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LYNDELL FINDLAYFOUNDER AND CHEESEMAKER, BLUE HARBOUR CHEESE

Born and raised in Australia, Findlay has had many careers in her lifetime. From computer programming to finan-cial systems, every seven years or so, she started getting the itch to make a career move. She returned to university to pursue a degree in Peace and Conflict studies and in 1997, found work with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). After postings in conflict zones like Chad, Congo, and Darfur, Findlay was reaching retirement age and decided it was time to move on. At the age of 61, she knew she had one last project left in her and after a lot of discussion and brainstorming, she decided to try her hand at cheesemaking. Blue Harbour Cheese was born in downtown Halifax.Photo by Dennis Evans

MUSEMO (MO)HANDAHUBLOGGER AND INFLUENCER, LION HUNTER

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Handahu immigrated to Canada in 2000 to study at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. After graduation, she landed a job as an HR payroll consultant and on the side, had developed a line of clutch purses. While she always thought that she had a knack for fashion, she didn’t actively cultivate her creative side until 2010: after losing her full-time job, the Haligo-nian decided to launch lionhunter.com. Named for the english translation of her last name, the blog focused on sharing her style and her experiences as someone who is “fat, a woman of colour and African.” The Internet immediately took notice. Handahu’s stylist exper-tise has been featured on CTV Atlantic (as the 2017 inhouse stylist for Make-over Monday) and she was named one of Canada’s best dressed by the Globe and Mail in 2017.Photo by Jesse Ingalls

SONJA MILLSCO-FOUNDER, PORT REXTON BREWING COMPANY

You could say that beer has been the milestone of Sonja’s life. Case in point: Mills bonded with her wife, Alicia MacDonald, over a pint of beer on their first date. Mills had a successful career in Halifax working as a lawyer for a commercial property developer. Alicia, with a Master in Nursing degree, was a nurse practitioner. In 2015, Mills found out her father had been diagnosed with ALS. She and Alicia decided to move back to Newfound-land to help care for him. They continued to work in their respective fields (Alicia at the Clarenville hospital; Sonja, working remotely for her previous employer) while also transitioning to the craft beer sector. They finally left their former careers behind in 2016 when they launched Port Rexton Brewing Company.Photo by Jon Sturge Photography

MYRNA GILLISCEO, AQUALITAS INC.

For nearly 25 years, Gillis spent time as a labour and employment lawyer advocating for the rights of those with disabilities. Specifically working in the not-for-profit sector, Gillis supported her clients in some of their most vulner-able situations—helping them through dispute resolutions and disability accommodation, just to name a few. She was even awarded the prestigious Queen’s Counsel desig-nation for her professional integrity, good character and outstanding contribu-tions to the practice of law. But in 2014, she decided to pivot her career and pursue a career in the cannabis industry. While many people enter the industry because of the potential financial returns, she saw it as an extension of her disabili-ties advocacy. Aqualitas, she says, has a “very patient-focused perspec-tive.” It’s also determinedly green, reportedly using 90 per cent less water and 50 per cent less energy than other producers.

MsdirectionFour women share lessons learned from following the wrong (for them)career path—and how they got back on track as independent entrepreneursBY AMANDA SCRIVER

Lesson 1:FACING YOUR FEAR IS YOUR GREATEST STRENGTHWhen Musemo (Mo) Handahu lost her full-time job in 2010, it pushed her to pivot from employee to entrepreneur. Within a year, this former HR consultant had expanded her side hustle (a line of clutch purses), opened an online store and launched fashion/life-style blog The Lion Hunter. The blog was like a fairy godmother for this real-life Cinderella: faster than you could say Bippity-Bop-pity-Boo, Handahu was well on her way to being a digital content strategist and seriously popular fashion influencer. Today, she has almost 43K Instagram followers (on par with Hilary Farr, the tough talking co-host of HGTV Canada’s Love It or List It), was named one of Canada’s Best Dressed by The Globe & Mail in 2017, and has covered South Africa Fashion Week and Cape Town Fashion Week for Essence Magazine.

Despite what her bold blog name suggests, Handahu confesses that it was launched with the confidence of a lamb (and that lion hunter is literally the translation of her last name). “I was definitely scared when I started blogging. My first shoot was in my apartment and elevator. I wasn’t ballsy enough to shoot outside yet. I was still working on my self-esteem and I wasn’t ready for all those eyeballs to be on me.”

Asked about chal-lenges she’s faced, she says she’s had to deal with social hang-ups about her being “a woman, fat, a woman of colour and African.” And while those attitudes have hurt (“it still hurts and will always hurt”), she says she’s gotten to the point where “the hurt is monumentally outweighed by my desire to ride this sucker ‘til the wheels fall off, to be the best role model I can be and to create a life that’s happier than my Instagram feed.”

“Being a blogger partly saved me, and partly helped me be my best self.”

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Lesson 2:IDENTIFY THE HOLE IN THE (CHEESE) MARKET AND FILL IT

After resigning from her high stress UN job at 61 but not yet ready to retire, Lyndell Findlay’s thoughts turned to… cheesemaking. She’d been interested in it for a while, but had never done anything about it. Perhaps, she thought, the time was ripe for her to follow the fromage.

A series of fortuitous events saw her interning with Brian Schlatter of Canal Junction Farms in Ohio for four months during the summer of 2012. Concurrent to that, she took a number of courses at the University of Vermont Cheese Insti-tute. “By the end of the summer, I not only had the four months of intensive experience, I also had the technical and theoretical cheesemaking knowledge, the chemistry and so on, from the courses.”

The internship gave her practical expe-rience making eight different types of cheese. Ironically, none of them was the

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IDENTIFY THE HOLE IN THE (CHEESE) MARKET AND FILL ITone cheese she felt compelled to make, the one she had discovered wasn’t being made by any of the other local cheese makers in Nova Scotia: blue cheese.

Recognizing that many people say they hate blue cheese because of its robust flavour, Findlay believed she could win them over with a very mild, creamy version before introducing them to other variations. “I thought people could be educated a little bit about how wonderful blue cheeses are and how diverse they can be.”

Decision made, Findlay used her savings to buy a cottage in downtown Halifax and began a nine-month renova-tion needed to turn its 1,900 sq. ft. into an urban cheese manufacturing plant. A bonus of the extensive renovation was that it gave her the time to learn how to make artisanal blue cheese. “I was

making cheese at home in my kitchen, doing test batches of two kilos at a time and experimenting. I did test, after test, after test until I finally got a cheese that I was satisfied with.” She also used that time to prepare her marketing materials and find customers who’d be interested in her high end product.

Findlay’s first cheese sold in January 2014 and it was a quick hit with Mari-time palettes. She’s had exponential year-over-year growth and expanded outside her Halifax cottage via a feder-ally licensed cheesemaker in New Brunswick who makes her product for her under license. Now she’s taking it a step further: Findlay is in the process of building her own federally-licensed processing plant, which means Blue Harbour Cheese will be available across Canada in 2019.

Submitted photos of Lyndell Findlay and Blue Harbour Cheese; Photos by Dennis Evans of www.evansphoto.ca

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THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH RESEARCHTry to imagine the complexity of the regulatory hurdles that come with being a novice producer for the medical cannabis industry. Now layer it with the responsibilities inherent in overseeing a subsidiary R&D company developing proprietary aquaponic technology that ensures your production methods use less water and less energy than your competitors. Just for fun, toss in an intricate checklist of requirements for achieving Clean Green Certification—proof of your reduced carbon footprint and organic produc-tion. And don’t forget an overall corporate commitment to supply the local market, while also fielding interest from European clients. Finally, ensure that patient-focused values and vision are inherent in all that you do. Conquer all of that, and you’ll begin to understand what Myrna Gillis has accomplished with Aqualitas Inc.

Gillis credits her experience as a lawyer for enabling her to build the business she helped found (her official title is CEO). “The fact that I have the critical thinking skills to be able to not only make my way through the regulations but also interpret those regulations in a way that can anticipate what the regulator is looking for, even when they don’t necessarily put it in black and white,” has, she says, been “very helpful.”

Helpful is an understatement. Since its launch in 2014, Aqualitas has captured considerable attention from the international investment community. Almost six million dollars worth of attention, to be exact—and that’s just from Arcview, the largest deal flow network of accredited investors in the cannabis industry in North America.

Then there’s the other $25-million-plus from efficiency rebates, carbon exemp-tions, nonconventional financing, National Research Council funding and

clean energy awards. Bottom line? It pays to do your homework.

FEEDBACK* dchafe@atlanticbusinessmagazine.com a @AtlanticBus; #Pivot

BEING PASSIONATE MAKES FOR THIRSTY CUSTOMERSSonja Mills and her wife, Alicia MacDonald, were living in Nova Scotia when that province’s craft beer scene really started to boom—and they loved it. Mills says visiting the various brew-eries and trying different ales was one of their favorite activities. So much so that Alicia began making her own home brew and volunteering with some of the established commercial breweries.

(cont’d p.43)Submitted photo: (l-r) Alicia MacDonald and Sonja Mills; Photo by Jon Sturge

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When they made a physical move to Newfoundland in 2015 to be closer to Mills’ family (she’s originally from Clarenville), they transitioned careers as well. Though Mills had been working as a lawyer and MacDonald as a nurse practitioner, they say they were entre-preneurs at heart. And their entrepre-neurial instincts were telling them that Newfoundland was untapped territory.

Getting started, however, was easier said than done: regulations, taxes and building permits were a struggle for government departments and agencies that hadn’t dealt with a craft brewery in their area before. The capital city region had had Yellowbelly, Quidi Vidi and Storm breweries for over a decade, but there wasn’t anything like that in Clarenville. Still, Mills and MacDonald persevered and Port Rexton Brewing was born—to the eternal gratitude of thirsty locals and visitors alike.

Mills says she and MacDonald were “pleasantly surprised” by the appetite for their products, and give some of the credit for their success to the aforemen-tioned predecessors. Those businesses, says Mills, had introduced Newfound-landers to craft brews and people were

excited to try something new. “Craft beer in general is exciting to people who have not really tried other beers before, but they’re interested in this new wave of breweries as a thing to do—to come and check out the brewery and the taproom and so on.”

The buzz has been building: from social media and high end restaurants to their seasonal taproom in Port Rexton and year-round retail store in St. John’s, Port Rexton Brewery’s cup runneth over. What are they planning to brew up next? Building a new facility in their diminutive 350-resident rural commu-nity is high on their wish list.

As it was in the beginning, however, the secret ingredient continues to be Mills’ and MacDonald’s passion for the business. While there are nine products available on a regularly rotating basis, this innovative duo continues to thirst for new flavours and styles. This year, they even collaborated with Split Rock Brewing Company in Twillingate, N.L. to create Next Generation, a reportedly thirst-quenching double dry-hopped saison. “You will have something different from us every month at least,” promises Mills.

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