EP02 Lessons in Multigenerational Business Leadership: Sean and Erin Rayners, VETS Group

Speakers

Speaker 1: Matt Knight

Speaker 2: Sean Rayner

Speaker 3: Erin Rayner

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Matt Knight  00:00

Matt, hello and welcome back to Table Talk with ABFI. I'm Matt Knight. today we're going to be joined by Sean and Erin Rayner with VETS group. They're a 102 year old business, and we're going to hear about some of their changes over the years. They're going to talk to us about how they've managed conflict between siblings over their leadership in the company, and we're going to hear about some of their early journey in entrepreneurship, including how you can sell rocks.  All right. Well, joining me today is Sean and Erin Rayner with VETS Group. We'll dive into a couple of questions and get to know a little bit more about VETS Group. But first, just wanted to kind of check in, see how you guys are doing, and see if you could tell me a little bit about your company, just kind of the high level elevator speech. Why don't we start with you? Sean?

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Sean Rayner  00:53

Okay, so today, the VETS Group is made up of two operating entities, VETS Sheet Metal, which is the founding business, the business that was started over 100 years ago by Fred Rayner and VETS Facility Services. So VETS Sheet Metal does large industrial ventilation projects. Specifically, we design, engineer, manufacture and install dust collection systems for all kinds of industries like forestry, agriculture, mining, as well as industrial air handling, fresh air for all kinds of other applications. And then VETS Facility Services also does HVAC for commercial commercial facilities, commercial buildings. We do HVAC, maintenance contracts, plumbing service, etc. That's our short version introduction.

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Matt Knight  01:47

Nice, excellent. So maybe we'll dive into just kind of the high level history and background of the family business. So if you want to kind of get into that starting patriarch, starting point and go from there, sure.

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Sean Rayner  02:04

Uh, Erin, you want to lead us off that way? 

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Erin Rayner  02:08

Yeah, yeah, sure. There's a story that I identify with and I really like to tell from our family business history. So Fred Rayner immigrated to Canada and then went back to the United Kingdom to fight in World War One. He was injured relatively quickly, and spent time recovering from his injuries, and he met a woman by the name of Fanny while he was in hospital, and Fanny, somehow he convinced Fanny to come back to Edmonton with him in 1919 or so after he was discharged from the military, and she came back to Edmonton with him. While he was trained as a carpenter, he got a job at a company called Barry's sheet metal, and was working at Barry's sheet metal in Edmonton. And do you remember party lines? Party lines like the multiple phone line version, not the pay by the minute version? I call them the original social media because if you know my ring was one ring and Sean's ring was two rings, and your house's ring was three rings, you could pick up on my one ring and hear about my conversation, right? So these were really popular in post World War One Canada. It was a way cheaper way to get phones across this giant country. And one day, Fanny was eavesdropping on somebody else's conversation, and she overheard somebody at Barry's talking about having to lay somebody off and and they were doing some layoffs, and Fred's name came up, and Fanny was a bit of a Spitfire, and she spoke up and said, Don't worry about it, tell him he quits and send him home. And so Fred went home that day, and they had a son, and he really needed to find another job. And he was a very interesting, industrious fellow. From what I hear, he started VETS Sheet Metal from there and rolled a roll of sheet metal under his arm, and rode bikes or rode street cars to different residential job sites throughout Edmonton, installing what was patented as, and I sometimes get this wrong, patented as a gravity fed gas furnace that he installed in many post war Edmonton homes. It was called the vets supreme, yeah, pre Lennox, okay.

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Matt Knight  04:44

And then how did it kind of go from there and like, what kind of maybe walk me through some of the generational changes, or the business changes from that gravity fed gas furnace on?

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Sean Rayner  04:59

So for Fred. Fred started the business in 1921 and named it VETS, which was a common prefix right for businesses back in that era. VETS butcher shop, VETS taxi. That's all these things because of all of the veterans who had returned from the First World War. And he built and ran that business. And he and his two sons worked there, off and on, and as he was, the way I understand it, he was approaching his 55th birthday, and his one son, Gordon, was working in the business, and his other son, the oldest son, Allen, was off doing something else. He was training as he had a passion for aviation, and he was training to be an aircraft mechanic of some kind, and wanted to - had aspirations of a northern airline business. And he got a telegram of some sort that said, hey, I turn 55 in three months. Come home and take over the business. And so he did. 

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And so Alan took over the business in 1946 and ran the business. Grew it, and it changed and grew and evolved over Alan's tenure. And Alan was our grandfather. He was a community minded fellow and an entrepreneurial guy. He had a couple of other VETS named businesses through his tenure, but the business really grew from that point. He was less the hands on operator of a business, and he went out to find other other technologies and other things to help grow the business. He got into, you know, air conditioning, and became one of the first Lennox dealers in Alberta. He drove to Syracuse, New York, and did a bunch of training so he could understand and hired people to run the business. And, you know, as a financial person, as an accountant, to do that. 

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And the business grew to be, you know, well over 100 employees. As the business became the city grew and changed, and it became more, you know, less residential and then more commercial, you know, and institutional and city buildings and university a lot of buildings on the university campus. When they were first built, VETS did the the ventilation for. 

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And so as Alan approached retirement, our dad, our father, David, became involved in VETS Sheet Metal after having worked in one of the other VETS businesses and he took over operations of the business in 1977. So that ebb of the sort of the commercial and institutional construction boom was kind of changing and evolving at that point in time. And David, I almost called him Alan. My middle name is Alan. David started to pivot the company and the focus to small industrial construction projects and custom job shop manufacturing. Erin likes to say that David was a reluctant entrepreneur because he had a very low risk tolerance and often struggled with determining how he could come to terms with the risk of a project.

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Erin Rayner  08:44

Or mitigated entirely, or mitigated entirely construction, yeah, like construction and entrepreneurship melded together does not equal a low risk business. And it didn't matter what, he tried really hard to find ways to write contracts or edit contracts so that he would remove as much risk as possible. And changed a lot of the course of the business. Yeah, for that generation,

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Sean Rayner  09:12

Yeah. The business changed, and they did some neat projects in David's tenure, but it changed from a large, sort of preeminent sheet metal, commercial, institutional sheet metal contractor to a niche, small job shop, fabricator that did also industrial ventilation projects, and for the majority of David's tenure running the business, you know, he said, well, the whether, whether he worked really, really hard, or he didn't work very hard, you know, in his words, you know, we did 1.8 to 2.4 million. And if I did 1.8 million, I’d have lost my you know what? And if I made, if we did 2.4 million in revenue, we made a pretty decent buck, and that was, you know, economic times through the mid 80s through the mid to late 90s in Alberta were, were pretty tough at times. So they bumped along, sort of thing. 

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Erin Rayner  10:16

It was tough for an extended period of time. I think sometimes when I think back growing up and looking back now at David's tenure in the organization, that reluctance, while I say he was a reluctant entrepreneur, I think that reluctance is one of the things that got us to the point where we could be here today, because if he had had a different risk tolerance, we might not have been able to be here with the company. May not have made it through those extended, long periods of high interest, economically Unstable Times. Yep, absolutely. 

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Sean Rayner  11:02

And as David was approaching, as we were getting a little older, Dad started, I think he won a membership to the Canadian Association of family enterprise, okay? And we got involved in some of those trainings and discussions and education. And actually came and did the road map course. Uh, how old are you? Circa 1999, or 2000 like, I think I was 20 or 19.

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Erin Rayner  11:34

I think I was 19. Okay.

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Sean Rayner  11:36

So I was like, no, anyway, we were, it was before our time per se conversation, yeah, and but they set the stage having had some of those conversations early in in our development, you know, we chose paths for schooling and whatnot that tried to set us up, in some ways, to be entrepreneurial, to take on some business acumen as we grew into into wanting to own the business. And it was a good thing we did, because after we finished, Erin and I each independently finished our own post secondary. We ended up in Toronto independently, at different jobs, different roles, different industries. 

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Erin Rayner  12:30

I call it our externship. So it's away from the business, away from the family, away from community and the things you know, yeah, and I worked in film and television at the CBC and for the Toronto International Film Festival, and Sean did something totally different and got his  - cut his teeth in sales.

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Sean Rayner  12:52

Yeah, yeah. I worked in sales Telecom, you know, which was kind of an exciting and tumultuous time in that industry, too. 

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Matt Knight  13:01

So leads me nicely into the next question, which is just to kind of get an overview of both of your professional journeys. So kind of what you did in school, how you got into the business, and kind of that like, you know, mapping out how you got to today.

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Sean Rayner  13:17

Okay, do you want to go first? 

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Erin Rayner  13:21

Sure. Okay, yes, let's Yeah. So I did growing up, I was, I would say, was an entrepreneurial kind of person, but it was a different kind of entrepreneurism. I sold painted rocks from a very early age -

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13:40

- door to door, the people you borrowed the rocks from, 

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Erin Rayner  13:43

Yeah. It was very, very vertically integrated. I would, you know, ask if you, I could take this thing you didn't need, and then I would add value to it, and then I would sell it back to you, you know. 

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And then I went to, I thought I would, I wanted to be a jazz singer, okay, so I went to Grant MacEwan and did the music for music program at Grant MacEwen, after which I realized that there were a lot of people around who sang a whole lot better than I did, and I wanted to be an artist rep, So represent artists and manage artists. And when I talked to the music director at Grant MacEwen at the time, he said, go take business, that'll help you. Anything anywhere you could decide to do, go and take business. 

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So I left and traveled for a while, and I came back, and I was hanging out with Sean one day, and he had already started the NAIT program for Business Administration, and so he was a semester ahead of me. He was like, you really need to do this program. You would really like this program. And so I finally got into the NAIT program, and then we went to Toronto. That's where that happened. We went to I did an internship in Toronto, and a couple of interns. Actually in sponsorship management and with the sponsorship agency and with the film festival and and then decided to move back there after finishing my diploma at NAIT and when it came time, like Sean and I eventually ended up living together with another friend in Toronto, and we would sit around and talk about the founding business and what if, and what would we do, and how would this go, and we knew so much about it. Yeah, right. Thank goodness, thank goodness we were able to, like spit, all those things when we knew nothing about it. 

And I never really necessarily saw a place for myself in the business as it was at that time. 

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So one day, we got a call from our parents. I'm like, our stories are really gonna intersect. I got a call from our parents, you know, we need to have a chat. Okay? So we put them on speakerphone one day, and that's when we found out our dad had cancer. And he was like, well, it was similar to the phone call that maybe Alan got. It's like, well, you know, I've got cancer. You know, if you've been thinking about doing anything in this business, you better come back now.  yeah, 

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Matt Knight  13:43

Wow 

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Sean Rayner  16:13

And that was November, 2003 and he went in for surgery, basically a couple of days later, and we hopped a plane and came home for a while dad was here having a surgery. We were here for a week, and then talked about it, went to the business and looked around, talked to the people and a little bit. And dad came out of his surgery, okay, and we flew back to Toronto, essentially packed our stuff into a U-Haul, gave notice at work and drove home. Yeah, yeah. 

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Erin Rayner  16:52

So that's I stepped into the 85 year old HVAC company from I was working at the CBC with the nature of things, with David Suzuki, then I came back to Edmonton and stepped into the 85 year old HVAC company

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Sean Rayner  17:05

And the business looked very different at that time than it does today. So we had, you know, I kind of gave the range of revenues that David said the business did throughout his tenure. And we had 18 employees, you know, I'm gonna say 19, with the two of us coming in trying to figure out, what should we do, what needs to be done. And for the first I want to say four months or so, we set to at the advice of the long term external accountant that kind of they've done our businesses. Their firm has done our businesses books for since 1947 you know their relationship with David and with the business. They gave us advice. They said, You guys put together a business plan, come and present it to to me, the accountant, and to mom and dad and and we'll, we'll talk succession. 

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So that's what we did. We put together, we looked at the business, looked at like did a bit of a SWOT analysis, looked at the market. What could we do? What should we do? Where are the opportunities? And Aaron helped develop and write that plan for me, basically with with my with my help, and we, we put together a plan, presented a succession business plan to mom and dad and and the accountants at their office, and waited for the yes or no and and it was, I don't think there was ever an option for it to be no yes. And so we did. 

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Then we started the succession process from there, and Aaron actually left the business at that point, went out to do her own thing, worked for a couple of other places in town, and then started our own marketing, event planning company, and I stayed in the business and started to try and execute that plan and build the business growing forward. And it's, it's been a journey,

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Erin Rayner  19:18

Yeah, one of the things that I -  sorry, go ahead. One of the things that I say about that decision to leave is that it's not a being in a family business. And one of the things that kind of had to, I had to come to terms with as somebody who chose to leave the business was that it wasn't about making the 85 year old HVAC company fit me. It was, did I fit? And at that time I didn't. So there was a lot of thought and and in some ways, grief you. Uh, leaving, leaving the business at that time. But if I hadn't, I wouldn't have done all the other things I did, which is great.

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Matt Knight  20:06

That kind of prepared you for what you're doing in the organization today, probably. 

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Erin Rayner  20:11

100% Yeah. 

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Matt Knight  20:12

So why don't we back up again, and we'll kind of go through your your journey a little bit, and then we'll 

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Sean Rayner  20:17

Sure, yeah, mine feels a lot shorter, like Erin touched on it in about a sentence and a half. And yeah, that was it. No, I -  so I graduated high school and I was going to take, I was going to take a year off, because Erin did and do something else. So I actually, I got a job at one of our suppliers, I'm sure, at the telephone request of my dad because I dropped off resumes and hadn't had a call back. And he says, oh, did you hear back from Sinclair supply? No, well, I got a call the next day from a nice gentleman over there, and I went in for an interview, and he said, you start tomorrow. Okay, so I worked in the warehouse for at Sinclair supply, and they're a local western Canadian based HVAC and sheet metal distribution company. They do parts, components, sheet metal bits and pieces and thermostats and all kinds of stuff. And so I worked there for about three, four or four months when I realized maybe I should just could skip the year off part and go to school. 

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And I applied to NAIT for the January start and and I got in, I found out that I got in, like classes started January 8, and I found out I got in January 8. So I got a call at lunch that said, Oh yeah, we have a spot for you. Would you? Can you be here tomorrow to start class? Okay, so I gave the nice gentleman at Sinclair supply about an hour's notice, and that was it. So I went to school at NAIT, did the two year program there, similarly, in looking for a job as an externship, I applied.

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I really like sales. I like talking to people. I like building relationships. I like selling stuff. And I worked in menswear when I was going to school. Loved it. It was a blast. And then I was applying for jobs all over the place, because I did. I wanted to go somewhere else and try my hand at life on my own. And I applied for jobs all over Canada and in the states even. And I was also a sailing instructor at the time, nice and so I was applying for jobs in the Grand Cayman for sailing instructors. 

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So I ended up getting a job in Toronto. I had about a week and a half to pack my stuff, pack my stuff into the car. I put my car on a train. We went on a family vacation to Mexico, came back, did laundry, got on the plane, and moved to Toronto, and I worked for a little over two years in telecom in Toronto, and had a blast doing it, and came back to try my hand at the business. 

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That was two years in Toronto, and then back to the family business. Yeah, so you both would have been pretty young when you were putting together that plan.  Yeah, yeah, I would have been. I was 22 Yeah. Hmm, 23 three years old and took over, took over the business in a leadership role at 24 with employees who had worked, most of the employees had worked there longer than I've been alive at that point in time. And, you know, it didn't bother me, I didn't think, but I'm going to say there were some of them had some challenges with that, for sure. And it was, it was an interesting transition.

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Matt Knight  24:03

So maybe both of you kind of maybe see if you could think back a little bit to growing up around business. Can you think of anything that your parents were doing to kind of prepare you for that phone call or prepare you for that opportunity in the future? Was there like, the coaching on how to sell your wrong so, like, was it like, were they doing anything intentionally, asides from, you know, raising humans? 

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Erin Rayner  24:33

Yeah, no, they were definitely, there was definite intention. There's definite intention, I would say with it, but it was not structured intention. I would say it was reading the newspaper at the breakfast table and talking about everybody had their section that they would read. And we'd all talk about the things that would happen, we would talk about this is a funny one. 

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Speaking of our mutual enjoyment of sales, in a way, is that my parents would always make us, if you wanted to do something, if you wanted to find something, buy something, research something, to go to the Yellow Pages and find the businesses that did those things or sold those things, and you should call them and do all the research and get all the information, and then convince the drivers of the household to take you to wherever those businesses were, or the holders of the wallet, or the holders of the wallet as to why you needed these things from this place. And I think that that was very early, random, unstructured. I don't think he was planning it, but that was definitely one of the pieces that I think back to.

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Sean Rayner  25:45

And I the thing that came to mind that made me chuckle was he we had, but we developed tastes for nice things and and I would always, you know, have be trying to convince the holders of the wallet that I needed this nice thing, and dad's response often was, Boy, you better get a good job. You better, you better earn a good income and support yourself in the style to which you've become accustomed. So that was it. It was motivation there, for sure. 

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Matt Knight  26:17

And then, and do either of you guys have kids? 

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Erin Rayner  26:20

Yeah,

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Matt Knight  26:21

Anything that you're doing differently or the same as what your dad did to kind of prepare them to be involved in the business or entrepreneurship in the future.

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Sean Rayner  26:30

So I've got one son. He is going on nine and two years ago, we moved to a home that's on a golf course. And so similar to the Hey, you don't need this, we're going to repurpose it and sell it back to you. One of the fun things we like to do is go hunting for golf balls. And we have a huge just tub of golf balls, and so we some. Will sit out there and clean them and package them. And we made a little sign, and we go sit on the cart path. He has made more money in 30 minutes than I would make in an entire weekend with a job as like, a teenager sitting there selling golf balls, he makes like $90 in like 20 minutes. I'm like, What is going on? Oh, my goodness. And so, so there's some of that. Yeah, yeah. Erin's is pretty young. 

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Erin Rayner  27:21

My Yeah, my son is four, so it's pretty early. I mean, we talk about money a little bit. He's discovered that money is the thing that happens and makes other things come and show up and but one of the things that I foster in him, that he kind of came with, what I like to support, is he's quite independent, and he's very curious, as many as many children are, but he's especially independent in his curiosity, and I like to Just let him follow the strings wherever they go. And I think that that's something about entrepreneurship and business ownership that like, Okay, well, what happens here, this curiosity, yeah, how does this work? Where does this go if I do this? What happens next? 

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Matt Knight  28:19

How do you guys manage conflict within the business, kind of between, between the two of you and other family members that might be involved in the business.

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Sean Rayner  28:30

We are the only family within the business, as it stands today, and I think Aaron and I handle conflict between each other very well. We speak openly back and forth, and it's recently, we've had some challenges with that. You know, to be honest, it's been, it hasn't been something we've had a ton of experience with, and we're working our way through and trying to understand how that works today. 

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Some of the things that you know, we always try and be approachable, you know, either to each other or to others within the business. And one of the things that has kind of came to light recently was where we didn't think that there was any challenge for the staff, the other staff, the other key staff and management staff within the business, that there was no challenge by our relationship, because We got a great we got a good relationship, and relationship, and then there was some conflict, and it became evident that people hold stuff back because there's some because of our relationship, and they're they're either afraid to say something to us about it, or. Or they hold it back. And we're, we're, we're learning lots these days about that and trying to find new avenues to understand it and deal with it. And you probably have a perspective on that too.

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Erin Rayner  30:16

Yeah, I think you're right in that when we have a difference of opinion, we are able to discuss it with each other. And it can be quite, you know, boisterous, especially, it can be active, it can be very active and animated. And yet, there's, I don't think, at least for me, there's no, I don't question whether or not there's a we're talking about. The thing we're discussing is the difference of opinion. It's not, it's not a personal conflict. And we discuss the thing boisterously, and then we either resolve it, don't resolve it, and or move on and then go for coffee or Yeah, and totally talk about something else and do other things and think about other things. Yeah? And drives my wife crazy too. Yeah? We've been like, yeah, we'd like, scream and yell at each other as siblings. And then you're like, Oh, you want to do something. Yeah, okay. And, but then it the conflict that he's talking about that, that we're seeing, that I didn't, I think I had an idea that it was there, but I didn't know that the extent to which it had taken root, I guess. 

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And the interesting part is that within discussions around family business, I find that there's lots of discussion around the family in the business, and yet, when this sibling relationship is strong and healthy, the fact that it can be a scene that that healthiness of a relationship can be seen as a threat by others within the organization, was kind of a light bulb moment like, oh, okay, interesting. And there's, there's a lot to learn about that, because it's, it's not about it's not between us. It's talking about and navigating through other people's perceptions and interpretations and other people's life experiences, right? And they come, they come to the business with a lens that we don't know, and they see us with a lens that we don't know. Maybe they don't even know.

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Matt Knight  32:47

So what do you know, 103 year old business? Or almost, yeah, 102, 102 and a half. So what do you do in the business that's over 100 years old, to be able to kind of build that culture that kind of includes, you know, that continued innovation and entrepreneurship and collaboration?

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Sean Rayner  33:09

Great question, when, when we took over the business, it didn't have that in some ways, there was a number of little silos in the business, and people ran their own sort of lives, livelihoods, departments, in some ways, and we leveraged that as sort of ownership, and it became one of Our core values. Back in 2011 we spent some time, you know, we when, when I took over the business, started trying all the things, you know, in our business plan, and we had some six early successes, and it was starting to grow and we were doing well. 

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And then in 2011 we sat down with people and sort of took stock and had good conversations and created a set of core values. And that ownership mentality was one of the things that came out of that our core values became. There's an acronym, it's honor. It's spelled the Canadian way, with a U, and they stand for human leadership, ownership, mentality, nurturing environment, open communication, united team and renowned craftsmanship. And over the last 10 or 11 years, they are a constant conversation in the organization and sort of building that but the value of that conversation was we had them with people who were new to the organization, who wanted to grow their career and their value to the organization, and people who were who'd been there longer than been alive, you know. And it was a fantastic conversation, and it just hit it on the head. So that's how

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Matt Knight  35:04

Nice, any kind of funny or memorable, or, you know, good antidotes of kind of growing up in a family business. So either like lessons learned or pivotal moments, or like awkward family picnics in the company?

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Sean Rayner  35:22

I think conversations with whenever, whenever dad would say he was going over to granddad's, it was like, oh, no, we're home. We're never going to leave. They talk business the whole time. And, you know, they set us up on the TV with the old Woody, the woodpecker, VHS, and it was not the most fun, but we had a anything else come to mind for you on that regard?

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Erin Rayner  35:58

Yeah, the one of, one of the things that I remember, and that always like, sometimes it pissed me off as a kid, was all of our family summer holidays. We had this travel trailer. We went on long, two week camping holidays every summer. And I mean, we had a blast. We'd go off an adventure and stuff. But every trip had at least one, sometimes two, customer visits or plant visits or, you know, unique places where this is made visits. 

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Sean Rayner  36:37

Wow, I do that today.

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Erin Rayner  36:43

And so that, like, that was one of the things where I was like, Really, are going to a hatchery? God, look at the vents. Oh, my god,

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Sean Rayner  36:54

Yeah. That's an occupational hazard of an HVAC business. Every place you walk into, you're looking up, going like, oh man, really? Yeah,

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Matt Knight  37:03

No fair. So looking forward, what do you think some of the biggest challenges are that you or that the family business might face over the next 10 years or so?

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Sean Rayner  37:17

So being that we're a family business with very little family. We have some key staff, and we've got plans to grow the business, you know, geographically and specialty wise, and the key staff that we have that really are at this point. They're the team that I built around me to help grow those, those specialties and those businesses. They're facing down retirement, you know, as we look to the future and so, like, there's, there's  an internal succession conversation that's, that's a big conversation, to have in a technically based business with a lot of unique knowledge. And we've kind of just come through a real challenging time, you know, pre COVID, entrepreneurial wise, you know, Aaron made a comment about, you know, David, lack of his risk tolerance is not, you know, I had a lack of risk tolerance, and we did a lot of things to to know, did I say that? Rap bum? Anyway, I went out and I took a lot of risk, and the business, the business grew, grew a lot, and and we kind of outgrew our capacity, our capabilities, and so we had to shrink down, and we had to sort of rebuild our balance sheet, and we've come through that time. And so looking to the future is getting back to strategic thinking and execution and taking the right risks and calculating them right, you know, is one of the other big pieces.

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Matt Knight  39:15

So asides from the roadmap course that you would have done with ABFI When you were 17 or 20. What do you think is kind of the most memorable kind of book or speaker or seminar that has changed the way that you manage the business or manage your life, or manager your strategy, your marketing? Maybe we'll start with you, Erin, to put you on the spot. 

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Sean Rayner  39:37

You look like you're thinking,

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Erin Rayner  39:38

yeah. Do you know? 

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Sean Rayner  39:39

Yeah. Okay, so Thomas Deans, Every Family's Business was a life changing book for me. I saw him speak at an event in Calgary. I bought his book. I think I devoured it. On an airplane ride. And then I bought like 40 copies of it, and I gave it to everybody I knew. I gave my dad, like five copies. I'm like, give this to all your old family business buddies, and I gave it to you know, my accountant, my lawyer, and all my all the people that I knew who were in family business, because it was a real great story about the shift of a family business to a business family and the understanding of you know you should be taking stock right of your business as the owner, whether it's 100 year old family legacy or not. And is this business doomed because we're in the I don't know, paper clip business like that could be a great business. I don't mean to hawk the paperclip, but they it could be that it's, you know, it's at the end of its life cycle, and we need to do something about it, or do we just ride it into the ground and that's it, you know? So we can come back to that and where I've taken my thoughts on ownership after Erin has a second, if that's okay. 

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Matt Knight  41:11

Nice.

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Erin Rayner  41:14

Yeah, I think that for me, the RoadMap was really influential for me. I wish like we did, like we said we did it really early, and the conversations that happened outside of RoadMap, like we as a family, we stayed up until sometimes two o'clock. We should find those tapes. We taped all of those conversations. Did you know that? Wow, yeah. So we taped the conversations, and there's got to be taped somewhere. We taped the conversations we had after a roadmap, and considering we were in our teens, it would be interesting to hear what our thoughts were at the time. But yeah, because RoadMap was influential, that was definitely influential. Built to last, yeah, the Jim Collins Built to Last, Good to Great, Great by Choice. All of those were, I would say, quite, quite impactful for me. I think that's all I got at the top of my head. 

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Matt Knight  42:23

You wanted to dive back into ownership for a second?

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Sean Rayner  42:25

Yeah. So as part of a long term spin off of our core values and that ownership mentality it really hit a chord with me, and I couldn't figure out why, as sort of 2011 through 2016-17. And it finally hit me that, you know, we were approaching our 100th year, and we had people who'd been with the business for multiple generations, not just longer than I'd been alive, but multiple generations of their family had worked in our business, and it was, you know, and the ownership mentality was so strong within the people of those you know, families and the people who were, you know, working in the business every day to make our business successful. And embodied that ownership mentality that I started exploring employee ownership.

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For our 100th anniversary, we launched our employee share ownership plan. And within the first two years, so we're going into the third offering, there's an annual process, and my vision for that is to be a broad based, employee owned business, and into our third year offering, which hasn't, hasn't been completed yet, we have 24 -- 27 employee shareholders, wow. And, you know, at varying degrees and levels, but like, that's the legacy, to me. Is to to to secure the legacy of of vets as an institution, and to secure the legacy with the people, and to have them stay and build that business and to benefit from it the same way we have, the same way the Rayners have for 100 years, for the next 100 is to build that employee ownership, to just, you know, that ownership mentality to the next level where the company has reciprocated it.

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Matt Knight  44:32

Yeah, well, that shows like, a lot of like, respect and kind of commitment to the organization, for that number of people to want to join in on that.

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Erin Rayner  44:40

It's interesting to see the like, the literal like, you almost see the shift in somebody who buys shares, who uses theirs, takes the money out of their bank account to buy shares at beds. We have this great story about when, when we launched the ESOP, we talked. Vote how we would, would we? Would we promote that? Would we promote that we have employee shareholders within the organization? And we had, we had one gentleman who was like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I want this on my business card, like, reception is going to be and and he was in a meeting with a customer, a big group of one particular customer, and put his card down on the table and, and, like, took a risk. Pointed it out I might be not telling the story, yeah. Like, took a risk. Pointed out you'll notice there I'm an owner, yeah, yeah. And, and the customer said, Yeah, I noticed. And he's like,

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Sean Rayner  45:45

yeah, that's why you're still here. 

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Erin Rayner  45:47

Yeah.

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Sean Rayner  45:48

You're an owner, and we see how you care and what you present and the ownership you have in it, and that's why we're having these conversations. He's like, yes, okay, so it was funny. He was, he was excited to tell us that story, because he was, I was like, I want that on my card. Yeah, that's amazing.

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Matt Knight  46:08

So if you think back to kind of, you know, someone who might be in your shoes today, walking into a family business at, you know, a young age that's about to take over for several generations, any advice that you would give to that individual?

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Sean Rayner  46:23

Yeah, be humble. Ask questions and expect that you're not the one with the answer. Yeah.

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Matt Knight  46:40

Anything to add to that Erin?

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Erin Rayner  46:41

Yeah, for sure, if you're not a fit now, stepping away doesn't necessarily mean that the legacy is not yours, and it also doesn't mean that you can't come back

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Matt Knight  47:09

Before I kind of wrap things up a little bit. You guys know what happened? I've been thinking about this for a while. Do you know what happened to Barry sheet metal?

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Erin Rayner  47:17

Well, you have been thinking about this for a while. No, okay, there was, it's funny though, we have these. The vet supreme furnace had this door on it, cast a second link door, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so every now and then we get a call being like, hey, we have this furnace in our garage or something. And we get, we had a whole bunch of these doors and we got one once that had Barry's name on it, yeah, yeah.

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Sean Rayner  47:41

Yeah. So there's a cast iron furnace door of Barry's sheet metal that's in my office as well. So part of the history,

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Erin Rayner  47:50

Nice, yeah, yeah. Google doesn't help. Okay, no, you can't go back that far on the Google that I found. Yeah,

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Matt Knight  47:57

Yeah. It was just trying to think through that the whole time we were talking. So before we wrap things up, if people want to learn more about VETS, if people need a really good replacement for their Barry's furnace in their garage, or have some more industrial needs on kind of the HVAC, on the dust collection or the sheet metal, how do they learn more? How do they get a hold of you? 

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Erin Rayner  48:23

Yeah, vetsgroup.com, would be a good place to start and put my email in the show notes. If you want.

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Matt Knight  48:33

Excellent. We'll do that. We wanted to thank both, both of you, Erin, Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been very easy conversation, and I learned a lot from kind of the key points that you guys had. So thank you.

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Erin Rayner  48:46

Thanks for having me

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Sean Rayner  48:47

Yeah, anytime.

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Matt Knight  48:48

Thanks for joining us on Table Talk today. If you want to learn more about the roadmap course that Sean and Erin mentioned, visit our website at www.abfi.ca if you want to suggest some guests or provide us with some feedback, please send me an email. Matt.Knight, that's two 't' s and a 'k' @ualberta.ca.

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