I walked into a mess. It was 2008, and I was elected the leader of this First Nation at the young age of 33 and had all these aspirations of community development and making a difference in people’s lives, but by January 2009 it was apparent we were close to $13 million in debt.
“We have three companies, and all were facing challenges at the same time. Government will never give us enough money for health, education and culture; it does provide us with a significant amount of funding, but not enough. So our companies allocate 20% [of profits] to our band. That helps fund the programs.
“Duz Cho Logging was facing the pine beetle epidemic and logging revenues were down significantly, and then the world [economy] crashed. We had equipment that needed to be paid for and people that needed to be paid for their labour, but the contracts just dried up. We were averaging 670,000 cubic metres annually, and then we dropped to 75,000 to 125,000, so it was absolutely atomic.”
“It wasn’t just our companies. Our Treaty 8 trust had a significant deficit. That’s primarily where we used to get our funding from to run our programs. With the downturn, the equities in our trust also went down, so we had to look to our businesses to alleviate that shortfall in cash.
“We cut our annual budget by $3.1 million in 2009 and scaled back to a four-day work week. People took wage cuts. It was a really challenging time.
“We also worked with Duz Cho Logging, which has been with the band since 1988. We scaled back where we could, sold machinery; you name it, we did it. There was nothing graceful about it. Logging probably ran at about 150 [employees] and they ended up going down to a skeleton crew of about 35.
“We were able to get lean and efficient. We were only doing stuff that we had to. When the economy started to pick up, we were already in a good position to move with it. The people that we have are just stellar. It’s been a real team effort on everybody’s part.
“It started turning around in 2010. Wood prices started to come up, and the economy started to roll a bit again. We’re fortunate to have good companies and good managers to maximize the benefits and work with the resource companies in their related fields to develop those opportunities as well as profits.”
“We’re now on the upswing. We’re busy. We have lots of opportunity and the companies are performing at the best they’ve ever performed. In 2008 we probably topped out at $6 million or $7 million, and in 2011 we’re back up to $28 million and projected revenues for 2012 are approximately $38 million.” •
