VELA Podcasts

In this episode of the Polestar Podcast by VELA Wealth, host Kevin Parton speaks to Sonia Strobel, the CEO and Co-founder of Skipper Otto, a sustainable B-Corp Certified Community Supported Fishery that connects Canadian fishing families with their communities through memberships and innovative, sustainable business structures. Prepare to be invigorated by Sonia’s passion for sustainability and get inspired to join the Skipper Otto Community.

 

 

Podcast Highlights:

• Discover Skipper Otto’s values on sustainability and the importance of preserving Indigenous finishing practices.
• Explore how Skipper Otto has reimagined the “farm-to-table” experience to connect customers to the stories of fishing families.
• Listen to Sonia discuss the role of a system-oriented approach in enabling sustainable practices and how it was essential to becoming a B-Corp Certified corporation.
• Familiarize yourself with Sonia’s perspectives on entrepreneurship and business ownership, emphasizing the significance of incremental progress to prevent feelings of overwhelm and ultimately achieve greater success.

 

About the Guest – Sonia Strobel

Sonia is a visionary leader and entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Skipper Otto Community Supported Fishery, an innovative solution for home cooks to source premium, wild seafood directly from independent, Canadian fishing families. Under her leadership Skipper Otto has grown both in size and scale, helping to transform the way Canadians eat local seafood.

Sonia is also a sought-after speaker on sustainable fisheries and local food systems. She relentlessly advocates for the rights of independent small-scale, community-based fishers and seeks to protect their way of life in Canada. Her ability to synthesize and communicate about complex issues in the fishing industry enables her to consistently engage Canadians to advocate for meaningful change. Sonia’s leadership continues to earn her many accolades including winner of Coralus (formerly SheEO) in 2015; Veuve Cliquot Business Woman Award 2018 Canadian finalist; winner of the Forum’s 2019 Pitch Finale; Inc Magazine’s list of the top 100 female entrepreneurs of 2020; and finalist in the BC Food and Beverage Women Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2023 and frequent invitations to speak at the House of Commons and major decision making tables.

 

About the Host – Kevin Parton

Kevin Parton, CFP professional, specializes in personal and business financial planning, tax reduction, and estate planning. Kevin diligently concentrates on client education as a powerful strategy for building financial certainty. As no financial situation is the same, Kevin and his team monitor clients’ plans and implement personalized strategies to reduce their personal and corporate taxes, and protect their income, assets, and loved ones against the financial consequences of a serious illness, injury or death, ensuring clients maintain financial certainty and peace of mind. To read more, please visit the VELA team page.

 

The episode is also available on:

  

  

 

 

 

The Podcast Transcript:

Kevin Parton:

Welcome to the Polestar Podcast by VELA Wealth, where we bring together financial experts, visionary entrepreneurs and passionate philanthropists who share not just their expertise but also their personal stories reflecting on their remarkable experiences and offering inspirational insight. I’m Kevin Parton, your host for this episode, and I am very excited for our guests today. Welcome Sonia and thank you for being here.

 

Sonia Strobel:

Thank you so much, Kevin. Great to be here.

 

Kevin Parton:

I was introduced to Sonia through a previous guest, Johnny Immerman, who met her as a keynote speaker at the B Corp convention held in Vancouver earlier this year. I’m excited to circle back to that a little bit later. But the second that he told me the name of her company, I knew I needed to meet her because my freezer is full of her product as my family have been members of this company for two years now.

A little bit of an introduction: Sonia Strobel is the visionary CEO and Co-founder of Skipper Otto, a pioneering organization that is transforming the seafood industry through direct-to-consumer models and sustainability. Skipper Otto is renowned for its innovative approach to connecting consumers directly with local fishermen. Ensuring fresh, high-quality seafood while promoting sustainable fishing practices.

That’s enough of my scripted intro. Sonia, how did I do?

 

Sonia Strobel:

You did great, Kevin. Thank you so much for the intro.

 

Kevin Parton:

You’re very welcome. The rest of this is going to be an awesome opportunity for me to ask you a litany of questions, because I think there’s just so much that you have to share today that we’ll try and tap into on this podcast.

 

Sonia Strobel:

That’s great. I think it’ll be lots of fun. And it’s so great that you’ve been a member for a couple of years, so you’ve already got that experience of what it means to be getting your seafood directly from our fishing families.

 

Kevin Parton:

Yes. I got my own personal questions because there are certain things about the company, such as the faces on the front of the packaging, which I thought was super cool. We’ll get to that later.

Can you share your journey from being a high school English teacher to becoming an entrepreneur? What motivated you to make this shift?

 

Sonia Strobel:

It’s an interesting story. I think there are a lot of us who become accidental entrepreneurs and that’s certainly my journey. I was a high school teacher, and I was always involved in local food systems, social justice projects and things like that. I married into a fishing family, and I was fascinated to learn what that way of life is.

Fishing families take on huge risks. Whether that’s licenses, boats, nets and all that kind of things. Then they head out to sea and have no guarantee what they’re going to catch. They have no guarantee what the price is going to be like, or what the market will be. So, it’s a really risky endeavour.

On the consumer side, we live here in, Metro Vancouver where we’re on the edge of some of the cleanest water in the world with some of the most abundant and well-managed fisheries in the world. And yet mostly 80% of what we eat here is imported seafood, and in Canada we export about 90% of what we catch.

So all these things were kind of fascinating to me when I became a part of a fishing family and because I had for a long time gotten vegetables directly from farmers through community-supported agriculture, CSA boxes, I was familiar with some of these programs and I thought, well, surely somebody must be doing that with fish so you could get your fish directly from a fishing family and I did my research and couldn’t find anyone doing it so just thought well, this is silly. Somebody’s got to do this. I guess it’ll be me. So that was kind of my journey to get started on that business. I don’t think I was even really aware that what I was doing was starting a business at the time. I was just solving a thing that needed to be solved. And so 16 years later, here we are.

 

Kevin Parton:

That’s fascinating. And from everything I’ve read, what you want to do when you start a business is create value. Oftentimes that starts not from doing something and convincing people why they should have it, but solving an unmet need. Now it seems odd and maybe still does that that gap existed 16 years ago. Do you know why it existed, why that hadn’t been started? Were there complexities in doing it? Did you come across obstacles early on where you thought “This is why this didn’t exist before”?

 

Sonia Strobel:

Definitely. I think if I knew then what I know now, I would have been too scared to do what I did. So, ignorance is bliss sometimes. I think we have a system here which is designed for a different outcome. In a lot of parts of the world where they were colonized, our fisheries were set up under that kind of structure. You have people from Britain come here and extract resources to export them. The whole system is kind of designed for that. And so, I realized that whether you’re talking about license ownership or infrastructure, everything was designed for a different outcome. So, in a way, you’re like a salmon swimming upstream. You’re fighting the currents to try to build something new. This definitely was challenging to do, but one of the things that I love to do is problem-solve. And I really found my place in that. And I said “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why is it done that way? Why don’t we just do it like this?” And I think not having had formal business training before I started the business, in some ways allowed me to just be creative, not to say that’s impossible, that will never work. But to just go out and try things. So, lots and lots of challenges. All of the logistics to set up a different way of doing business was challenging for sure.

 

Kevin Parton:

So, let’s go back to the beginning then, 16 years ago. Some of the big things that seem to be paramount in starting and growing a business over 16 years are a vision, mission, purpose and a reason why. Can you speak to what that vision or mission was back then? And if that stayed the same for 16 years?

 

Sonia Strobel:

The vision and mission, as I said before, were around this idea of creating a different kind of fisheries system. Different kinds of food systems. Creating one that pays living wages, treats fishing families with dignity and de-risks fishing for those families. That allows them to persist in a traditional way of life in their often rural, coastal Indigenous communities.  So, we are motivated to protect this way of life. And then on the other side, we’re motivated around building a robust local food system, a way that people could get local food. And then as well we are motivated by conservation. None of us want to catch the last fish. We want this to be a way of life that goes on in our families for generations and generations. So, we’re very interested in the ways that small-scale and community-based fishing protects. It looks forward, it thinks that the long term. It’s not just about pulling floating dollars out of the ocean. But about how do we be good stewards and respectfully interact in this ecosystem? Also a reconciliation piece around recognizing that First Nations here and Inuit in the North families that we work with, have persisted for generations and generations for time immemorial, fishing, feeding themselves, their communities, their families, and trading for millennia. So how do we recognize the value that our First Nations fishing families see, share that story and protect that way of life? So, these are some of the key values around why we got started and those have continued to be what we think of as the pillars for how we make decisions. If we have an opportunity, for example, to bring in a new species of seafood, we ask ourselves, does buying it from this person protect a way of life in our coastal and indigenous fishing communities? Does it support conservation? Is it fished responsibly? Does it build robust local food systems? Does it solve all these kinds of problems and at the same time, does it support the business? Because we are a business.

So there has to be a revenue-generating reason to do this, to make sure the business doesn’t go under. So, these continue to be the pillars of decision-making for the company today and I think that is what has kept us going. In addition, I think your values are like a compass and there are so many great fishing and metaphors so forgive me if I use them. When there’s the captain on the ship, the captain is setting the course and they’re looking  to the horizon. They have to have tools to guide them. Because if you meander and you take side trips and you chase every shiny object, you can lose sight of where you’re going and you can be wildly inefficient getting there. So, for us, those core values, are the core reasons why we started the business and they remain there to guide us at every decision-making point.

 

Kevin Parton:

You said in the beginning you didn’t view yourself as an entrepreneur as you didn’t have the experience. At that point you were a problem solver, and you were married into a fishing family, which gave you close proximity to an existing problem. But now, 16 years in, what are some of the things you did early on that you think now were indicative of real true entrepreneurship?

 

Sonia Strobel:

I think some of the big things right now are around building the right team. Acknowledging that I bring certain strengths and certain skills, and there are lots of gaps that I don’t bring. My husband and I, co-founding this company, had a lot of similar strengths, big ideas and a connection to fishing. But boy, it was hard in those early years trying to do the QuickBooks ourselves. So, recognizing that one of the key things is building the right team, hire people who are smarter than you and have the humility to say you have all these great skills. Let’s bring that into this company and let me set up systems of accountability and communication so that you have the tools and authority to work efficiently and happily. Building a team, of course, is essential.

And systems – systems and structure! Having been a high school teacher, I understand the value of systems because they help you communicate desired outcomes. In business, I learned not to do something once and then reinvent it every time. Do it once and write the system for how it’s done. That has allowed us to onboard great new people, hire them, give them the agency to run with things and do them, but also have succession planning, so if and when people leave, that isn’t a disaster or catastrophe. We’re not on our knees begging people not to leave. We love our staff and we also recognize that people’s lives change. If they move on, we have systems that they can hand over to other people. So that’s also really critical.

 

Kevin Parton:

Presumably over those 16 years, you’ve evolved as a person, as a business owner and have developed a lot of skills along the way. What are some of the things that you’ve learned since the beginning that, when you applied to the business, you really saw an upward trajectory?

 

Sonia Strobel:

There’s so much, and it’s hard just to pull out a couple. But the metaphor I like to use is that my first son was born the same year that I started the company, so he’s 16 and the company’s 16. So, while I’ve been growing a 16-year-old company, I’ve also been raising a 16-year-old person. And I think there are so many parallels. So for any of your listeners who may be parents or close to parents or know some parents, this might ring true that when you first start – in my case, not having had the training to be an entrepreneur to start a business – it’s just like when you have a baby, you kind of can’t believe they let you go home from the hospital with a baby because you’re so unsure of what to do and haven’t had any training whatsoever. But when they’re little, you figure it out because they’re hungry, their needs are right in front of you. You feed them, you change diapers, it’s exhausting, but you just do everything. And that’s what entrepreneurship was like in those early years. You do all things and there’s no real manual for how to do it. But just like how parenting evolves, so does the way you run a business in the same way. As a parent, you have to parent differently. And likewise, as an entrepreneur, you have to lead differently. So, I have now a teenage son, his needs are very different from when he was a newborn baby. I have to upskill all the time as a parent and think about how to be supportive and likewise in the business. It’s very similar in many ways. Being the CEO of a company evolves and it involves a lot of listening and observing and then saying, “Okay, wait, I am not needed in that way anymore.” And that’s not something to be sad about. That’s a good thing because that means the company has grown up and it has all these capacities now. So, it’s important to celebrate that, but then recognize that there are areas where I am needed. For me, a lot of that’s been around thinking about the vision and what this company is designed to achieve, then allowing that to guide my energy. As an example, last year we became B Corp certified and I think you mentioned that at the outset. So that’s a lot of work, getting that B Corp certification. Essentially it acts as an audit of your impact. It involved dedicating time and resources to having all that data, to be transparent so that we can back up claims about the impact that we create. That’s the kind of stuff that you can do as a more mature company, you can’t do that when you’re at the very beginning of a start-up. And just like when you’re a parent, you don’t start writing college applications when your kids are two. Well, some people maybe do, but…

 

Kevin Parton:

… It depends on who you’re talking to!

 

Sonia Strobel:

I know! It depends on who you’re talking to. But there’s a time and a place for that and you can become overwhelmed if you start a startup and you think “We have to be a B Corp and we have to have RRSP contributions for our staff. And we have to do X, Y, Z.” If you try to do that all on day one, you’re going to overwhelm yourself and you’re going to miss some important things. So, it’s recognizing what stage you’re at and then being humble enough to say “I am not able to do that right now, so I’m going to focus on this” or, “I’m not needed for that anymore. So let me celebrate that and then find ways that I can be of value to the company.”

 

Kevin Parton:

There are lots of similarities between business and parenthood. In companies there’s the infancy stage, there’s the growth stage and then eventually there’s the passing of the baton in whatever way that is. For some people, it’s wrapping up an organization. Sometimes when you build something that’s bigger than yourself, it’s a question of “Does this stay in the family or what is a good transition?” Because everybody who starts a business is a person and the business is an entity that’s tied to them, but they have a whole other life outside of that.

So, what does that look like for you and Skipper Otto?  And to backtrack a little as well, could we go back to where the name came from?

 

Sonia Strobel:

So, Otto is my father-in-law’s name. When I married into the fishing family, he really was the one who spoke so eloquently about why fishing is a meaningful way of life. That being out there on the ocean, small-scale, community-based fishers are conservationists. They are outdoors people. They love to be on the water. They derive such meaning from that peaceful, calm environment and also this very basic interaction with nature to harvest these living creatures to feed people. It’s very fulfilling for people, and it just calls to a certain number of people. You hear the phrase, “salt waters in your veins” and it’s real for Otto and it is for my husband, Sean. And so, I learned so much from them. This is why we named the company Skipper Otto, naming it after Otto.

As I say, my first son was born that year that we started the company. And around that time Otto had started talking about selling the boat. It was just so difficult. It was just money-losing. You lose money, year after year and you just can’t keep up. And I felt really sad about this, losing that way of life in our family. I remember distinctly I have a photo of me with this newborn baby on the fish boat and thinking, “Gosh, I’d really love for my kids to be able to grow up this way. It’s so sad if we can’t.” So, here we are, fast forward 16 years. My husband Sean and my oldest son, Oliver, just got back from fishing. They go out every week. They’re fishing the Chinook salmon fisheries right now. It is a family affair. And my oldest son is a fisherman at heart. It’s just fascinating to watch –  it’s the saltwater in his veins. He wants to be there on the water, he wants to learn. And, for a lot of kids at 16, classroom learning is not their favourite place to be, right? And yet, being on the water, the things that he learns about life and about people, about important things like trust and about winning people over, helping people out, about hard work, about staying up late, about how hard your parents work. Even things like radio operation and marine emergency duties and safety on the first day, he’s learning so much and he loves it. So, it’s very meaningful for us as a family to continue fishing. Then I watch our other 45 fishing families that fish for Skipper Otto now, and it’s the same story. It’s all multi-generational. It’s all about how we as fishing families pass on knowledge and our values are out there on the fishing grounds. I see the value of what we do separately and what our members do, by trusting those fishing families and saying, “Hey, we actually value what you’re doing and how you teach your kids and how you raise them.” So, they’re continuing to support them and that’s been a really deeply personal piece for our family.

 

Kevin Parton:

That’s awesome. As you said, “Fishing is in people’s families, and now, not only fishing is in your family but also running an organization that supports fishing.”

Do your children get involved in that side of operations as well? One is running a business, and the other is running a fishing boat, which is a business, but they’re different interests.

 

Sonia Strobel:

Yes, there are really different interests and different skill sets, and I like that you pointed that out. I think a lot of fishing families are entrepreneurs, they’re running businesses, and they have all these costs.

 

Kevin Parton:

High overhead business.

 

Sonia Strobel:

High overhead, high-risk businesses. Right, exactly. And then running this side, the shoreside, is another kind of business. I think that often people don’t recognize that in fishing families… and this is why I use the word fishing families because it often is a whole family affair and you’ve got members of the family on shore who are dealing with things like all of the onerous paperwork, reporting things to the government and managing licenses and the finances, and then selling the fish. And sometimes you’ve got your fish and you’ve had them gutted and you’ve got roe, so now you could sell the roe to somebody else. So, you’re managing those complex business things. Families are all learning that. Then there is the other side – our business side. My kids are a bit young to be involved in much of this business side, except, they’ve certainly grown-up learning how to operate forklifts and learning how to offload and how to pack orders. My kids are down at Fisherman’s Wharf and they’re picking up a lot of the trade as we go along. So, I’m not one of those people who’s hung up on the idea that my kids are going to take over my business. For me, I don’t think that’s fair to pigeonhole them. I want them to be themselves and to discover what they want to do in the world. Here is this opportunity, we have this growing business. They can work in it, whether that’s a summer college job or whether they begin to pick up some of the other aspects, whether that’s finance or marketing or HR, who knows, there’ll be opportunities. But I also don’t want to burden them with this idea that they have to follow in my footsteps and take it over. So, we think about succession planning in terms of: How do we do jobs that we love, for as long as we want to do them? And then how do we set ourselves up to be able to replace ourselves? How do we make sure that what we’re building, we can replace ourselves if and when we want to?

 

Kevin Parton:

So, I heard on another podcast you’re on, and you mentioned a couple of things that I wanted to touch on. You talked about scaling the business. I don’t know how many fishing families were involved other than your own in year 1, but you’ve got 45 now, so a big growth trajectory. Now this is my personal story. I didn’t know anything about Skipper Otto, but I opened the freezer one day and my wife had brought home a bunch of fish with people’s pictures on it. And then I remember reading and it told me about who that fisherman was and where they caught the fish. And there’s this story on there and I thought that’s so unique and cool. Then my brain being systems-oriented thought, the effort that had to go behind doing this, doesn’t necessarily seem profitable – but it’s definitely a labour of love to have done that. So, tell us about that.

 

 

Sonia Strobel:

You know, it’s true. We’re super proud of those labels because we are the only people I know of in the world that do that. Certainly, the only ones in Canada. But I don’t know anybody else anywhere in the world that does that. And it’s not just a marketing ploy. It’s not like we just randomly stick someone’s face on the label, we really babysit each fish from the boat through the processor. Our fishing families will call us from the fishing grounds and report in and say, “Okay, I’ve got X pounds of this product and I’m on my way into Vancouver.” And so, our operations team does the math, they figure out the recovery rates, they figure out how many fillets there will be. We do all the printing in-house. So, we actually produce that label on the spot. Then we edit it with all the current updated information, we run off however many copies we need onto those drums of labels, and then we take those or ship them across town to where they’re being processed. So it’s real-time, fisherman drives up with the truck of fish, our labels arrive, the fish cutters are cutting back, sealing and then putting that label on there so that we know who caught it. And that’s been really important to us because it’s an act of honouring the work of those people who harvest it. And I think so much about our food system we’re so disconnected. I know we go into the grocery store, and they shrink-wrap things, and nobody thinks much about where it came from. But I think when you get to know fishing families, you understand the work that goes into that.

I think we also live in a world where people are so disconnected, that they’re losing those connections between people. You could live in your apartment as we did in the pandemic and order everything online and never see another human. But we lose something about our humanity when we don’t connect with people or connect with people who are outside of our own little social media bubbles. So that’s always been critical for us to have the fishing families themselves tell us what they want on their label, their name, maybe for many of our First Nations, that’s the name of the fish in their language. How long or how many generations they’ve been fishing, gear method that they use to catch it. All these kinds of pieces of information tell us that.

So, it does seem like an onerous thing to do, but I said at the beginning, this is why I think systems are so important. Because once you have the system in place, it’s not that difficult to maintain. But it takes being motivated to do it, valuing it, saying this is really important to us and then putting into place the systems to operate that day after day. So, it is critical to what we do and we’re really proud of it.

 

 

Kevin Parton:

I love it too. You talked about connecting the chain and making everyone feel like part of the community. I’ve heard Scott Harrison, who is the founder of Charity Water, and he talked about how they would raise money to build wells and then he finally was able to connect the well that was built in the water and the data being produced to the people who made the donations. And just the general contentment and satisfaction with the people who are making donations went through the roof because they saw where their money went. And so, for me, it’s a similar experience. I know who I’m supporting. I know who the fisherman was. I would imagine it must be a sense of pride too, for the fisherman, knowing that’s their package. It’s not just going out into the ether of the world. It’s not being shipped to another country. It’s super unique.

I can see such a passionate pursuit of what you’re doing because I heard you talk about how you’re an ideas woman and sometimes you show up with ideas and your team must think that you’re nuts. But that’s super cool because it’s important to know that exists in the business world. That you can have these crazy ideas that aren’t necessarily entirely motivated by efficiency at first or by profitability, but by passion and by the labour of love. And then figure out how to make it work efficiently and systematically, for it to build and become profitable. And as time has gone on, it builds loyalty. It builds brand recognition.

 

Sonia Strobel:

It does. And it even builds it within the organization. I think you’re absolutely right. It used to just be me walking in and throwing grenades into everything, just like crazy ideas. But I think that kind of enthusiasm for centering the business around our values, is infectious and everybody has picked that up. So, the ideas come from within as well, the team is all motivated to find new novel ways to do things so that we can achieve what we’re setting out to do. One short example is that one of the other folks on our team came up with the idea to do a Secret Santa letter exchange program during the holidays. So, we have all of our members write letters to their fishing families during the holidays to say how meaningful it is to them. So that’s closing the loop you were talking about and some of the fishermen are cranky old fishermen, but they’ll say “Well, I guess I got to go because I have to get something for the members.” Because they’re so proud. They know their face is going on it, and they know what it means to those people at the end to receive it.

 

 

Kevin Parton:

That’s awesome. So, I know about the company, I love all of the value it brings to the fishers. But the community is a big part. You talked in the past about where people can go to pick up the seafood and how that gets them out of their home, into the community and the value it brings. So, maybe talk about it from the consumer side. What are the reasons why this is a far better way for them to engage with seafood consumption than what they might be familiar with.

 

Sonia Strobel:

That’s a great question. From the consumer side, folks often think that the most convenient thing is just to walk into a grocery store and pick up what’s there. But actually, it’s a far better experience to be a member of a Community Supported Fishery and get your seafood this way. So, our members commit to a dollar value for the year, and they can start as small as $100. It’s not a massive commitment and that almost functions like a gift card, if you will. After that, they can pick and choose whatever they want, whenever they want from the catch. So, they’ll get e-mail updates from the fishing grounds, stories about who’s catching what, where, when and how, and they can log in to the online store, see their credit there and then say, “Oh, look, Doug caught halibut. I’d like a piece” or, “Look, there’s some smoked salmon just out of the smokehouse. I’ll take a piece of that.” So, they can pick and choose. It’s really flexible. It’s not like getting a weekly mystery box of fish or anything, and they can order as often as they want.

The important thing is we don’t do direct home delivery. What we do is what we call “Community Partner Pickups”. So, we have about 100 pickup locations across Canada, from Victoria to Montreal, where people can select to have their orders shipped. The order goes into a grocery store, a butcher shop, sometimes a brewery or even sometimes a National Historic site. Places that act as a community pickup hub. Your order comes in flash frozen. It goes into that freezer, and then you’ve got about four days or so to go and pick it up. And that’s really important. It fosters relationships in your community. So, if you’re here in Metro Vancouver, you can come to False Creek Fisherman’s Wharf and pick it up directly from us. But if you’re in Winnipeg or you’re in Toronto, you can pick it up in your neighbourhood, in your community. Those community partners are also business people running a business in their community. They know their community too, and it sends our people in the door to shop in the store, and I think that’s meaningful. I think it’s really important to do that, to support one another. They say, “The rising tide lifts all boats.” And it’s a core driver to make sure we’re lifting one another up.

So, we think that’s a really neat and efficient way to get your seafood because it’s coming in flash frozen, you can take these pieces home, put it in the freezer, sometimes people think that frozen isn’t high quality, but I just have to say when we do blind side-by-side taste tests, people always pick the frozen and the reason they do, is because if it’s flash-frozen right when it’s caught, you’re preserving the catch day freshness, whereas if it’s coming to you through that long supply chain, it might have been out of the water for 14 days by the time you get it. So, it’s not necessarily fresh. When you’ve got these beautiful little flash-frozen pieces of fish in your freezer you can pull one out and throw it in a sink of cold water for 20 minutes. Once thawed, you’re cooking the rest of your dinner. You’ve got the freshest seafood on the table. It’s not languishing in your fridge while you decide what night you’re going to cook it, but it’s always on hand. It’s just such a convenient way for folks to get seafood.

 

Kevin Parton:

You’re describing what happens in my house two to three days a week. And in two years, I haven’t had a bad experience. So, like I said, I love being part of that. I love supporting local and knowing where those resources are going.

A couple more things that I want to cover today before we wrap this up. You mentioned something that I thought was also really unique about what you do, called Blue Perks Wellness. So maybe for a couple of minutes can you talk about what that is?

 

Sonia Strobel:

That’s a great program where businesses buy Skipper Otto memberships for their staff, their key accounts, their partners, etc. as a Wellness perk. Maybe your listeners are familiar with this idea of blue zones in the world, and so blue zones are parts of the world where there are the longest-living people. We studied them and asked why they lived so long. Why are they healthy? Why are they happy? And one of the things that we pulled out of that is that people in blue zones eat seafood about 3 times a week. It’s incredibly nutritive, incredibly good for you, so much better for you than fish oil supplements that don’t have the same effect. So, we’ve offered this to businesses to buy a Skipper Otto membership for their staff. We saw this in the blue zones, and we thought, “Wow, this really is what we do at Skipper Otto.” Connecting people in meaningful ways, we feed them the most nutritive, delicious fish that’s so good for your brain and your heart and all those things. So, we have companies now who are taking us up on this. They’re buying Skipper Otto memberships for their teams. We have a couple of tiers of that package, whether it’s kind of a self-serve or whether it’s a little bit more handholding where we actually will do a lunch and learn with staff, helping them understand the benefit, what they get from this, the welcome packages that every employee can have on their desk. It’s a great way for companies to set themselves apart. There are so many folks that I’m hearing from in the business community talking about how we retain good staff. They’re looking for more than just the boilerplate benefits packages. This is a really kind of neat and unique thing when we talk to staff at companies that have blue perks, they are so fired up about it. They feel like this really shows how much their company cares. And that they’ve been welcomed into something unique and different. We meet them where they are. Some folks are great home cooks. They know exactly what to do. We’ve got recipes. Some folks are just starting out, they’re scared to cook fish. But we can do all this education with them. As you know, I was a high school teacher. I love the teaching and learning part. Thanks for asking about that. We think that’s a really fun and exciting program.

 

Kevin Parton:

I love that for what it is, it’s very unique. I also love it because it’s among several things over the 16 years of Skipper Otto that have been quite creative and innovative. I think that what helps businesses stand the test of time. Not just resting on your laurels and doing what worked when you started. But thinking how do we grow? How do we pivot? How are we unique? All of these things are coming out of great ideas and problem-finding. But it’s also continuing to take those risks, going for a new idea that may not work but feels good. That’s true entrepreneurship. So, with that being said, where do you see Skipper Otto in 10 years? What’s on the horizon?

 

Sonia Strobel:

So much. I love my job. Honestly, I hope people love their jobs as much as I do because I get to be creative, I get to think long-term down the road and what else can we create with this more mature business. I get excited about the idea of truly being nationwide in terms of our fishing families, but also nationwide in terms of anyone in Canada being able to access Canadian seafood in this direct-to-fishing family way. We have fishing families in BC and Nunavut, we’re chatting now with some folks in Northern Saskatchewan about having Saskatchewan Lake fish available to Skipper Otto members, and, of course, there’s the East Coast. There are so many fisheries in Canada that we would be so excited to support and to be able to have our members support and to get to know them. And then likewise, expanding into every corner of the country in terms of pick-up. We have about 100 pickup locations, but we want more. We want thousands, we want to be able to reach everybody. So, we do have a big vision for where we’re going. And I just know there are so many opportunities and we’re just excited to grow. We grow mostly through word of mouth, and we’ve been cautious with how we grow because we have wanted to retain that control. But we know that as we grow, we grow our impact, and we grow a better food system in Canada and a better way of life for folks. So, we’re really excited about that.

 

Kevin Parton:

That’s awesome. Maybe a question for another interview is as things scale, but for now, how do you maintain the culture and how do you maintain that sense of community? Does one prevent or limit the other or can you do them all? So excited to see where Skipper Otto grows to and how you handle and manage that. Just based on your demeanor in this interview, you’re bringing so much passion to what you do, and that’s the secret ingredient to success in so many ways. Which brings us to the last two questions that I like to ask these of everybody who I convinced to come on this podcast. The first is around purpose. At this stage in your life, with everything that you know, for people striving to find purpose and fulfillment, what advice would you give to them?

 

Sonia Strobel:

For me, we talked about this at the outset, it was really around witnessing a problem or something that just didn’t jive for me, that didn’t seem right. Thinking that’s not the best way to do this. There’s got to be a better way. When something runs counter to your values, you can feel your blood pressure rising, and that’s because your values are under threat. So, if you find yourself getting huffy about something, then I think that’s an opportunity to say wait. That’s something that is going counter to my values. Is there some way that I can solve that problem? I think that’s what lights people up. When they feel like they’re moving toward a better way, moving towards solving something that really goes counter to their values and beliefs, that’s what lights them up. That’s really what we did. And I think that doesn’t always have to be starting a business. I’m sure some of your listeners work in large mature companies or any variety of things. I think we can all look at places in our lives, whether that’s in our community or our kids, sports teams or in our volunteer work or even within our own departments and teams in our company. We can all find things that rub us the wrong way that might be running counter to our values. Then we must get creative and not be afraid to set up something new that tackles that. So that for me is seeing something that’s wrong and then learning about it, listening and then innovating and finding a new way. And that’s what gets us up in the morning.

 

Kevin Parton:

I love that. And I think what you said there that stood out was not being afraid. For a lot of people, it’s the fear of “what if” or thinking if it is worth it or even sitting still long enough to listen to that feeling that you said you got. But doing that means being concrete on what those values are, and where that feeling comes from. But then having the confidence to say, we’re on this planet for as long as we’re here, let’s have the courage and try. And that’s where I think purpose comes from.

 

Sonia Strobel:

Yes, exactly. It’s always easier to ask forgiveness than permission. So, just be daring and try things in small ways. We didn’t have any money when we started Skipper Otto. But we tried a low hanging fruit version. So, I encourage people to think about what’s the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that you can try and find out if it’s got legs.

 

Kevin Parton:

And maybe in a similar vein or it’s been mentioned already, what’s the most valuable advice you would share with leaders or entrepreneurs, based on your experience? At this point, what advice would you give to someone who’s starting a business or looking to be a leader in their community or their company?

 

Sonia Strobel:

Well, I guess I can tie that to the last question you asked and to some things we talked about earlier.  Remember that you don’t have to do it all yourself, and you don’t have to do it all at once. So, there’s some really interesting visuals out there about how, if you look at the whole thing that you’re building, you can become overwhelmed. You must not do that. You must look one step at a time. My husband is a cave diver, and he always says to me, “The thing about cave diving is you have to just think about what’s right in front of you. You can’t think about what happens if my light goes out. What happens if this happens?” You’ll become paralyzed by that, so you solve for what’s right in front of you right now and know that you will have confidence. You have what it takes to solve whatever it is that’s coming when it comes, you can’t fix it now. You can’t solve it now. When you first start a company or a new project, you may have this vision, “We want to have our B Corp certification or do 1% For The Planet.” Know that that will come. And when the time is right, you are the right person to do it. You will be fine. Just solve what’s right in front of you, one step at a time, and that’s gotten me through. Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed. Have the vision but bring your gaze back to a closer field.

 

Kevin Parton:

I love that advice. That’s incredibly valuable. And for someone whose husband does cave diving, I’m sure that is valuable advice, too. “Don’t think too far ahead, just get to dinner time!”

 

Sonia Strobel:

Get to dinner time! Exactly.

 

Kevin Parton:

Okay, well, I know where to find you. But for any listeners who are excited about what they’ve heard and want to learn more, or they want to become a member. How do they find you?

 

Sonia Strobel:

I would love to connect with folks! And I’d love to feed them. So, if they go to skipperotto.com, you can join. You can buy, as little as $100 membership and give us a try. If you don’t like it, no harm, no foul. But I can guarantee you’re going to love it. You can also find us on all the social channels. Follow our fishing families on the fishing grounds. I would love to have folks aboard, get them some seafood and get them some great stories and community connection. And likewise, if you’re running a business, if you have a company, if you have a team and you think that Blue Perks might be a great fit for your team, give me a call. Give me a shout. You can find me at sonia@skipperotto.com. Find me on LinkedIn and places like that as well. I’d love to have a chat and see what could work for your team.

 

Kevin Parton:

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. After two years of seeing your product in my freezer, it’s a pleasure to be able to learn a lot more about you and thank you for making the time today.

 

Sonia Strobel:

Thank you so much for being a member of all these years and for helping share our story, it was great chatting with you today.

 

Kevin Parton:

Likewise, take care.

 

Sonia Strobel:

You too.