As a teenager, Linda Banister cut her teeth in business at Northlands Park, hawking programs for her racetrack manager father Morris Taylor.

The racetrack turned out to be a valuable training ground for Banister, now a respected management consultant in Alberta.

The 41-year-old Banister runs the show just as her father did, as president of Banister Research & Consulting, a thriving Edmonton management consulting firm she founded in 1997.

Banister was recently honoured for her work in management consulting as recipient of the prestigious YWCA Women of Distinction Award. 1. What were your career aspirations as a youngster growing up in Edmonton?

Jack Dagley photos, for Business Edge
From garbage collection to drainage to governance, Linda Banister loves the variety of management consulting.

“I always aspired to be a schoolteacher. My grandmother was a schoolteacher and had been in one of the very small schoolhouses in Manitoba where they taught all grades. I always thought that was a good profession. As I continued through my schooling, I wanted to be the manager of Northlands Park racetrack, which was what my dad was. I worked at Northlands from the time I was 14, selling coffee and programs. Eventually, I did their Shaw Cable television show.”

2. What did you learn from those years at the racetrack?

“It was such a culture shock to start, working in a betting environment where there was a wide range of cultures and types of people. It was quite fascinating. I think I learned a lot about people. I think the racetrack is like a world unto itself and it has a culture and excitement about it every single day.”

3. Is your company’s business culture anything like the racetrack?

“There are some similarities in that we have a wide variety of people that work for the firm. There’s a professional level of people with university degrees and professional backgrounds, but in the market research area we have a call centre with a wide range of people working there. It has a bit of a subculture, like the racetrack did. There’s a whole gamut of ethnic backgrounds, educational backgrounds, upbringing and income levels. I think my experience at the racetrack made me flexible and sensitive to different kinds of people.”

4. Who has been the most important mentor in your life?

“I think my father was a big influence. I thought he was an exceptionally good manager and I think he had an interesting dynamic in which to work with the board of Northlands, and I thought he did a great job working in the public eye. Right now, one of the most important influences in my life is my husband (Harold Banister, a financial adviser). He came from a background in the construction industry (with the Banister Construction Group). That’s similar to consulting in that you’re doing contracting work, and I think he has been tremendously helpful for me in understanding the contracting business, the dynamics of the risk of taking a job, how much it costs to put a proposal in and just being aggressive and entrepreneurial.”



5. What initially sparked your interest in management consulting?

“My first consulting opportunity was when I was doing my master’s degree (at the University of Alberta). I applied for a summer job with the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and applied for one of the four studies they were doing on privatization. I was given the study on privatizing garbage collection. It was really consulting. I loved it. It was just like being in school in some respects. It appealed to me to work with a wide variety of people. That’s when I decided the consulting thing was kind of neat.”

6. What has been the major challenge in building your business?

“I think one of the biggest challenges is trying to groom the firm with the right people and to make sure the fit of the skill level and the personalities within the firm is working well. Our firm has a reputation of providing good-quality work, but also being really nice people and being really responsive to our clients and always going the extra mile. So it’s important to make sure the people within the firm have the same philosophy and approach to business.”

7. How would you describe your leadership style?

“You know, I think I allow people the opportunity to grow and I’m very conscious of them growing in their skillsets and their opportunities within the company. I’m probably pretty hands off, yet I probably expect a lot. Everybody has an opportunity to work on an ongoing basis on their own thing, but at the end of the day, I make sure the product is of the quality that it needs to be. I also think one of the things Banister is known for is being a nice employer and a nice place to work. We try to treat everyone with respect and we try to have a life balance for our employees, giving them time off if they need it.”

8. What do you need to learn to become a better manager?

“Although I tend to be a bit hands off, I think one of the things I’m always becoming more conscious of is in making the specific time to talk to my employees about where they’re going, where the company is going and what I can do and what the firm can do to make them a better employee. In the last year or so, I’ve really recognized that maybe I’m not doing that in a formalized kind of way. So now I’ve instituted twice-yearly performance appraisals. They’re not really formal. We already have a salary review. But this is an opportunity for people to talk about how it’s going and what else they want to do or learn. I think people really need that.”

9. Are you able to balance business and personal life?

“I’m very much into a balanced life. I have two children, in Grades 4 and 5. I’m really a high-energy person, so when I’m here I’m working really hard. Even though I’m doing well personally financially in the company, I’d really rather hire another person and have more time myself. If I see people working too hard, I say: ‘Listen, I think we need someone else.’ I don’t want anyone burning themselves out. In our industry, burnout and unhappy marriages and all of that are really quite commonplace, and I’m just not willing to go there nor do I want my staff to go there. I take about three months off every year. I have an awesome staff and I believe in empowering them and making them good employees by giving them the opportunity to do it without me.”

10. What’s your 10-year vision for your firm?

“We’re in a real growth pattern right now and we’re continuing to grow at a rapid pace. We started in a 12 x 12-foot office where it was just me (in 1997). Now, we’ve moved to a 2,200-sq.-ft. home that we converted into our office building. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve bought three lots in the Oliver area, a really beautiful quasi-residential/commercial area just off the downtown core.

“We’re building a new 9,000-sq.-ft. building with a state-of-the-art focus group facility. So we’re hopefully going to be one of the major players in the market research and evaluation world in Edmonton and we’re going to have the best focus-group facility. Having satisfied clients just feeds me, I guess.”

11. What makes your company unique in your industry?

“In our industry, we are probably most unique because we practise in two areas. There are a number of market research firms in Edmonton and there are a number of evaluation firms in the city. We’re one of the only firms that provides both. What that means to our clients is that if we’re doing an evaluation, we don’t have to sub-contract out a huge survey. We don’t just say ‘X’ per cent said this in the survey, but we actually interpret what it means in a more analytical kind of way.”

12. How do you see your industry changing over the next decade?

“I think that because market research is a very, very competitive industry, companies are going to have to be even more customer-service focused. I see a complacency in our industry where some companies are not necessarily catering to their clients in the way I think they need to be, providing value-added service and a product that they can afford. I think one has to step up the whole service (aspect), and we’re ready for that. In our industry, the problem is with (companies) not treating their employees with respect and not realizing that they’re the most important asset you have. Turnover is so expensive.”

13. What are the most critical issues your industry is facing?

“One of the ongoing issues is educating the public and our clients on the value and usefulness of research. Clients, particularly in the private sector, need to recognize that money spent on research can assist them in meeting strategic goals, improving customer service and ensuring a satisfied employee base. Governments (municipal, provincial and federal) have been strong proponents of research, due to the escalating need for accountability and responsiveness to residents’ needs. Within the public, market research firms are continually facing resistance to completing telephone research, a problem made more difficult because of the increase in the number of telemarketers.”

14. What do you enjoy most about your business?

“It’s the excitement and opportunity of growth and the opportunity to learn new things all of the time. One of the things about consulting is that you’re always learning about garbage collection or drainage or governance or whatever. And just being around my amazing group of people.”

15. What’s your advice for a young person entering the workforce?

“We interview a lot of people and we hire students from the business faculty, summer students and professional staff. I think my advice would be to try and be willing to accept an opportunity that might be perhaps even more junior than you’re hoping for and stay with the company long enough to grow and learn. I find people have really quite high expectations and don’t want to stay with a company for very long. With this generation, it’s always that the grass is greener on the other side. I think it’s harder for an employer to want to take someone when you know that they might leave before long.”

16. What do you look for in an employee?

“I think it’s important that they have dedication. Even though people come in with high averages and an MBA, I tend to hire an older, more established person in their 40s or 50s because they want to stay long enough to learn and to be an asset with your company.”

17. Who’s the business leader you most admire and respect?

“In the past, I always admired my (late) father-in-law, Harold’s father. The reason I always admired him was because he risked everything and mortgaged his house to start his company. He showed an amazing amount of courage. I think the current person I admire is Bill Comrie (president of The Brick). He has built an incredibly successful company with innovative marketing approaches and he also has a tremendous focus on being a husband and father. Every time when we see him at a social event, he seems to be so balanced that way and that’s really what I try to achieve.”

18. What are you investing in these days, besides your own company?

“Harold is so helpful when it comes to picking stocks. He is so adamant about a balanced portfolio and I try to maintain a very balanced portfolio and not keep all my eggs in one basket. Certainly, one of my biggest holdings is my company and it will be even more so when we expand and have a bigger building.”

19. How important is money to you?

“It’s nothing compared to the value of being successful and doing something really good in my life. We have enough money to live a very nice life and we don’t even spend it. My husband and I always chuckle because our most fun thing to do is really just to sit around and snuggle the kids. And we hardly ever go out.”

20. What do you see yourself doing 10 years from today?

“I very much plan on working very, very hard until the children are in university and my husband and I are planning to do a little more travelling. Otherwise, I’d like to have in place a future president of my company and I’d like to be more like the chairman of the board and oversee the business, but not be involved on a stringent day-to-day basis. I’d very much like to be on some boards and I’d like to contribute to the province in a volunteer capacity.”