Canada's Top Small & Medium Employers (2025) - Flipbook - Page 5
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JILLY
CANADA'S TOP SMALL & MEDIUM EMPLOYERS (2025)
Employees at Kelowna, B.C.-based The Jilly Box enjoy a wellness weekend at a resort hotel in Victoria.
Where Smallest is Beautiful
Some of the most effective SMEs have fewer than 50 employees
I
f you scrutinize the list of Canada’s Top
Small & Medium Employers (2025),
which covers companies with less
than 500 employees, you’ll see a few
with a simple but rather special distinction. Among the competition’s 125 winners
are 10 firms with fewer than 50 employees
— the smallest of the small. They are
sprinkled across the country, from
Vancouver to Halifax, and their businesses
run from wine wholesaling (Trialto Wine
Group Ltd.) to social and environmental
communications (Yulu Public Relations
Inc.). But the inspiring part is that these
little engines can offer a working environment of such high quality as to become a
competition winner.
“Benefit wise, they are strong,” says
Kristina Leung, managing editor at
Mediacorp Canada, which runs the
competition. She notes that most super-small companies have a single main
founder. “For them, it can be an opportunity to do what you love — ‘I don’t necessarily want to have a 9 to 5 so I’m going to
create a business that I’m interested in. I’ll
be able to create my own schedule, and I’m
going to be able to enable other people
that collaborate me with me to have the
same kind of perks and benefits.’”
You can see that in companies like The
Jilly Box Inc., founded by designer and
former television personality Jillian Harris
and a partner in Kelowna, B.C. Harris says
she wanted to start a company she’d like to
work for. And in Ontario, veteran political
adviser Kory Teneycke and longtime
government relations leader Michael
Coates set up Rubicon Strategy Inc. to
take advantage of the decades of experience they could offer to offer companies
that want to lobby government. Which is
also a lucrative field, notes CEO Teneycke
— another reason to start a very small
company. With just 30 employees, it is
“very profitable,” he says, and can afford a
full range of benefits and bonuses for its
highly educated experts. At that size, too,
there’s another advantage: “We tend to be
pretty choosy who we bring in.”
– Berton Woodward
