recruited to join. “I had known Arlene Flock from a private club we both belonged to in Calgary. She phoned me one day, and I was extremely busy. I came on the phone and said, ‘Arlene, I’ve got about two minutes – what do you need?’ And she says to me, ‘Lynda, I want to get a group of about 10 women together to buy a chuckwagon. We’re going to maybe raise money for charity, we’re going to have some fun, we’re going to be women networking. Are you interested in putting in some money to buy a chuckwagon? Yes or no? And I said, ‘Sure, I’m in.’”

After hanging up the phone, Hay immediately wondered what she had gotten herself into. “Because these chuckwagons can go for a fair bit of money, and once I give my word, you have my word.”

But the doubts receded and after sponsoring their first pink tarp over a wagon at the 1999 derby, Hay found that Chickwagon was a lot more fun than both she and Flock could have imagined. The group went from adding a woman’s touch to a cowboy’s sport to a series of year-round networking events and a charity for women’s causes.

“We ended up making quite a bit of money through donations and whatnot, so we started the charitable side,” explains flock. Chickwagon began by supporting the University of Calgary’s stem cell research, but now does more work with organizations like the YWCA.

“Chickwagon is not about one story,” says Rita Egizii from the Haskayne School of Business, who was not only Chickwagon’s founding member, but the founding president and first executive director. “It is about a kaleidoscope of stories that all run together.” The one memory that stands out the most for the Chickwagon founders appears to come in the form of a pink chicken costume worn by participants in the Stampede Parade.

“I don’t think you’re a full Chick until you have been in the Stampede Parade,” says Hay, who in her early years with Chickwagon found herself dressed in a pink fleece velour chicken suit and flapping her wings for the parade-goers.

“The Chickwagon experience made an indelible mark on my life in more ways than I can ever count,” says Egizii.

The foundation hasn’t just touched the lives of its members, but those in the community that it has helped over the last decade. Chickwagon has raised $300,000 and has given thousands of hours to its charities. And have you noticed? These days cowboys don’t think twice about wearing pink.

Tags: Agriculture, One of a Kind
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Nothing shines through a bear market like a winning idea

by Fabrice Taylor

Money stops flowing in a bear market but good ideas don’t. Even more than with the large caps, the best speculative stock bargains happen during tough times; a lack of demand forces the sellers of good ideas to lower their prices. The few who have the cash and the courage to invest have better chances of making a score. With that in mind, let’s look at four interesting micro-cap opportunities. The caveat here is that small companies like these, which aren’t profitable and have limited revenues (if any), are potentially very rewarding but also risky.

Our first candidate is Edmonton-based Titan Trading Analytics Inc. (TSXV:TTA), which has been developing automated stock trading software. Taking the software for a spin, I was impressed with the amount of data it can crunch and present to the user to help him or her make trading decisions. In fact, the system can make trades without human intervention, based on a sophisticated series of data points.

Titan’s software can track more than 200,000 data ticks per second per server. The interface is elegant and user-friendly, and presents an array of technical and other analyses that I won’t get into here. Suffice to say that the system gives varying degrees of buy signals and the strongest ones, while more scarce, appear to me to have a high probability of success. Titan hopes to make money by licensing its software to institutions and managing money for third parties.

Next up is Synodon Inc. (TSXV:SYD), also based in the capital and which invented what it calls a remote sensing device for the oil and gas industry. Put simply, the contraption uses a camera, hardware and software to detect natural gas leaks in pipelines, gas plants and city distribution systems. Today gas leaks are located by having people walk around with sensors. (Big leaks in pipelines are inspected with planes looking for brown spots – dead vegetation.) Synodon says its technology is more accurate, faster and ultimately cheaper. You strap it to a helicopter or plane and cover a lot more ground. The company has interested a number of gas transmitters and producers who like the idea of cutting the cost of finding leaks.

Collectively, the industry also wants to stop losing gas. About 2% of produced gas escapes into the atmosphere, which costs producers billions and damages the environment. The return on investment for producers or carriers is excellent if Synodon’s technology works. Does it? I’ve been following the progress for more than a year, and there are very promising signs, including some preliminary customer deals. If the technology, which was acquired from the Canadian Space Agency, does prove itself in this context, it’s not hard to see that the uses are there.

The third idea rests on the premise that natural gas will play a rapidly growing role in our energy needs as we green the planet. Calgary-based Landis Energy Corporation (TSXV:LIS) wants to build natural gas storage in a salt formation in Nova Scotia. The formation is “brined” by pumping water into the dome, dissolving the salt and pumping the salty water out, leaving a huge cavern behind. Fort Chicago Energy Partners (TSX:FCE.UN), the pipeline trust, is a 50% partner on the project.

Landis is well along in its plans; environmental permits are in place and a pilot test confirmed that the formation is suited to storage. All Landis needs is money, but investors want proof that it can come up with customers. I visited the site a couple of weeks ago and spent a long time talking to management, who say they’re close to signing up definitive contracts. That checks out.

The salt formations will earn money two ways. First, customers will lease space to store their own gas in case of outages, which are very common on the East Coast because the supply, such as from Sable Island, is unpredictable. The second is trading gas futures, which, with your own gas in storage, is safe and potentially lucrative, especially in a volatile market like the Eastern Seaboard. I’ve been following this one for more than a year too, and they are getting traction.

Finally, there’s Calgary’s Blackline GPS Corp. (TSXV:BLN), which makes compact GPS locators. The idea is to put them in your car, boat or in your kid’s backpack so you can keep track of the things you love. (There’s also one for monitoring lone workers.) The technology is pretty simple and there are no patents. But it seems effective. For example, if your car moves when it shouldn’t, you get a text message on your cellphone and you can find it with GPS.

What does recommend this idea is the management team, which for the most part is the same group that built and sold BW Technologies for a quarter billion five years ago. BW went from nothing to an industry leader in gas detectors in about 18 years, outshining competitors on costs, efficiency and especially by finding new uses for its technology.

I sat down with the top three executives and found them knowledgeable, hungry and organized. Their enthusiasm is shared by Escort, which makes the top-selling radar detector and which struck a deal to lend its brand to Blackline’s auto tracking device. You can see the thinking that made BW successful at work at Blackline: a knack not for inventing technology but for making it work. That’s no guarantee, of course, but experience counts.

Prairie Trader is an independent overview and assessment of investments available to Albertans. Alberta Venture assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of any stock recommendations. You can send letters about this column to feedback.

Tags: bear market, Personal Finance, Prairie Trader
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Question: What can business people do to reverse the eroding public perception of the free enterprise system?

The Case:
The public image of business, particularly big business, has rarely been so deplorable. While most business people try to make an honourable living by offering products and services that contribute to employment, wealth creation and community development, those who play the capitalist system as if it were a greed-driven game without rules have tarnished the reputation of all enterprises. The sorry record of scams, frauds and consumer ripoffs by everyone from the financial services industry to the electric power industry has attracted a tsunami of government intervention and re-regulation. With the media piling on, legislators vow to break up the “Old Boys club,” where deals made between buddies at the golf club glide through boardrooms with nary a thought to conflicts of interest, or of how close they come to crossing the lines of legal limitation.

The Panel:
James K. (Jim) Gray: a Calgary businessman and chair of the Canada West Foundation
Janet Keeping: a lawyer and president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership
K.C. (Kim) Mackenzie: a professional urban development consultant and CEO of Mackenzie Associates Consulting Group Ltd.

Jim Gray: The vast majority of business people are entirely ethical. On the other hand, there is no questioning the conclusion that a few bad apples have tainted the barrel. We live in an increasingly litigious world, and the unfettered greed that seems to be prevalent these days in a minority of sectors has been just dreadful. It’s brought increased regulation. It runs the risk of stifling competition. We’re getting to the position where governments are going to start picking winners and losers. That’s a terrible consequence of this malaise.

Janet Keeping: My first answer to the question about what business can do is to convey to the public and to government that you and your colleagues in your business are straight shooters and not con artists. I think good business people should be supporting necessary and well-thought-out regulation. Some of the businesses and business people I know have always taken that view. They know a lot about what needs to be done. They know that good regulation is important because it levels the playing field. Then you don’t have other, less ethical operators cutting corners, bringing the whole industry into disrepute and maybe creating another catastrophe like the one in the [global] financial sector.

Kim Mackenzie: I do think that business has been getting a black eye, but I also believe that a lot of it is well-deserved by the system and some of the unscrupulous people that operate within the system. At the base of it, I think it was a distancing of the people who manage large corporations from the people who are affected by what they do, in particular shareholders. …The resulting lack of accountability that occurred as a result of senior management’s being so removed from reality and from the people they’re supposed to be serving left the managers of these organizations operating in a bubble where they didn’t see anything except what worked for them.

The many who are slogging away and doing their own thing according to good rules can be tarnished by the reputation of people who haven’t performed admirably. They can be restrained by rules, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which came in to regulate certain things, and which many business people say, over-regulated in certain cases. [SOX, enacted in the United States in 2002, was a reaction to scandals like Enron and WorldCom. It set criminal penalties for companies and executives guilty of fraud.] It’s an illustration of the rebound effect where the pendulum can swing too far one way toward less regulation, and then it swings back too far, or more than it really needs to in the other direction to the extent that it can be hard on a lot of people who didn’t need to be harmed or controlled.

Gray: Self-regulation has not worked. Everybody is, to a degree, greedy – not necessarily always for money or power, but there is a greed in the human dimension. It gets out of control from time to time, and this time it went way too far, so it has to be reined back in. There’s no silver bullet in all of this. We in business have to be much more effective communicators. We’ve got to participate in the public debate, more than we have in the past. We’ve got to be much more transparent.

Keeping: The thing that strikes me about the great ethical fiascos of business over the last few years is those who say that government should get out of the way, that those problems have been a function of government intervention. It’s preposterous! It’s clear that we were into the world of voodoo financing where anything goes. If you could spin a story and get somebody to buy your “product,” then you made money. What we found at the end of the day was, of course, that the bottom fell out and a whole great big chasm opened up and the world economic system – not all of it, but a lot of it – has sunk down into it.

We’ve been under the influence of a very powerful ideology. The ideology has been grossly mistaken because the ideologues supported unrestrained capitalism. Well, you can’t have unrestrained capitalism. You have to have rules.

Listen to the interviews that shaped this column, July’s Right Call Audio Collection, now.

If you’d like advice on a compromising situation (no names used), send details to feedback@albertaventure.com, or login to this site and post a comment.

Tags: Business Ethics, Fil Fraser, The Right Call
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“Suncor will become not just Canada’s biggest energy company but Canada’s biggest company.”

There are few things more perilous in publishing than putting a big number like $50 billion on the cover. Stuff happens, things change by the time readers get the issue in their hands. (You don’t even need numbers for that. I recall National Post Business running the image of John Roth on its cover as CEO of the Year in November 2000, the very month Nortel Networks began its long descent from a three-figure share price down to the bankrupt penny stock it is today.)

Nonetheless, we wanted to convey, in just a few words, the sheer magnitude of the new Suncor Energy that longtime CEO Rick George has assembled through the still-in-progress merger with Petro-Canada, making him a natural to head up our annual list of Alberta’s 50 Most Influential People. Combining the two companies’ revenues from 2008 produces the colossal sum of $57.6 billion, $20 billion better than Canada’s existing revenue leader, Power Corp. Even assuming the new Suncor divests its non-core assets and oil prices stick to US$60 a barrel, it’s safe to assume Suncor will become not just Canada’s biggest energy company but Canada’s biggest company, a first for a firm headquartered west of Toronto.

Even looking at market capitalization, at the time of writing the two companies consolidated were worth $45 billion and trending upward along with oil prices. So the nicely round, alliterative and eye-catchingly huge number of $50 billion is not so far-fetched and, who knows, could be on the low side by the time you read this.

The whole exercise of naming 50 Alberta residents who have the greatest impact both within the province and outside it is a daunting one to begin with, inevitably inviting the dissent (sometimes outrage) of readers who feel one honouree is unworthy or another individual, overlooked. We had a record number of nominations from the public this year, all duly considered though not necessarily assented to by our five-person editorial panel. The rest came from pointed queries to respected third parties, as well as stories within our own pages and those in the broader media universe over the past 12 months. As usual, we made a point of fielding representation not just from the ranks of business people and politicians but also scholars, writers, artists, athletes, philanthropists, volunteers and community activists. Finally, we double-checked that the achievements of each nominee lived up to their early billing.

In the business community especially, the economic turmoil of the past year has caused many to look for leadership in new – and very often old – places. Feel free to disagree with our choices. Indeed, we encourage it, either by posting a message following the 50 Most Influential coverage at albertaventure.com or by email.

Michael McCullough
Editor

Tags: 50 Most, 50 Most Influential, Editor's Note
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