Behind every business is a story, one that follows a hero’s journey. Two things happened to me as a child that prepared me for success in the workplace and in business. This is Tana's story.

Seeing Systems...

Our family kept a set of World Book Encyclopedias in the den.  My Dad loved science, my Mom was a nurse, and our neighbour was a doctor. I was captivated by the volume on the human body. It contained a printed page of a skeleton and a series of transparent overlays. Each transparency introduced a different layer of information, a system entirely different from the last: the circulatory system, the organs, the muscles and tendons, and finally the skin.  I was spell bound by how the layers fit together and how the human body could not function if any layer was missed or impeded.

This experience impacted the way I see things. All things.

From about grade four I learned to see the world in layers. That’s how I learned to look beneath the surface of workplace problems to examine the inter-dependent components of the business and identify root cause. Deep thinking is something I do quickly and easily because I’ve identified various layers and assembled the appropriate toolkit to help reveal them to others.

As an adult I learned that business is as complex and inter-connected as the human body. It’s critical that adjustments be made in the right system. If your rib is out of place you may think, “Hey, I need a chiropractor”, but if muscle tension is what pulled your rib out of alignment, the chiropractor can put it back into position but it will pop out the moment you sneeze. If you fail to diagnose the root cause of the problem, you can get caught in a never-ending loop of chiropractor adjustments when five acupuncture treatments might permanently release the muscle tension causing the problem in the first place.

I applied this layering principle in the early 1990's when I was a manager at Canada's largest commercial fishing harbour. At the time computers used MS DOS with the flashing green prompt (no intuitive windows environment yet). To take charge of $50 million in properties I mapped the buildings, wharfs, shorelines and water basins. The basic skeleton of the property. Next I created a series of transparencies to "layer" in emergency access routes, loading zones, cranes, fire extinguishers, and show property uses.  I re-created the way I'd learned about the human body two decades earlier. 

The #1 mistake smart business owners make is they misdiagnosis symptoms as the problem. When that happens they apply a linear solution to a non-linear problem. For instance, business owners often misdiagnose slumping sales as the problem instead of seeing it as a symptom of a deeper problem. If the root of declining sales is the delayed impact of poor customer service, the business spends money and hires more people and the problem is not solved at all. In that case hiring more salespeople is a linear solution and a misdiagnosis. 

Hearing Performance...

The second incident sharpened my hearing.

​My Dad owned a business called The Brass Hub Inn in Radville, Saskatchewan, population 1,200. With rooms for rent on the upper level, the main floor had a coffee shop, pub, fine dining lounge, and a pin-ball arcade. As you might imagine, a room full of pin ball machines in the 1970’s attracted teenage boys to the arcade like a magnet. We packed them in like sardines after school and on weekends. The arcade billowed cigarette smoke and was electrically charged with light, sound, testosterone and intense competition to get top score.

​The business office was directly across from the pin-ball arcade, concealed behind a large picture mirror that was really one-way glass. From the sanctity of the office, I listened to the clacks and dings of pin-ball machines for hundreds of hours.

One machine in particular captured my interest. A slot car race track with scoreboard sprawled the surface of a table and was covered by a large plastic dome. The steering wheel and controls were located outside the tamper-proof dome.

Over time I started to differentiate sound patterns between players. High score players had more of a rhythmic sound. It was rather intriguing to me. I found the rhythmic patterns held my attention and were strangely soothing in their predictability.   

I was deathly shy as a child and avoided the pin-ball arcade like the plague. One night after the doors were locked and the place was quiet I walked over to the race car game with a handful of quarters to test my theory about rhythm patterns. Instead of steering the car with eye-hand coordination, like everyone else, I focused on finding the rhythm and sound pattern. The numbers on the scoreboard went up and up. I beat the all time score on the machine by a mile.    

After the boys exhausted their search to find out who put the high score on the Turbo Drive, someone asked me if any new players had been in town. Not wanting to be found out, I told them nobody had been in recently. As far as they were concerned, it was an unsolved mystery.   

From these early lessons two things became second nature for me in every job I’ve held, project I’ve managed, or business I’ve run. The first is finding the rhythm and flow in doing the work the business does. The second is looking beneath the surface to see the network of inter-connected systems that makeup the business. Seeing systems is like having x-ray vision.

Effectiveness and high performance has a rhythm to it. Whether it’s lead time, production flow, or a sales cycle, timing is everything. There is an underlying pattern and rhythm to any productive work flow. Even creative projects! Once you find the groove it’s easy to ramp up production while keeping quality and efficiency high. Exceeding the optimal cycle burns people out, increases risk of injury, or leads to employee turnover. Not striving to find that sweet spot stunts the growth of people, performance, and profit.   

As a result of these early insights, I love work! And I love business. I’ve sold jeans, managed inventory, swabbed decks, graded exotic seafood, skippered a boat, coordinated loading and dangerous goods permits for container ships destined for Japan, negotiated complex property leases, and owned multiple businesses. When I’m in my element seeing systems I even get a kick out of loading the dishwasher!

The moral of the story is…if your business isn’t performing as well as you’d like, get a proper diagnosis! It will save you time, money, and frustration!

Intuitive Journey

Tana Plewes has been building communities by focusing on individual dreams and strengths of people since she arrived in British Columbia from Saskatchewan at the age of 19. She started work as a dive tender and relief skipper on an underwater seafood harvesting boat. From the rough waters of ocean living and the hard life of working the boats, she began to not only fall in love with the ocean, but also the people who work hard and dream of better things both for themselves and their families. Tana believes that building entrepreneurs is a powerful way of building communities.

It was that vision that led her to work for the Steveston Harbour Authority, creating systems that helped diverse communities of harbour users thrive. “Our processes took an organization out of chaos and mis-management, and built a financially sustainable, future-focused and people-first system that worked for the community” Tana recalls. It was these early successes with re-structuring and re-vitalizing communities that led Tana to launch out on her own and create a company focused on building up communities of entrepreneurs.

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Hurricane Winds

Tana has a unique ability to see possibilities where others only see problems. In 1996, driven by the urgent need for conservation, the federal government declared a mandate for a massive reduction in salmon fishing, including the likelihood of eliminating entire sub-industries (such as gillnetting) on the west coast within 2 years. This single statement threw the entire west coast fishing community into chaos, fear and confusion. It was like a hurricane wind hitting their boats!

People were losing their livelihoods, many of whom had fished on the coast for generations, had devoted their lives and life savings into this industry and simply didn’t know what to do, or how to respond to this unprecedented and sudden change.

Tana knew she had to do something. And she knew it started with listening to the people. So she launched her own consulting business, and using that as a vehicle, got the funding for, created and staffed a toll-free support service, the Fisheries and Oceans Information Line. Tana listened as 17,535 calls came in and people told their stories of how this 'hurricane wind' was impacting them. People were angry. They were stressful, anxious and sad. Families were breaking up. Whole communities were falling apart. When the president of the Area 'D' Gillnet Association called her and asked in a plaintive voice, “What will I tell my members? What will our members do”? Tana recalls. “It was heart-breaking, but exhilarating at the same time, because as the conversation went on, we slowly began to see possibilities and dream of ways we could turn it around and create something new and different.”

And so that’s what they did. Just like her earlier work at the Steveston Harbour Authority, Tana set about creating structures and systems to help bring people out of chaos and fear, and into order and hope. Her work with fisheries and the fishing communities resulted in new demonstration fisheries, pilot projects for sustainable fishing, programs and services for the fishing communities, and ultimately, her client won the Governor General’s award for Selective and Responsible Fisheries. Order and hope out of chaos and confusion.

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The Start of a New Chapter, The Triumph & The Downfall

After a successful career making an impact in the fishing industry, and having 2 children, Tana decided to enter into the world of entrepreneurship in a bigger way. Together with her husband Randy, they founded Premier Building Products, a manufacturer and distributor of high-end, panelized, custom homes, and Premier Enterprises USA Inc., a general contracting firm. Within 3 years, their BC company grew from revenue of $50,000, to $1.5 million, and was one of the top 3 finalists for the 2001 BC Export Awards, Exporter of the year.

Then, like the fishermen facing fisheries closures, Tana and Randy experienced their own ‘hurricane winds’ on September 11th, 2001 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre in New York. The economy experienced a downturn and home builders in the US (representing 100% of their customer base), ceased building. The bottom fell out of the market. Despite efforts to re-tool and resurrect their business into new Canadian markets, the business was sold by 2005. “We had taken it as far as we could, but at the end of the day, we had built a business that was totally dependent on ourselves and on the whims of one singular market” Tana explained.

                                                                                    Empowering Diverse Communities
After Premier, Tana continued her work as a consultant and community builder until she pursued a long time dream of earning a Master’s degree in Leadership. She has always been a deep thinker, and been able to develop systems, programs, and tools that could bring order, clarity and hope to troubled organizations and hurting communities. By masterfully envisioning what teams and systems needed to come together to make it work better, Tana started her Master’s degree, supporting deeper thought and searching for something that could pull it all together. At this higher level, the process she automatically knew how to do became both explainable and teachable.

While achieving her Leadership degree, Tana's academic advisor suggested she contact Michael Gerber, the well-known American author of the E-Myth series of business books and founder of E-Myth Worldwide. A mentor and fellow systems thinker, Michael had been teaching business owners to think more like entrepreneurs and to work 'on' their business instead of 'in' their business for decades. Connecting with Michael Gerber was an epiphany for Tana. He was able to inspire the language and structure for what she'd been doing and trying to explain to others for decades. He was the answer and the mentor she was searching for!

                                                                                                                      The Epiphany
Tana explains, “What I realized was that I had fallen into what Michael calls the trap of the manager. With Premier Building Products, we had only built a business to the manager stage, and not a true entrepreneurial company that could stand the test of time and essentially run on its own.”

The systems and ideas that Michael Gerber taught Tana over the five years they worked together provided enormous insights for saving communities and families from stress and trauma similar to what Tana had felt during the collapse of Premier, and the fishermen and their families felt when fisheries collapsed. "In hindsight", she said, "It's easy to fall prey to misconceptions that you're on top of the world and will live 'happily ever after' when things are going good. The moment you stop creating you've already begun to slide backwards and consume what you worked so hard to create". That's when Tana realized something she'd known in her heart all along. 

                                         Entrepreneurship - taught right - can change lives, elevate families and heal communities.

It was that epiphany that led Tana to where she is today, founding the Discovery Centre for Entrepreneurship, achieving Canada Revenue Agency recognition as a private career training organization, and delivering programming for entrepreneurs, business owners, and community organizations.

As a catalyst of business growth for over twenty years, Tana's had more than 22,000 critical conversations with business leaders about their labour market challenges. She's tracked performance trends and behaviour patterns for over two decades. She understands barriers to growth, workforce challenges, professional goals, and personal desires. Problems are not personal, they're systemic. Great entrepreneurs learn how to overcome invisible barrier to success by building systems that serve the needs of their customer, employees, suppliers and investors.  

Contact Tana to find out how you can bring the Discovery Centre for Entrepreneurship to your community to foster economic renewal.

What kind of hurricane force winds are you facing?
Is there a dream in your heart that seems too big for you?
You're come to the right place to find out...

Contact Tana