Palmer Blog
May 16, 2011
When I heard of Wallace McCain’s passing, I thought back to my venture out to Vancouver as a young man. I was 19 and working at a division of McCain Foods in Burnaby, BC called Fresh Pak. My dad, who worked for the McCain brothers most of his career, had asked Wallace to check in on me. Wallace did so, offered me a job in Australia and gave me a little pep talk. I remember […]
May 11, 2011
For those of us who’ve been around for a while, Willie Nelson’s classic song, “Ain’t it funny how time slips away” still rings true. I had occasion to recall my first boardroom meeting the other day. I was a pricing assistant for an international forwarder and had an idea for a courier style envelope that was perforated in the middle, so you could have 2 different size products in one. I actually interrupted the VP laden meeting […]
April 29, 2011
It has been my observation that the highly creative mind tends to stay in a divergent thinking pattern until a hard deadline is imposed. Instead of honing in on one idea they do what I call the “creative bounce” and go from one great idea to the next in reckless abandon. I heard Canadian songwriter Eddie Schwartz tell the story of how he was commissioned to write a song for Pat Benatar early in her career. […]
April 25, 2011
It’s April 18th and I’m flying to Florida to enjoy a holiday. I typically take time off in late December as we shut down between Xmas and New Year’s anyway. This is something new… Turning the ship over to your co-pilots is a necessary evolution in developing your company’s management team. They may stumble or even fall but life and business does go on without you. I tried it a week last fall during our […]
March 28, 2011
I’m looking out my window at a snowy day in Mississauga. It would have been a reasonably good weather day for March in small town New Brunswick where I grew up. But here and now, a little snow can shut this city down. Twenty minute drives can end up being 2 hours. Hard to believe I had my motorcycle out for a spin on the first day of spring just two days ago. Life is […]
March 21, 2011
Every department, company and democracy has a leader for a good reason. The one thing most of us would agree on, is that with any given issue there are as many opinions as there are stars in the sky… and someone needs to make the final call. I like the sayings “a camel was a horse designed by committee” and “too many cooks spoil the broth”, and of course to counter that “two heads are […]
March 15, 2011
Although nobody is jumping up and down with joy, we find the general mood in the transportation sector to be positive as we shuffle into 2011. There have been a few acquisitions, quite a bit of shuffling at the senior management level and the driver shortage topic has come to the forefront once again. Does anybody know where this economy is going? Not really. But one thing is for sure… in the next few years […]
January 28, 2011
There are notable advantages and disadvantages related directly to the size of your organization. As a small company, it would be helpful at times to think like a bigger firm and have more processes and procedures in place. The opposite is always true; with larger companies favouring process over the kind of entrepreneurial decision making that made their companies a success in the first place. It’s basically a spin on the economic theory of marginal […]
I love my work like I love summer. Why not? Summer is when I get to play my favorite sport—golf! Playing artist is a lot like playing golf. You need to be calm and cool under pressure if you ever hope to keep the ball in play; that’s rare for an artist. My best shots happen when I talk less and concentrate more; that’s not so rare for an artist.
I’m definitely a country girl. I didn’t grow up in an actual town, village or hamlet. It was more like the middle of somewhere along Highway 28, surrounded by trees. Many thanks goes to my high school art teacher, Mr. Edwards, for inspiring me to choose this career path. With the realization that I actually could create art for a living, college lured me away from country life to the big city. Kitchener, to be exact, to study Graphic Design & Advertising at Conestoga College. Talk about beginning an adventure and a culture shock! Not staring at people with purple, green or some other wildly coloured hair was a bit of a challenge. City buses (lol thinking back), who knew they only stopped on the same side of the street as the bus stop sign!? Lesson learnt.
To say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree would be an understatement in my family; at least when it comes to picking a career path. There isn’t a person in my immediate family that hasn’t at some point or another worked in the IT field. I guess there’s something in our DNA that pulls us towards computers.
I am the 8th of 9 children raised in Essex County outside of Windsor, Ontario. We lived on a gravel road, no sidewalks and our greatest adventures were in our own backyard. I still have friends I made in grade 1 and continue to stay in touch today. After graduating from the University of Windsor with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, I moved to the big city of Toronto and have worked most of my career in the printing industry. I got to know the folks at Palmer Marketing as a key supplier to them for over a decade.
I started Palmer Marketing at age 34 in January of 1988. I had 2 kids in diapers and a crazy idea about running my own company. I came from an entrepreneurial family and had no good reason to believe it wasn’t possible and as it happens, it was.