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Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As I recently ascended (via elevator!) from my (heated!) underground parkade, through the (secure!) lobby of our fancy new office (tower!), said good morning to the concierge (the concierge?!) and then took (another!) elevator to our beautiful new premises where I gained access (using my thumbprint!), wandered through our (spacious!) kitchen and down the hall to my (sunlit!)(corner!) office looking up at the iconic Calgary Tower, I thought to myself ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’
Indeed, Dorothy, there’s been a tornado of adulting happening around here lately. And it’s not just our office move. If we had only moved offices, metaphorically trading the Michael Jordan poster above our bed for, like, actual art, it would have been a lot. But with news of our merger(!) with Humanis Conseils now official (read the full press release here), we are fast realizing that adulting can be fun and the benefits of our union – for both our clients and our team – are significant.
For the Calgary team, the merger represents a particularly uncharacteristic (and at times uncomfortable) bout of maturity. Around for nearly 15 years, our motto may as well have been ‘it worked yesterday, so let’s do that again today.’ Serially monogamous, we’d been in the same office space, used the same customer relationship management software, stuck with the same suppliers, employed mostly the same team, hosted the same events, supported the same charitable causes, worked repeatedly for many of the same clients, generated roughly the same annual revenues, and generally just sort of stayed the same. Borne neither of stubbornness nor laziness, we were just a bit slow to ditch the bank teller for the ATM.
For sure, going through this spell of corporate puberty has had its share of awkward moments. When my long-time partner, Ranju Shergill, and I sat down recently in our new office’s “Central Park,” an open collaboration space in the centre of our office, to work through our first ever annual budget (a budget?!) – a request requirement of our new private equity partner – we must’ve appeared to the 20-somethings in the office, trying not to gawk or even pretend to notice, like two people discovering Spotify while still wearing their belt-clipped Sony Walkmans. A budget? Please. What’s next?! An in-house Business Development Manager planning our entire 2024 rooftop Stampede Party?!
Her name is Tracy. And as my long-time Director of Marketing, Kiara Marika, and I were toured around the stunning Le Germain Hotel rooftop patio that included sweeping views of the city, an elevator(!) for delivering supplies and even (multiple!) power outlets(!), we must have appeared to Tracy as really bad poker players trying not to reveal our sheer delight at the thought of not having to hoof 40 cases of beer, and so much more, up five flights of stairs, whilst simultaneously McGyvering a spider’s web of extension cords for the DJ and trying to conceal the Koi pond that contained neither fish nor water, as we’ve done for 14 previous parties. And when Tracy cheerfully said, “Of course, if it rains our team will seamlessly move you and your guests to our beautiful second-floor function space and carry on,” we again must’ve looked like a pair of Britannica Encyclopedia salespeople being shown the Internet for the first time.
And then there are all the other adulty things that have come with the merger, each tackled with the maturity and wisdom that adults tend to possess, providing an early glimpse into future challenges and issues inevitably to arise and, more importantly, how we’ll tackle those. Take the name, for example. I’ve written in our two previous posts (I promise this being the third and final in the trilogy), Landing the Plane et Human is as Human Does, about how much we like the name Humanis and how motivated we were to drop Pekarsky. But that decision, once made, led to a series of other big questions.
On its face the decision might seem curious. The Pekarsky name, four generations deep in Alberta and 15 years on the firm’s masthead, subsumed by a one-year old, born only last March. This boggled the mind of our highly analytical SEO / Google analytics wizard and created no end of challenges for our marketing team (of one) as she, again with great help from others, developed a social media strategy to encourage our followers to leave Pekarsky & Co. and head over to Humanis (for you can’t actually delete a company page on LinkedIn without deleting your employees’ work experience).
Then there’s the matter of building a new website, while operating two live ones. And think of it from Edmonton’s perspective: we show up, move right on in, help ourselves to the fridge and immediately insist upon replacing the original Humanis tagline with We Know People, prominently feature our red ampersand all over the place and encourage them to ditch their OG website, created mere months earlier, only to spend more money, again, on a new one over which I exerted Kim Jong-un level control. How do you like us so far?
On the adulting went. Agreeing on the look, feel, and voice of the merged brand. Choosing the preferred supplier where local loyalties existed. Landing on new and consistent titles for the team (congratulations, by the way, to Ranju Shergill, Managing Partner, Calgary and Diane Wheatley, Managing Partner Edmonton), choosing a preferred database (#futureproblem), comp plan, benefits provider, accounting system, reporting cadence, proposals, templates, fees, email signatures, corporate structure, banking, assigning contracts and so forth. Sometimes resembling Alphonse and Gaston, known for their exaggerated politeness leading to a sort of comedic stalemate, and other times exhibiting swift and assertive action, devoid of any hesitation or faux graciousness.
And we haven’t even mentioned the governance of the new firm. The real grown-up stuff, with an actual Board of Directors, a CEO, and a Senior Leadership Team. This is the finances/family-planning/faith chat of any new corporate marriage. And I gotta say, so far so good. It’s a special thing when you can find a partner where one plus one equals more than two. Where, in these early days, there’s a genuine spirit of comradery and collaboration, where everyone steps up to willingly help take on the overflow or lend a hand to a pitch. Where the sheer depth of functional and industry expertise doubles overnight. And not only are these people extremely talented, but they’re incredibly nice, too. Theirs is a firm you’d bring home to mother.
So here we are, on the other side of our corporate rite of passage, slightly dazed but genuinely excited. Ditching our dial-up Internet, our film cameras, and our 8-track collection, we’re leaning into the virtues of a new today and a better tomorrow. Indeed, nostalgia is a seductive liar, as George Ball once said. But we’re not running from the past. We’re very proud of what we built. Rather, we are realizing that adult life is part of the journey we’re on and merging with the right people at the right time, aligned to the right core values, and doing things the right way can be truly reinvigorating and very rewarding.
We’ve got a new home, a new family, and a new identity. We are most certainly not in Kansas anymore. We’re adulting hard, and honestly, it feels pretty darn good.
Regards,
Adam.
