City firm named family enterprise of the year

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Patti Bowles and her husband, Kristjan Backman, of Phoenix Recycling Inc. (JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Photo Store

IT'S now the province's largest document-shredding business and one of its largest office-products recycling services, but Winnipegger Kristjan Backman hasn't forgotten his family-owned business's humble beginnings.

It was 22 years ago Backman built a plywood box for the back of his father's old half-ton truck and launched Phoenix Recycling Inc.

"It was absolutely just me," Backman said of Phoenix's early days as a provider of recycling services for local small businesses. One man, one truck and one customer.

Since then, Backman and his wife, Patti Bowles, have built Phoenix into a thriving $2.5-million-a-year business that not only picks up and recycles office waste products, but also stores and shreds company documents. And instead of one employee and one truck, Phoenix now boasts 21 employees and a fleet of 11 trucks.

It's that kind of growth and success that helped lead to Phoenix recently being named the 2013 Manitoba Family Enterprise of the Year by the Manitoba chapter of the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise (CAFE).

The Transcona firm beat out two other finalists -- The Eastern Group of Companies and Thomas Design Builders Ltd. -- for this year's award. It will go on to represent Manitoba at the national Family Enterprise of the Year awards dinner this June in Toronto.

"Manitoba family-owned businesses have continued to be recognized as some of the most important and valued employers throughout Manitoba," Kimberly Bishop, president of the Manitoba chapter of CAFE, said in announcing this year's award winner.

Bishop said one way of measuring the importance of family enterprises is by their sheer numbers. About 43 per cent, or just over 32,000, of the province's 74,459 businesses are family-owned enterprises.

She said some of the criteria CAFE uses in selecting a winner are its growth, success and involvement in the community. There also must be more than one generation of the family involved in the business, and it has to be headquartered here.

Backman said his parents and Patti's parents are investors in the business and helped keep the company afloat during those early years.

"We worked 100 hours a week for probably three or four years," he said.

He also recalled in those early days living for several months in a camper trailer parked in the company's warehouse so he wouldn't waste time driving to and from work.

He said it was in 1994, a year before a big downturn in the recycling business, that a customer asked him if Phoenix would also provide document-shredding services. He agreed, other customers quickly came on board, and it wasn't long before that became the company's biggest revenue generator.

"We lost a ton of money during that period of time (the recycling downturn) and we wanted to change the focus of our business from a commodity-based business to more of a services-based business...," he said. "So we were able to really turn the company around."

Less than a decade later, again at the request of a customer, Phoenix added document storage to its service offerings.

And about three years later, that side of the business doubled in size overnight with the acquisition of the document-storage operations of one of its competitors.

Document shredding, which can be done either on-site or at Phoenix's 50,000-square-foot depot on Hoka Street, accounts for more than half the company's yearly revenue, Backman said. Document-storage chips in about 30 per cent and recycling accounts for the remaining 20 per cent.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

Phoenix rising

Name: Phoenix Recycling Inc.

Owners: Kristjan Backman and family

Founded: 1992

Services: The company started as a recycling operation, picking up and recycling office-waste products such as paper, bottles and tin cans. It later expanded into offering document storage and shredding services.

Growth: Started with one employee, one truck and one customer. Now has a staff of 21, a fleet of 11 trucks and more than 1,700 customers. It's the province's largest paper-shredding company, and one of its larger recycling-services operations.

-- source: Kristjan Backman

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 12, 2013 B5