On the first Tuesday of every month, we’ll announce a new Female Founder, including a video interview of them sharing their business story. Want to be featured as a Female Founder? Contact Memberships for more details. The Female Founders Program would not be possible without our Title Sponsor, Scotiabank.
To learn a little more about the Scotiabank Women Initiative, and why they’ve chosen to sponsor this program, see the video below.
The next Female Founder(s) we’re featuring is Cathy Snyder, President & CEO, Nopak Canada and Angela Power, Vice-Chair and Co-Owner of Nopak Canada.
To learn more about Cathy & Angela’s journey as a Female Founder, watch the interview below (or read the written format).
Tell us about your business.
(Cathy Synder) Nopak Canada Inc. has been around for over 40 years, and I have my little prop here and we make these. This is a cylinder. This one is our own design, and everything is made here in Ontario, and it does qualify for Ontario Made and, we are in the business of making things move.
So, we make cylinders, and we also distribute fluid power products that help things move in every industry in Canada and around the world. We are working on an order right now that is going to France and we’re working on another order that is going to end up in Mongolia. So, we make things move all over the world.
Where is your business located?
(Angela) We’re located at 220 Forbisher Drive in Waterloo and have been there for 30 years or more.
What are some of the benefits of establishing your business in the Waterloo Region?
(Cathy) We think this area is a good fit for our company because of the history of manufacturing that exists here in the Kitchen Waterloo area and also the technology that exists here. So, we are very much and have been a traditional machine shop type of environment which fit in very well with the manufacturing environment of kind of the older KW area but now we’re moving into that more technology driven business and I’ve been looking at how do we merge tradition with technology and so that’s what we’re working on next.
That’s the next phase of our evolution is to try and move into the environment where we’re using AI, where we’re using robotics, where we’re using co-bots, that kind of thing, machine centers, all of those kind of technology environments that we need to move into to be the business that we want to grow to be.
How do you ensure the core values are integrated at the workplace?
(Cathy) I think how we’re trying to really live timely quality service is by going out into the production area and saying, okay, here’s what’s due today. Is there anything that’s going to prevent this from going out the door? This is what’s due next week.
Is there anything that’s going to prevent this from going out the door? And interestingly, I had a banner made, which we’ve hung out in production and staff have pointed to it and said, “I need to do that. So how am I going to do that? If I have all these other things, what do we need to do to make sure that I am timely and I am producing quality and I am servicing the customer.”
So, for me, that was a real “aha moment” because that’s, that says to me, people understand what we’re trying to do and now they’re starting to live it too.
And so, we’ve, we’ve tried to do that in everything. And not only from the customer perspective, but I say to people, we are each other’s customers as well. So, we have to be living that for each other.
If there’s something that somebody is waiting for, we need to be timely about that. We need to give them what they need, and we need to be able to help them solve a problem if they’re, if they have one or in whatever role they have, we need to help them to make what they’re doing as easy and efficient for them as possible.
How did you start your career?
(Angela) I started off when I was, I’m going to say 15 years old – in my own cleaning business.
And it started off slow and then moved up to bigger and better things for me. And that’s where I was until three years ago. So, I found it great.
How do you feel about being your own boss?
(Angela) For me, it was great. I did things at my own time, didn’t have to account for anybody else’s mistakes, account for my own. And it was fine for me.
That’s what I like to do. I could come and go as I please just do my own thing. And yeah, it just kind of came to me.
How did you learn about starting your own business?
(Angela) When I first started at 15, I did one house for my aunt. I did her house and that’s what started it. And it was, it just grew from there.
It was a lot of work. It was seven nights a week sometimes, but I got through it all and raising my kids and did it on my own.
(Cathy) Out of university, I started at Krug Furniture in manufacturing. So, I’ve kind of come full circle in terms of my career because in between I worked in insurance and, more recently I worked at United Way and in Kitchener-Waterloo in not-for-profit, of course. So I’ve kind of been involved in a lot of different industries and each one has given me a lot of good background for the role I’m in right now, because I am, I’m using a lot of what I learned in each of those different positions and, and in each part of my career to learn about what I’d like to do if I ever became President and CEO and learn what I might not want to do as President and CEO. And so, I think those being in the three different industries has really positioned me well for where I am now.
What have you learned from one another?
(Angela) I can tell you; I’ve learned so much from Kathy, right? Because I know nothing, I knew nothing about this business, and she’s taught me a lot.
(Cathy) Angie for me has taught me what works well and what doesn’t, because I bounce everything off Angie first.
I’ll talk to Angie about; this is what I want to do. This is what I’m thinking. And so, it’s that having that sounding board for me is important.
And, and because of the situation that we’re in, we only have each other. and so that’s been important to me and learning what she thinks will work and not work has been great because that, that meant I didn’t just go blazing out into the main office and announce something and, you know, I’m flat.
(Angela) We bounce things off each other all the time. Yeah. To make sure that, okay, we’re on the same page here, you know?
(Cathy) So, well, I was just going to say one of the more recent things that I said to Angie – I’m going into year two, I’m in year two of my husband being gone, 15 months, almost, you know, and Angie’s been with her husband a little longer. And I was having a bad day, bad, bad morning.
And she came in and I said, this isn’t getting easier. And Angie said, it, year two is not easier. In some ways it’s harder because you’re through the shock of what you’ve been through.
And now you’re into the reality of what you’re going through and that’s almost harder. And having Angie, who’s been there and is in the business with me, so we’re trying to get through the day and trying to live through these moments of grief has been important to me and really special. Having someone who’s been there and understands.
(Angela) Important. Yeah. It’s important to have that other person who understands. It’ll be four years for me, and it doesn’t get easier. But we take it day by day and get through each, each day trying to run this business and keep it afloat and keep everybody happy.
How did you get involved with Nopak?
(Angela) My husband, I was married to almost 30 years. He started this business. He was a founder, and this was his thing. It wasn’t mine. Like I said, I was in my own business, and he was getting ready to retire. So, I was downsizing my business and almost four years ago, December, he passed away very suddenly.
So, this was kind of put in my lap of what to do with it. So, I started off as a board member to try and figure out what I wanted to do. And then I was asked to join Nopak as an employee plus help run the business, help, you know, do something with it, make it better.
And I did that. It’s hard because I didn’t know nothing. I had no knowledge, only of what he told me, but that’s not, it doesn’t cut. You need to see what the business is all about. Not just somebody telling you all the time. And it was hard, very hard.
It took me two years just to be able to function, to understand what this whole business was. But I take it day by day and knowledge from Kathy has taught me and I’m still learning. I’ll always be learning.
I lost, the business lost 40 years, over 40 years of knowledge and I’ll never have that, but I’ll learn it day by day. That’s how I became part of this business.
(Cathy) So, my husband was not a founder, but he came in shortly after Nopak Canada came into existence in various capacities over 40 years.
And he had been a part-time employee for most of that time and became a shareholder within the last 20 years or so. And he needed somebody to help with accounting because the accountant had decided to retire. And so, I was looking, actually looking to start my own business at that point in time.
And he said, I need help, and I need it next week. You’re coming in. Okay.
So, I went in and took over from the person who was doing the bookkeeping at the time. And I took over from what he was doing as well, because he wanted to kind of semi-retire. And so that was in 2017.
And over the years until 2021, I was in the role of CFO, CAO, and I have a CPA designation and an HR designation. So, I started to upgrade everything that I saw needed to be upgraded. And then Angie’s husband wanted to retire.
The president at the time wanted to retire. And there’s a lot of discussion about what we were going to do with the business, sell it, close it, or keep going. And the decision was made to keep going.
And the decision was made by the board to put me in as President and CEO. And so, I’ve been doing that since July 1st, 2021. So, like Angie, when I came in, my husband would show me this thing.
And I go, yeah, I have no idea what that does. And so, over the course of the years that I’ve been there, I have learned, as has Angie, we can pretty much put one of these together now. Probably you wouldn’t want to use it in a machine because it might not have the… You never know.
You never know though. But under the watchful eye of our shop foreman, I’m sure we could probably use it. But we’ve pulled parts.
We’ve done a lot of things over there so that we understood what the people in the shop are doing in the production area. And I think that’s a good basis. And that’s gained us some respect from those individuals.
But yeah, I really miss my husband being here because like Terry, that was all the financial and administration knowledge of the company just being gone. And I really miss talking to him about the strategy and all of these things that we wanted to do with the business. For me, that’s one of the most difficult challenges of keeping going.
And it probably would be easy for us any day to say, you know what, we’re done. But we know we can’t. We have people depending on us and that’s important to us.
And our husband’s legacy too. I think I can speak for us when I say we really want them to be proud of us. And so, we keep going every day so that we make that happen.
What were the first steps you took after taking over the business?
(Cathy) For me, it was quite honestly getting rid of the three typewriters that were there. We did have three typewriters which were used and not by me. And so, it was a very symbolic thing for me to be able to phone someone to come and take typewriters away.
And since then, we have implemented an ERP system that tracks all over 100,000 inventory parts we have. Because each of our cylinders is considered a custom order, any cylinder can have numerous modifications made to it depending on what the requires. And so, tracking that, we’ve had one person that’s been really involved in that.
And she, Maggie, I got to give her some credit because she’s worked on those materials for thousands of cylinders. And between her and the shop foreman Clive have made sure that they’re accurate. And these cylinders take many parts. It looks like it is not that many, but they take many, many parts and different labor and all kinds of different things. And so, for us, just putting that in place was a huge effort. And everybody was involved in it.
It impacted everyone. We’ve automated a lot of those things that used to be typed are now in systems. Angie puts a lot of that information into the system.
And now we’re starting to talk about moving forward using barcodes and how do we use AI add-ons to automate a lot of that data entry that we’ve had to do because we had to get that information into the system. How do we use AI and different add-on module software to the ERP system that we have so that we are now using technology instead of using the traditional ways of doing that to make us even that much more efficient. We’ve gained a lot of efficiencies over the last few years and we’re constantly looking for ways in terms of how we do things better.
(Angela) It was like clearing out some old to bring in the new. And I cleared out a lot of stuff. A lot of paper. For me, I could not believe how old things were in the system. Not even in the system, but they were just back in the day. It just went back in the day.
And I’m thinking, okay, we’ve brought it back up to where it should be. 21st century where it should be. And we’re still moving along to get more stuff, like more things in the system.
(Cathy) We want to keep it going into the future is what we want. We need this company in the future. And we recognize that to do that, we do have to implement the new technologies.
And we don’t have any, we have a CNC machine, so we have a computerized machine, but we also have a hundred-year-old machine that we are still using. And it is a workforce machine. And as long as it keeps working, it’s great.
We’ve been able to find parts for it, believe it or not. But once we can’t find those parts anymore, then we start to run into problems. And so, what we’re looking at, we’re not going to replace a hundred-year-old machine with a 50-year-old machine.
We’re going to replace a hundred-year-old machine with a machining center and something that is going to perform a lot more in terms of what’s required for our products than what these machines are capable of currently. So that’s where we’re going. And that’s been a bit of a challenge for some of the people in production because they are used to doing things a certain way.
But they’ve been really good about supporting us and supporting the vision. And they have made a lot of changes in the last little while.
(Angela) They know change is coming.
What were some of the cultural shocks that you first experienced?
(Cathy) It’s a very male-dominated industry and Nopak was a very male-dominated company. There were far more men than women. And now it’s about 50-50, which has brought a completely different dynamic to the table.
And I think, as I mentioned before, the production team have been very, very supportive of that. The two individuals who have been there the longest are ones over 40 years, ones over 30 years. And they’ve really, as I say, been very supportive of me and of us as owners and board members and just people who are there every day working with them.
And so, I think culture-wise, many of the staff will say it’s a very different place today than it was prior to 2021. And we’re hoping that’s a good thing. We’re hoping that they see it like that.
Our goal is to be a great place to work. That is our goal. And that our employees say, yes, it is.
What are some of your biggest accomplishments?
(Cathy) Greatest accomplishments so far from an internal perspective is getting that ERP system in place. Before, as I mentioned, it was very manual.
There were typewriters involved and a lot of data entry and labor and paper, a lot of paper. Whereas now a customer phones, and we can look up what they’ve purchased in the last two and a half years. And we can see everything that they’ve done.
We can see all the quotes we’ve sent. We can see, there’s a lot of information there that we didn’t have before other than in a filing cabinet. And so, I think just putting that in, as I mentioned, it’s been a huge project, and everybody’s been involved in it from every part of the organization.
And that was a major step for us, a major step forward. Externally, I think we’ve brought on some new products that we, and we hadn’t brought any new products on for probably 20 years. We’ve brought some new products on that we believe we need to have for the future.
Metric products, that kind of thing, because the industry of changing machinery, where machinery is coming from tends to be overseas in Europe and they use metric. We never had that before. We’ve always dealt with imperial.
If we had to do metric, it wasn’t the easiest for us. So, we’re trying to bring on products that we think our customers are going to need now and into the future.
(Angela) I think bringing on the new customers, because we’ve gotten tons of new customers from what was originally there, probably from when you started.
So that was a major thing for us too. And we redid our website, which I think has made us more top of mind for people, customers, potential customers, because a lot of those customers are coming from our website. We’ve got to contact us and a lot of them we can tell are coming from there.
So obviously they’re searching for fluid power or cylinders or whatever keywords they’re using and we’re hitting that top spot. So, they’re coming to us. That’s been a big accomplishment too.
What are some of your biggest challenges right now?
(Cathy) Definitely a challenge right now for us is the economy. Being a small business in manufacturing is not easy. Being a small business or being in any business in a bad economy is not easy, but we’re finding it challenging for us right at the moment.
Luckily, we have some very loyal customers who keep coming back to the table and we’re able to get through this, but it has been a challenge in terms of the economy. We buy products from the US, and we also buy products in US dollars. So, exchange rate fluctuation can be a risk for us as well.
So, we’re trying to make sure we’re keeping our pricing where it needs to be despite the highs and lows of exchange. And I think from that personal perspective, losing three legacy owner shareholder managers in just over three years has been a huge challenge for us because that’s institutional knowledge that we no longer have. And Angie and I were talking about, we don’t have all the answers to questions that we have about the company before we started or where it came from.
We know some of the story, but we don’t know all of it. And I wish I would have gotten that more, but you don’t think that that kind of thing is going to happen in a very short period to three people. So that’s been a challenge.
(Angela) That was the biggest challenge I think for me was taking on something I knew nothing about. And I still, I still struggle on certain things, but there’s people there that I know I can go to, and they can get me through it.
How do you define success?
There’s two ways to define success and it basically comes from my accounting background and my HR background.
So, there’s the hard sales, bottom line, all of those kinds of measurements of success in terms of dollars and return to shareholders. Those kinds of things are clearly important in that and having the sales and the bottom line and returning value to not only shareholders, but customers and everybody allows you to carry on. So, there’s that kind of hard side of what success looks like.
The HR side of me says that success is creating a workplace where people feel motivated and are feel like they’re meeting their goals in terms of things that they want to accomplish in their life. And it’s not, I mean, for some people it is about money and that’s fine, but I hope it’s that we’re creating a workplace that’s more than just about money because, I mean, we are a small business. There are businesses that can pay more than we can.
So, I hope what we can offer people is a place that feels that we are providing flexibility to them, to give them that work-life balance that they need. We have people who can work from home. We have people who can leave when they need to, take a day when they need to.
And I hope that we’re creating an environment, as I say, that in which people feel motivated and happy, I guess, about coming to work.
(Angela) When I came into the company, I see it as when I came into the company I see it as the success for not just the owners, not just you know the ones who are running the business, it’s your all your employees you want to see them all succeed and accomplish things that they do want to accomplish, you want them to be able to move up into the company and do different things that maybe we never thought of you know grow the company that maybe one day when we retire you know they still have a place to come to and work for and enjoy their job. To me it’s more my husband’s legacy something I’m doing for him and something I can do for the employees there because them having their jobs is very important to me and that’s I think why we kept the business going not just for ourselves but for the employees and hopefully they can succeed in things for the future that we might not be there for.
What’s your biggest inspiration?
(Angela) The one thing that gets me through every day is my husband, this was his niche as I call it and if I can go in there and show him that I can do something that he did that he probably never thought I would ever be able to do – not my lifetime, which I never thought either. He’s my inspiration for doing all these two things.
(Cathy) So, my philosophy has always been the Gandhi quote: “be the change you see in the world.”
I have tried to live that for a very long time so I’m trying to run the business the way I would want to be treated if I was working for someone else. The other inspiration for me like Angie is my husband and he was my biggest supporter, and he really pushed me to do different things and so every job I’ve had since we got together, he’s been in the background inspiring me to move forward.
I took on a lot of volunteer roles in my in the last 20 years or so and he was always there very supportive making supper when I didn’t come home till 7 o’clock at night and going to events with me that he didn’t really want to go to, but he was there with me the whole way and in terms of Nopak, he said to me you know you can do this on the days that I said I’m not sure I can and so as I said like Angie he’s still there in my mind getting me to get up every morning and go to work and try to do the best I can for everyone there and for the company.
What are some of your goals right now?
(Cathy) In the short-term getting through this economic situation is quite honestly something that I focus on every day. I’m looking at reports and doing forecasts and that kind of thing. So, there is a bit of just what goals can we meet day-to-day but longer term our goals are to grow the business. I have numbers in mind that I am trying to focus us towards so in terms of just increasing our customer base increasing the sales. We’ve already as I said brought on some new product lines, so we want to get those out there to increase our reach in terms of our marketing and communications and bringing on more technology because I think that’s what we’re going to need to be able to compete.
Our competitors are extremely large billions of dollar companies, which are located in the US or in Europe and they are far ahead of us we have a very good brand a very good reputation and I think in order to compete with those large companies we are going to have to continue to push ourselves into a much more technology based way of manufacturing than we are today.
What is your team structure?
(Cathy) There were the three shareholders – legacy shareholders and now the widows Angie and me are the board members/shareholders and the employees now.
Our website at nopakcanada.com reach out to me at csynder@nopakcanada.com we’re also on Instagram and on X at the moment.
