Steve: And your activities, I gather, here are not limited to the sort of comptroller or accounting aspect, but you are involved in a number of other activities. Maybe you could explain.
Jack: That's right, because the role that I have here at the board, it's much, much more than just handling the accounting and the setup. I'm one of those accountants that just don't like accounting at all. [laughter] I leave that to-we have an assistant comptroller here at the Board, and she handles a lot of the financial statement preparation and presentation. For me, what it's allowed me to do is allowed me to go into the management of the mandate of the Board of Trade, meaning that I look at the organization from a budgetary point of view. Being a non-profit, this is my first taste of a non-profit organization, and being in a non-profit environment is so much different from the real estate development environment, where, you know, you can put away five, ten thousand dollars for just a consultant's contingency fees. Here, we're battling for every dollar. As I said to Darcy, I've never seen so many people happy at the end of the year when we make only a couple thousand bucks! [laughter] That's quite an achievement, when you look at what we do here at the Board. Everything has to be analyzed or evaluated. Cost-benefit analysis that we do daily here-we always have to measure the benefit of what we do here versus the cost of delivering that service or that message. For me, that takes it from being involved with the programs that we deliver, the policy research that we do here, the membership targets that we set up, the business development sponsorship dollars that we try to kind of squeeze out of every hole in the community. We roll that all in to make sure that our costs are being covered by all these contributions. The Board of Trade is dependent on no provincial, federal monies at all, so we're self-sustaining here. That means that all the activities have to be able to stand on their own, and from that point of view, I look at every department as a business case, and for me, that's much, much more than just doing the analysis at the end of the month of how much they made or how much they lost. It means also setting up a strategy going forward for the entire year and for the years to come.
Steve: And I understand you were also involved in liaising with human resource managers in other companies or something. Could you explain a little bit about that?
Jack: Well, being also the Director of Administration, what happens is that I'm responsible for support to departments and also to the fulfilling of our operations, so I do get involved with all the different HR agencies that we have around town. That goes from analyzing and making sure we're paying the proper wages, the proper benefits, so we are always in contact with the people that are involved in setting up employment packages, and so we make sure that ours are competitive out there with them, and also the agencies, the temp agencies, the HR hiring and firing, we have consultants-we don't have an HR department, we have thirty-six full-time staff here. We don't have an on-site human resources manager. So I'm the emergency stop, if you want to call it that, in here, if we need legal advice on some standard employment issue, or whether it's recruiting. I'm not a professional interviewer, so we have consultants that we bring in, so I would make sure that they are briefed before they get in here what the situation is; what's needed, what's our requirement. Basically, we manage to use the outside consultants as kind of a top-up of what we can do internally.
Steve: What do you think is your biggest challenge at this point? Looking forward for the Vancouver Board of Trade, what is your biggest challenge?
Jack: Boy, I think it would be engagement and relevant-remain relevant to our membership. We have a diverse community out there, and the Board of Trade is supposed to represent the business community, and that includes the large and small businesses; it also involves the different ethnic communities and ethnic businesses as well, so I think whether it is high-tech, low-tech, service, manufacturing, we've got to remember that they all have their different pressures and all different sensitivities, so that's a challenge, trying to remain relevant to all those different sectors. Engagement means, to me, kind of falls in with the relevant part, because in order to understand what they do-all the different sectors do-and for them to understand what we as their local Chamber of Commerce does for them, we have to maintain this two-way communication. We have to be on top of each other in terms of understanding what they are, who they are, and for them to also understand us at the Board of Trade; what we can do and what we can't do. There are some things that we can't do, so in terms of engagement, meaning just to kind of keep that open communication to make people understand each other.
