Started at the Bottom, Now I'm Here

There is a quote I love that goes something like, "don't look at the horizon and worry about how far you have to go. The distance is limitless. Instead, look back and see how far you've come".

As we settle into our new office space - our 5th in 13+ years - it's a great opportunity to look back on our early days.

To tell you the truth, the company I bought into and eventually took over had a bit of a complicated structure. The founder decided to open 4 companies at the same time - 3 of which I became a part of and the other, I worked for part-time for several years. Those I was involved with included I.OPT Marketing Groups Ltd. (this stands for Influencing Others Positively Through Marketing), Knew.Age Solutions Event Planning and Tigris Personnel. Both Knew.Age and Tigris were set up as divisions of I.OPT Marketing. We had 3 bank accounts and had to file for 3 companies at the end of the year. Aside from being confusing to people, this was also expensive and inefficient.

Being a young entrepreneur of just 24, the woman who founded these companies and brought me under her wing felt that giving us account management titles representing a division of a company would give off the illusion of being a part of a bigger enterprise. Nobody really knew what I.OPT Marketing did or represented - and nobody knew where we worked. We would meet our client's at their offices to convenience them based on their own schedules and host interviews for new talent in cafes, virtual offices or boardrooms we had rented. We hired regional support in major cities across the country to replicate the same model to find the best and the brightest brand ambassadors to work with us.

If the uncomfortable question came up about where we worked, we would vaguely say "just east of Toronto". As a service based business with no overhead, we didn't really need an physical office space - at least, not for a long time. Like most small businesses, our humble beginnings started in a basement - and in our case - my partner's parents basement with desks shoved up against some 80's style floor to ceiling height wall units as you can see here.

While this wasn't entirely ideal for us (or I'm sure for them), it got us by in the beginning. About a year in, my partner opened an office for her other business. Unlike our 3 businesses, she did need a physical space to meet with potential customers. This company was B2C so it was completely different from I.OPT, Knew and Tigris which were almost entirely B2B. So off to Woodbridge we went for a brief period of time. If you recall, gas spiked at $1.30/L back in 2005. We were feeling the pinch on our pocket books because of the pumps and felt we were wasting a lot of time commuting. After just 6 months, we moved back to her parents house. She kept the office in Woodbridge but it remained exclusively for her other business.

The following year, 2006, was HUGE for us. We actually hadn't paid ourselves for several months - then we landed an opportunity to staff 110 stores for Rogers across Canada for 6 weekends. To this day, it remains the biggest program we have ever booked (at least, under the context of one contract). Thank God!!! We were able to back pay ourselves for all those months we had gone unpaid. At this time, my #1 goal was saving to buy my own house. I had bounced around a lot when I was younger and simply wanted a place to call my own. As you can imagine, this helped significantly and beyond the contract, we were able to put ourselves on salary from that point onward.

My partner was largely responsible for driving business development and recruiting talent while I was responsible for scheduling, creating training packages/post-event reports, bookkeeping etc., I went to school for journalism so outside of my experience working in field, I was basically winging everything we did in the office. I just kept thinking - what would staff need to know to be properly prepared for an event or what would client's want to know about their events. What matters to them? We would build as much as we could around that.

I was also starting to think that it would be REALLY nice to get out of this dark basement; however, it was more important to keep our overhead down and take a salary consistently so we continued to hold off.

As we rolled into 2007, I felt like I was finally in the position I needed to be in to buy my first home - and I did - a great townhouse in Pickering. It was spacious and bright - perfect for a first time home buyer. A week after I had signed off on the property, my partner and I went out for lunch. In short, she dropped a bomb on me. She was pregnant... well, that changes things doesn't it?! While we had been operating from her parent's house for 3 years, with the space in my new house and her unforeseen departure from the company (at least for a little while), it made perfect sense to move the office into my house. We transitioned just 2 months after I had moved in myself.

While the space we had to work with wasn't big by any means, we had room for 3 small desks and it was bright since it was above ground. I also loved the commute - going from 15 minutes to 30 seconds :-) This said, any time I was saving on a drive, I put into work instead.

My partner continued to work up until a couple weeks before her due date. 2007 hadn't quite been the year 2006 had been for us sales-wise. In fact, we would often joke about how the years should've been reversed from the stand point of growth but I guess the meme showing an entrepreneur's journey like a swirling doodle isn't too far off.

With my partner's mat on the horizon, I was excited to hire our first head office employee - Cassandra - one of the wonderful gals from our roster. She was eager, enthusiastic and happy to work from a home office. It's not for everyone but she was totally cool about it. I think she actually preferred it. Looking back, I needed the extra support but it probably wasn't enough. Our sales doubled in the year my partner was off. Since she was still being paid while she was on mat leave, albeit reduced, we didn't want to hire a second employee unless we absolutely had to.

As 2008 drew to a close, my partner began attending a few meetings with me here and there and came back to work 10-12 hours a week. It was evident right away her head and heart weren't into the work like they used to be. She seemed unfocused and I was observing that small tasks that should only take 20-30min were taking 1-2 days... I didn't know what to do but as it turned out, I didn't have to worry about it for very long. We were pitching on a huge opportunity with Koodo Mobile for over 400 stores across the country and while we didn't land the business (they wanted exclusivity which we couldn't offer because of our relationship with Rogers), the opportunity served as a catalyst for a bigger discussion. My partner didn't want to come back to work full-time. Given our growth, I couldn't settle for a part-time partner just 4 years into building the business.

Turns out, she really didn't have plans to come back to work at all. She had already met with our accountant and lawyer regarding the value of our company (I learned later on when I was sent their bills to pay). I was left with 3 options. I could partner with someone new however this would be to her benefit, not mine, as they would have half of our companies and I wouldn't have anything invested in theirs. We could split the earnings and walk away - or I could buy her out. Given the relationships and good will we had built with our clients, I bought her out - as most people know. It took a couple years but I made it happen and had completely paid her out by the end of 2010.

Soon after she left the company, I hired another employee to work in the office. Looking back, I think I must have been a horrible boss. I know I had a bad habit of micro-managing my employees... I found it very difficult to delegate and let go of the work I had been planning myself for the past few years. This employee in particular stayed with me for 2 years but after she left, I started to worry about operating the business from home.

Since we were in a stacked town house, my staff would have access to the rest of the house if I wasn't there. There was no way to separate the space or keep the upper levels independent. It really wasn't something I worried about right away, but when I was looking into a new hire, it became a bigger concern. My significant other was working towards a career in fire and wasn't able to contribute at home very much at the time, so between my personal situation and paying my partner a hefty sum during our buy out, keeping overhead low continued to be a priority.

We started hunting for a new house with a separate entrance to the basement. After a couple months of searching - we found one, just 2 streets away from where we were living and ironically on the same street I lived on in high school. It needs updating however; ALOT of updating. It looked like we had walked into 1975 - complete with lots of wood paneling, peach coloured carpet upstairs, leopard print carpet in the basement and lots of brown accent colour. When we began looking, we hadn't really been looking to sign up for a reno but sign up we did. The house we found was a 5 story back split so it was a BIG reno to say the least.

We took possession in August 2011 and bridged our mortgage so we could renovate and move the office with no down time. We continued to renovate full time for over 4 months after that... heck, it's been over 6 years and we still aren't completely done '-)

The new home office was bright like the last which we loved. It had room for 4 of us rather than 3, it's own entrance so it was separate from the rest of the house, a dedicated kitchen, washroom and meeting space. As far as home offices go, I think it was about as good as it was ever gonna get. And yes, that is my dogs bed in the corner. They would come down to hang out with us occasionally. Who doesn't love a dog friendly office !?!

This spot was definitely an improvement over the last and it gave me the opportunity to keep costs down while saving up to buy our own "real" office. It took some time but by the end of 3 years here, I finally had enough saved to put down on an office.

I found the space of our dreams but given the renovations it would have required, I couldn't afford it in addition to the down payment. It also had room for way more employees than we needed at the time, probably as many as 30, so it didn't make sense. As such, we settled on an office in south Ajax with space for a boardroom, 6-7 staff, main floor storage, a kitchen, 2 washrooms and even an upper level mezzanine.

We moved in February 2015 and one of the first things we did aside from painting, was put in a glass partition to enclose our boardroom. After it was branded, it was truly stunning. I couldn't be more proud of our new spot - our first "real" office!

When we bought the space, my significant other said "aren't you worried you will grow out of it too quickly". At the time, there were 4 of us full-time and I had room to add 2-3 more people. While it was definitely a possibility, I loved the idea of owning vs. renting so I figured I would deal with that when the time came and build up equity in the meantime.

Well, that time passed really quickly. With the growth we were experiencing, it became evident in less than 2 years that we would need to move into a larger space. I found the office I wanted very quickly and decided to transition from a unit I owned to a unit we would be leasing. This proved to be far more trying than expected.

While I found the office we wanted in early December, it took Colliers nearly 4 months to let us know if we could have the space. Apparently one of their existing tenants had expressed some interest in it so we had to sit tight. By the end of March 2017, they finally told us we could have it. This pushed us into a month of lease negotiations then a month to secure the permit for the renos we wanted to do. This included tearing down the walls of 2 existing offices to create a larger open concept space, then enclosing a space at the back into 2 new offices. This would give us room for a team of 15 rather than the 9-10 with the original floor plan. We also chose to shrink the size of the kitchen, making it open concept as well, but more importantly giving us space to build a storage room and a storage closet for our server/phone system. We also built a small coat closet.

Here are a couple of before pictures - one from my first site check then another after the walls had come down.

At the high end, I could envision 5-6 people in the open space, 1 per office and then there was a lot of wasted open space. While it's no issue to take walls down, putting them up is another story since you need to move electrical and HVAC around. When you're renting, you need to play by the book so we had no choice but to get a permit for the work.

As with most renovations, nothing ever runs completely according to plan. There was a change to the building code that requires any new walls being built to have doors that are 38" wide rather than the standard 36" wide. Even though we weren't changing the front door, we had no choice but to custom order 4 expensive 38" doors for the 2 new offices and the 2 storage areas. And of course, these didn't arrive until 1 week after the project was supposed to be completed. I will admit, the irony of having these huge doors inside our office but a standard sized front door was pretty frustrating... gotta love dealing with city permits!

The demolition started at the end of May and seemed to get off to a good start. By the middle of June however, it looked like everything had come to a grinding halt. When I asked the contractor about this, he said they couldn't build walls until the doors came in... this didn't make much sense to me, and even when the doors arrived, he only sent one worker so progress was very slow throughout July.

Our office sold relatively quickly and was originally scheduled to close Aug. 1. We officially took possession of our new office Jul. 1 but were able to start the work before hand. My plan was to have the contractors complete their work by the first week of July, thereby giving me time to paint and floor ourselves. Unfortunately, this wasn't meant to be... by the end of July, the contractor was far from done.

Our saving grace in all of this was that the first sale of our office fell through so we were able to adjust our closing date to Aug. 14 with the new buyer. The workers were there literally until 6pm the night before our move. I hired someone to floor over the weekend before our move, since we no longer had time to do it ourselves and had slugged out every weekend but one, from Canada Day until mid-August, painting anything I could to speed things along.

In addition to the delays with the structural work, I also called the contractor about some electrical work that hadn't been completed. There were light switches hanging from the ceiling and we needed our telepoles wired/installed. The contractor insisted this work was done when it was obvious it was not. The electrician was supposed to return the week before we moved but had to go into emergency surgery. Thankfully, the superintendent introduced us to his contractor who called someone in to finish the work the Sunday of our move in weekend. We were operational by Monday, albeit with wires hanging from the ceiling but the telepoles were up that evening.

While there are only 8 of us full-time, I was dead set on creating enough seats to accommodate our growth. As you can see below, we were able to fit in 12 work stations in the open concept area along with the 2 offices/reception. Hopefully this will last us the 4 years of our lease!

The last piece of the puzzle was getting our branding completed. This was the fun part! we hired Motive Media to create an inspiration wall in our boardroom with our mission statement and values, frost all of the glass panels between the rooms, decal Tigris over the 2 new offices (one painted blue and one painted purple to match our logos), create a new reception sign as well as a vinyl white board for our boardroom. We couldn't be any happier with our it turned out! To see more pictures from our new space and read about our tips on creating an inspiration office design, click here.

As business has grown and changed, we have adapted and grown with it. This includes everything from streamlining our brand identity (we eventually closed down I.OPT/Knew.Age and transitioned from Tigris Personnel to Tigris Inc., to Tigris Events Inc.,) and strengthening our internal team to finding the right spaces at the right time to accommodate our budget as well as our physical needs.

Looking back, I think we could've gotten into a "real" office alot sooner. Without any business education, I never understood how much money I should be trying to operate on. When I finally hired my first business coach, 8 years in, she told me most businesses operate on 3 months. At the time, I had 18 months of operating costs sitting in the bank. I figured I could handle anything with those kinds of retained earnings available! Since we often have high volume staffing programs and a range of clients with different payment terms, this frugal approach has helped us more times than I can count however when a client took longer to pay than expected or we had an influx of talent to compensate at the exact same time.

As more time has passed, I have had a business coach, 2 mentors and am currently a part of TEC Canada, a peer to peer mentoring group, all of whom have assisted me in my own professional development and strategic planning for Tigris. It's one of the few things I wish I had done a bit sooner into my career. If I could go back in time, I would've found a coach or mentor earlier, looked into SEO sooner and learned to get out of my own way so my employees can do their jobs! But, I started at the bottom and now I'm here; and I think that's something to be damn proud of. I'm excited to see where we are headed next!

To see some of the exciting, award-winning projects we have been a part of over the past couple of years, click here to see some videos or here for our master portfolio. We would love to bring your brand to life!

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. For more on Tigris and to check out our newly launched website, go to www.tigriseventsinc.com.