Late one night in November, Destination British Columbia president Marsha Walden took some of the same advice that she gives her three 20-something children.
Walden was content with her role as a vice-president at British Columbia Lottery Corp. (BCLC) and had little interest in an email that a headhunter sent her along with a job description outlining an opportunity to lead the marketing of British Columbia as a tourism attraction.
Then Walden remembered the refrain that she tells her children: “be open to possibilities, say yes whenever you can and good things will flow.”
She slept on the idea of applying for the job and realized that the top job at Destination BC fit her skill set.
It also offered her the chance to be a CEO for the first time in her career.
Sitting at a table in her corner office, Walden reveals that big changes are on the way at her organization.
After taking a second to admire her office's peekaboo view of cruise ships passing and mountains towering in the background, she reveals that a new corporate strategy is not quite ready to be shared with industry.
“It won't be too long, likely this summer,” she said.
“Details of a new marketing approach or new branding won't come until the fall.”
The corporate strategy is a high-level view of Destination BC's operations and priorities.
One thing is clear: the organization will be led by industry.
The B.C. government's botched strategy to fold the former Tourism BC into the tourism ministry generated industry outcry and a promise from Premier Christy Clark during her leadership bid that, if she won, she would restore a stand-alone industry-led tourism marketing organization.
Critics have nitpicked that five of Destination BC's nine directors are government appointees, but Walden dismisses the criticism by saying that the board is “skills-based” with members who have a diverse range of insight in key disciplines such as marketing, human resources, finance and governance.
She also pointed out that a separate 19-member tourism marketing committee (TMC) provides more hands-on input about operations than do the board members.
“The TMC gets more into the operational strategy and is not up there in the clouds on governance strategy,” Walden said.
B.C. has six regional tourism destination marketing organizations and each gets to nominate three TMC members. One aboriginal tourism representative is added, and two board members also sit on that committee.
Walden is convinced that the structure is sound and that future financial streamlining can produce a bigger bang for her 108-employee organization's $54 million budget.
Industry, meanwhile, will be encouraged to do what the private sector does well: partner together and produce world-class destinations and tourist packages.
Throughout her life, Vancouver-born Walden has shown the same pragmatism.
Longtime associates say she also has a reputation for reliably ensuring things get done on time and for motivating teams.
“She's a really smart, strategic team-builder,” said Southcott Strategies partner Andrea Southcott.
“I was really impressed with her dedication on one project we worked on together. She worked on the project through the night and had a real work ethic to pull the team together.”
Southcott, who now sits with Walden on a committee that is organizing the 2014 Grey Cup, has known Walden since the two worked on advertising and marketing projects in the early 1990s.
Walden, now 57, graduated from Point Grey High School and enrolled at the University of British Columbia with vague plans to go into journalism. Next came a flirtation with becoming a lawyer.
“Once I took marketing courses in my commerce degree, I never looked back,” she said.
Walden graduated in 1980 and got a job at the advertising agency Baker Lovick, which has since morphed into BBDO. She stayed 17 years.
“When you get a chance to work on different kinds of assignments, time flies,” she said. “The work always stayed interesting to me, and I had great clients along the way.”
One of her memorable campaigns was for Yellow Pages Group. It illustrated calamities that consumers could encounter if they did not flip through their business phone directories to discover a world of options. One ad featured a vegetarian convention inexplicably held at a hunting lodge.
“The ads got a lot of notoriety and won awards internationally,” she said.
By 1997, however, her motherly instinct kicked in, and she decided to quit to spend more time with her three children, then aged five, seven and nine.
She got swept up into a lot of volunteer roles. If it wasn't a reading program at her child's elementary school, it was helping found the North Shore Female Hockey Association.
The 1998 Olympics had just ended, and Canada won the first silver medal ever awarded in women's hockey.
One of Walden's daughters was caught up in the euphoria of the Games and the sport and wanted to play hockey.
So Walden partnered with the founder of the North Shore's only girls hockey team, and the two set out to expand into a league. New teams formed, and before she knew it, there were about a dozen across Metro Vancouver.
She tiptoed back into the workforce as a consultant and was hired to be the BCLC's marketing and communications director. Walden was then put in charge of Internet gambling, which included launching the PlayNow online betting site.
As vice-president of bingo gambling, she revitalized that sagging sector and was in charge of the rollout of a string of Chances gambling centres. Her final BCLC role was vice-president of strategy, transformation and social responsibility.
“I couldn't have planned it,” she said. “I keep telling the kids that: career paths are not linear.”
