Day 8 - HB Lanarc, West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Date	July 29, 2011
Word/Phrase of the Day	Beard West Falea
Start location	Vancouver, BC
End location	Vancouver, BC
Laid my head	Tim’s newly free ‘guest bedroom’
Miles cycled	<5
Miles on other transport	0
Flats/Problems	0
Bike Mates (miles)	-
$ food	20
$ coffee (#)	0 (1)
$ beer	8 (1)
$ gear	-
$ lodging	0
Beards (per mile: Tim’s new suggestion for a way to measure ‘hipsterness’)
Firm visited	1 – HB Lanarc
Advise for job seekers	Check back in. You contact us. Keep in touch. – Janine de la Salle
Take home lesson	Is there an IPhone ap for this? An automated ‘just checking in’ service?
Highlight	Biking to SE False Creek Olympic Village
Rain?	Nope

HB Lanarc’s offices sit on top of Vancouver’s Academy for Swordplay and Knightly Arts. Next to the building is a film school. Across the street is the ‘best classical music record store in the city’ (according to Tim). So around the bike rack in front of the office was a mix of adults in chain mail carrying weapons, young hipsters discussing static frame usage and disheveled men walking slowly and unaware on the pavement staring at records in their hands. HB Lanarc (www.hblanarc.ca) is on the second floor and is what you’d expect of a design and planning firm. Modern, crisp, efficiently arranged. It has recently been bought by Golder – the AECOM of Canada. HB Lanarc, careful not to get lumped in with the resource extraction services and other slightly dubious development activities that Golder is known for, remains in their office, retains their name and just added the small print “… part of the Golder family) under their logo.

"Golder's offices are in a business park on the outside of town", a woman said. Read: "We are NOT them". At least not in brand or feel. There are both advantages to having a strong “parent company” and disadvantages. The advantages are that they may be able to head in directions that they never had thought of before. As it was pitched to me, “if you can think of it (and if it makes good business sense), they will let you do it”. No need to convince small clients and mitigate small budgets. The size of the organization means that some failure in speculative activities is factored in. It’s why Walmart and REI can have fantastic return policies and small stores can not. They can shoulder the loss when a person returns a grill or a backpack after giving it a good “try” with the reasoning that “it just wasn’t for me” and happy retail agents will smile, refund the money and then toss it in the trash. If this analogy is confusing or sad, just imagine that your project is that tattered backpack. And in the small firms, often when it fails, you get thrown out with the backpack. It's not as cut-throat as that but small businesses feel the bumps of failure more acutely. The advantage of working for Golder or AECOM is having bosses like the retail agents in blue and green vests with smile pins.

I met with Janine de la Salle at HB Lanarc (…”now part of the Golder family”), a woman who studied international development, got into foodie issues while researching Havana and voila, was sheparded by Mark Holland (the H in HB Lanarc) into food system planning. Mark left HB Lanarc recently and Janine now seemingly has great opportunity for exciting responsibility and big shoes to fill. However, it seems that she’d like some help filling those shoes and we talked extensively about how the provinces, the city and private firms engage in food system planning and design in this region as well as throughout the world. We interestingly talked about how west coast planners often say that it is impossible (or at least difficult) to compare Europe and its history and planning path. Yet, after hearing me spout about Croatia, comparisons in northern Europe, observations in Africa and experience (albeit short and limited) in Switzerland, she seemed interested to take another look over the ocean, at least for some variety of thought. And I realized that I had found my niche in her chin stroking, cog turning contemplation about where to take food system planning in HB Lanarc. Janine and I could be a good team and I sense quite a bit of ability to grow, manage and “rise in the ranks” with this niche. I suppose this is what I want. I’ll have to think on that a bit. However, Janine said that her ability to hire me won’t come up until they pitch these ideas to the new bosses and see if they want to go to bat.

Once again I am in the hopper. People seem ready to hire, interested in my potential, but non-committal. And so I left Janine with my portfolio and CV and hope that she keeps me in mind. She said to let her know what comes out of my west coast trip. The problem is that if the trip is successful, I’ll be working elsewhere.