After 100 years of their family being in the West Coast fishery business, brothers Mike and Chris Wick – co-owners of Delta-based sustainable seafood company Raincoast Trading – are still working to keep the tradition alive and well.
The company has two divisions: One is Raincoast, the retail side, which primarily produces and sells canned fish such as wild salmon and tuna. The other is North Delta Seafood, which imports and exports less mainstream species, such as pollock, hake and sablefish. While primarily in the processing industry now, their legacy started with fishing, said Mike Wick.
"Our dad and our dad's dad grew up [in the business]," he said. "They've been fishermen for two generations. Our great-grandfather came [here] from Norway."
In the late 1970s, the Wick family decided to diversify and started Superior Seafood, making its first foray into processing by building a plant on River Road – only to sell it a few years later.
"They discovered they were better at fishing than running fish plants," said Mike. "They sold the plant operation and stayed on as the fishing arm side of it."
Even though success with the plant was short lived, the family would try it again a while later. That's when Mike stepped in.
"They needed someone to look after the business side," he said.
Ironically, when Mike was younger he and his brother were not allowed to join the family business even if they had wanted to.
"The rule in our house was that we weren't allowed to work on the boats until we had finished high school," said Wick. "Once we finished high school, we had to go get our post-secondary [education]. We could be on the boats in the summer – our dad really encouraged us to get experience in some other industry."
Mike was a natural candidate for the job – with an economics background, he was working as a lender at Royal Bank at the time and had an interest in developing the sales side of the business.
Around the same time, Chris was also asked to come aboard to help out with a different aspect.
"Chris looks after procurement," said Wick. "He looks after fishermen. He gets fish to the door and I get the fish to the market."
While it sounds like the perfect sibling partnership – the brothers now each own half of the company after buying it from their parents last year – it comes with a set of unique challenges.
"Sometimes the difficulty is deciding who's the boss on a topic," said Wick. "There's not a clear boss sometimes."
They clash on decisions from how a routine task should be handled to what route to take on capital investments.
Following the advice of their parents, the brothers sought help from professionals. They signed up with the non-profit Canadian Association of Family Enterprise (CAFE), which has several chapters across Canada, providing services, resources and support to people involved in family enterprises.
"They have a course regarding this transition of [family] business," said Wick. "During family- planning sessions, they highlight problems and how to work through them."
The Vancouver chapter of CAFE is managed by UBC's Business Families Centre at the Sauder School of Business. David Bentall, an instructor at the centre, specializes in consulting with family businesses dealing with generational succession.
"Typically, they need help when they are stuck and don't know what to do in areas like selecting the next/future CEO among siblings, improving relationships, creating unity, starting family meetings, developing a plan for the future and recruiting a board," said Bentall.
Problems often arise when there is a disparity in knowledge or expertise, lack of performance evaluations and feedback, and confusion around how to share power and authority.
Besides addressing these issues through meetings, Bentall said sometimes family members just need some time alone outside of the business.
"Having downtime or time apart is typically healthy and usually leads to a better chance for long-term survivability of the family working relationship," he said.
Mike Wick, who is married with three kids, said the time with his own family serves as that downtime.
"In the window of our business [my brother and I] spend a lot of time together," he said. "We don't spend a lot of time outside of the business. We can exhaust each other in the course of a week." •
