Shawn O'Hara: This week's podcast is more of what you could consider a pilot or a first launch. This is a conversation I had with John Juricic. This is the very first in the Sidney Breakfast Club after hours series.

I've already had two podcasts about that topic, or within that series, rather, on this podcast. These are a series of live YouTube livestream, YouTube broadcast that we have with a guest speaker. This first one, we were kind of trying out the tech in my studio and in John's studio, doing it over Zoom, doing it over YouTube, looking at how we would manage the live chat, how we would handle the delays, and so on.

We were also just conversing about what topics we will cover and why we're doing it, and the state of things happening. I've taken that YouTube stream and the other ones and converted them into audio because my preference is audio. Some people love having video content or video podcasts. I prefer audio, which is why I have an audio-only podcast.

This True North Compliance podcast is audio only because I like to be out and doing things when I have a podcast on, not looking at a screen. With my phone, if I have a video podcast and I turn off the screen, often the phone's in my pocket or it's in a bag or something and it's out. I've got the headphones; the audio shuts off. That's a reason that I like audio podcasts, and I've taken these podcasts and converted them into audio.

There will still be a link in the show notes for this particular video if you want to go to YouTube and watch it there. The Sidney Breakfast Club meets in Sidney, which is about a half-hour drive north of the city of Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. For those of you who are long-distance listeners, if you're ever in the area, I suggest you come by. I encourage you right now.

We meet on the second Wednesday of the month, seven till eight thirty, and there are speakers, guest speakers, sometimes panel discussions, sometimes demonstrations. Always very informative, whatever the topic. It tends to have more of a, let's say, tech manufacturing industry focus, although we've also been touching on the recent issues with the tariffs, food security, and so on.

It's been a great pleasure to do this series with John, who I've known since the late 1990s. So here we go with what is actually the first episode, number one, you could say, of the Sidney Breakfast Club - After Hours series. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show.

John Juricic: Shawn and I are launching a new live stream series on industry activity on the peninsula, and we are just figuring this out. First of all, my name is John Juricic. I'm with Shawn O'Hara, and I own a company called Harbor Digital Media. We are very active in digital training solutions and have been active in digital marketing.

Shawn, you can go ahead and introduce yourself.

Shawn O'Hara: I have a marketing agency called Agency 2525. I started the web stuff in 1995 and went through a few different companies, then finally gave up the web design industry last year for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. I did this to focus much more on marketing, direct response marketing, and marketing that generates results for a few different industries.

John Juricic: You and I go way back. I think we met in the late nineties through various networking clubs. Back then, networking was very hip and new. So you and I go back a ways.

Shawn O'Hara: I think it was probably 1996, could have been 1996 or 1997, right?

John Juricic: Right. That's a long time. And you still have hair and I do not. Yes, I do. Oh boy. So, we've been through a lot of stuff. You and I have done a lot of community stuff, one of which is I manage a group, a networking group, as it turns out, called the Sidney Breakfast Club. That is a peninsula-based industry networking group that meets once a month except for the summer.

We have speakers and we talk about how to learn from each other, how to run our businesses, how to avoid mistakes, and how to grow our businesses—everything around growing the business. The club itself has been in existence since the early nineties. It was sort of intertwined with VIATec at that time and, in the early days, helped establish the marine tech industry, some of which those companies are still attending our sessions.

Shawn O'Hara: It's quite an eclectic mix, I could say, because I like the way you have us go around the room and state who we are and where we are. There's a mix of manufacturers, engineers, students who come occasionally, and people like us—the marketers who are there to try to get business.

John Juricic: It is a natural part of networking that there are folks there that, to some, are frustrating, but it's part of doing business. There are very polite ways to say, "Thank you, but I'm not interested. I already use those services."

Shawn O'Hara: Another thing I'll point out is that when people go around, there's also a good chunk of retired people. So there's a ton of knowledge in the room. As a marketer, I always try to keep my eye or ear out for friction—what is slowing people down? There are so many acronyms, and sometimes I'm there and I realize, okay, the people in this room understand what he or she just said. Sometimes I say to myself, that sounds impressive, but I have no idea what they're talking about. It's just a lot of letters.

John Juricic: We would have speakers attend from companies, and they would review with us the ups and downs, and we would try to learn from that. But then somebody became inaugurated in January of this year and really turned the economic tables up and ripped them out from under our Canadian business establishment. Since then, we have been trying to figure out how to operate a business in this new world.

So we started having monthly panels of businesses reacting to the new tariff war. We did that for about four or five months, I think, since maybe February. Interest has exploded at the Sidney Breakfast Club, and there has been a huge amount of desire to have follow-up and to collectively as a community deal with these issues. We will review some of those, Shawn, you and I, during this session. This became a natural extension of that, so we're going to do these live interviews, maybe weekly. We'll see what we can handle. We'll have guests and continue the conversation on how business is reacting successfully and not successfully to the tariff wars.

We ended up with a meeting last week where this initiative came from. That meeting was attended by about 70 people, which is now average for the monthly meeting. The speakers were the executive director and deputy director of the South Island Prosperity Partnership. I called it a project, but it was a partnership. You were corrected live. So I thought we would spend a bit of time, Shawn, reviewing what's been going on and what happened at that meeting, and start to share out what we think is going to happen. That's kind of my preamble.

I'm not going to do that every meeting. So what do you think, what are your gut reactions after now five months of chatting about this stuff?

Shawn O'Hara: We got a kick in our complacency from down south, and I really like what Ray Brougham said about the opportunity we had when the lockdown happened, which was five years ago, this month or four or five years ago. We were going through this process of the supply chain being disrupted. We have to innovate. We have to figure out where we're going to get our staff and how we can stay in business.

But we had such a strong push to go back. We wanted to go back to 2019. We wanted to go back, and we used to say we wanted to go back to normal—the way things used to be. Which meant any of the innovation or ideas we had in a lot of cases just died because, hey, we're back, we're normal. We can give up the masks, we can leave our doors, we can touch people again, we can hug. So all of those things that we thought were great ideas—let's forget about them. We'll go back to the way things were. Now we've got this big kick. We can't go back because even if there was a regime change down there, let's say next week, things are not going to change because worldwide a lot of things have been affected. The silver lining is that we are looking at newer ways of doing things, new markets, which we always should have been doing, continually staying on top.

John Juricic: That's a great summary. I never actually, I suppose I did at some point, but I never heard it really crystallized and articulated like that. The COVID thing was a shock. This is now a second shock for business in five years. None of us are going to look back. In fact, there's been significant momentum to think of ways—how do we become more efficient? How do we become more productive and innovative? Frankly, Shawn, we made kind of a joke at the beginning about how long we've known each other, but that used to be how Canadian business thought.

I recall that was a real value add for Canadian business. That's what differentiated us. We didn't have the huge money coming out of Silicon Valley or the huge capitalization, but Canadians were productive, efficient, and innovative. Where do we stand now? What are we, like a hundredth in the world?

Shawn O'Hara: Yeah, it's horrible. I felt like asking that during the talk—why is our productivity so low? Early in our relationship, or maybe 20-plus years ago, I was reading someone who had been to venture capital events in the US and Canada. He said in the US there's so much excitement and hype. In Canada, they're much more reserved, but they're just as excited and determined. At some point, we lost that.

John Juricic: Yeah. We became complacent, didn't we? That's a great point. I think everyone in that room has decided they don't want to be that way—they don't want to look back. They want to look forward. They don't entirely know how to do that, Shawn. Some initiatives have arisen, not from the Sidney Breakfast Club, but through the connectivity and energy, one of them being a Vancouver Island Manufacturing Excellence Alliance. That's on LinkedIn under that title. That group is trying to apply some lean principles.

We are resigned to the fact that we are going to lose a component of our marketplace from the US, and rather than complain about it, we're asking if we can improve efficiency internally to compensate for that loss as well as try to get new business. There's been a lot of activity around Buy Local and Buy Canada, which has all kinds of emotional components. There is a wish to work together. We can see that with ease, but in fact, it's hard to work together and collaborate.

As businesses, you know, we say, "Let's work together," and then you sit in a room and you don't want to share anything. You don't want to open yourself up to new ideas. You don't want to recognize that the world has changed dramatically. So this issue of change management—we have to be willing to change, and that's hard.

Shawn O'Hara: When I first heard the concept of the Manufacturer's Excellence Alliance, I likened it to the mastermind principle that Napoleon Hill talked about. Lean, in a sense, when it's done within a factory or company, is one thing, but when it's done with other businesses that are not competing, where we can sit around a table and say, "I've got this issue, how do I deal with it? How have you dealt with it?"—that brings in a lot. For those non-engineer listeners who are more familiar with personal development and Napoleon Hill, that probably resonates.

John Juricic: That's fabulous. There's a fabulous new energy. There is a willingness to change the way we do things. What do you see next? We've got a Canadian government elected saying, "We're going to be the best economy in the world. We're going to do this." There are old guys like me, and there's a lot of skepticism around some of this stuff. Do you sense that there could be a breakthrough, and why?

Shawn O'Hara: I see a huge amount of skepticism. I guess political views change over time, and one's views of the role of government change. Now my view is the government should get out of the way basically, because one of the big topics that's come up—not just this year, but in some of the earlier sessions—was the bureaucracy that we've had to deal with.

The red tape is there for protection, the environment, and so on, but when it becomes a hindrance or when we have to rely on governments for things, the pressure has to come from the businesses. Here's a great example: the Peninsula Chamber has been saying for a very long time how the cost of housing affects the ability for a company to function. If we're losing companies and they're moving because people cannot live in this part, that's damaging to the economy. As they brought up on Wednesday, now it seems access to a family doctor is a competitive advantage or lack thereof. People may think, "Oh, business, they just want to make money." Well, they want people to have a place to live so that their workers can live. They want them to have access to doctors so that they can be healthy. They want to be able to pay them so they can afford to live here, which means their products have to sell. They also want access to culture because that's something people are looking for too. We don't really have a vibrant arts and culture scene.

John Juricic: On the peninsula? I'll say that on the peninsula. I've said that before. There is obviously some, but it's not vibrant. There's not a lot, there's not a capacity. Certainly, the Mary Winspear Centre is creating all kinds of it, but it's one center.

Right. It's important that a dialogue continues for industry to find ways that we didn't do in 2020—to find ways to adapt, change, and build better, more efficient businesses. This will be part of that. It'll be part of understanding the technology to do that. Perhaps we can have chats with people across Canada who are learning how to do this, and we can learn from them, and certainly folks in the peninsula and lower Vancouver Island region.

I'm really excited to be on this journey with you, Shawn, and I really appreciate your understanding and me mucking around trying to figure out how this works.

Shawn O'Hara: That's what I do. Thank you, John, for inviting us.

John Juricic: Thank you very much. Thank you.

Okay, my friend. Bye-bye.

YouTube video of this conversation.