THE AMPERSAND 
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
For those of you who awoke Saturday morning to the first sign of winter, put on a pot of coffee and worked your way through the weekend edition of the Calgary Herald, you would have been greeted by the smiling faces of my partner, Terry Stein, and myself standing atop our office roof posing for the photo which graced page C10 of the weekend Business Section. For those who missed it, you can read the article here or drop by our office where I suspect we have a few dozen copies lying around. As you can see above, over 10 years ago a similar photo of a much younger me appeared in the same section of the paper soon after I started my career in search, though I was considerably less grey and slightly more plump back then. How quickly time passes. It got me to thinking…although we often refer to ourselves self-deprecatingly as the new kids on the block in a rather mature search community, our team brings over 40 years of search experience to the office every day. No wonder I’m more grey.
Speaking of history and ties to the past, in the early 1960s, my father, Dan Pekarsky, started practicing law with a gentleman named Barry Vogel at a firm later to be known as Witten Pekarsky Vogel. Today, over 50 years later, it gives us great pleasure to bring the next generation of Pekarskys and Vogels together in another common pursuit. Effective November 1 Rick Vogel has joined Pekarsky Stein as Managing Director of our newly formed Edmonton office. While the Calgary executive search community has seen a number of new entrants in recent years (including ourselves), it has been over 10 years since a new search firm opened in the Capital Region, a period of time during which Edmonton’s population has increased by over 150,000 people and the business community continues to top national lists for growth, increase in GDP and overall economic activity. Add to that the numerous searches we have executed in Edmonton without an office there along with Rick’s existing relationships and highly developed search specialization and, simply put, Edmonton was a natural next step on our path to world domination. Sprinkle in a deep family history and a foundation of mutual trust and respect that spans the generations and the decision to expand north was really, in the words of my nine year old, a no brainer.
You can read Rick’s entire bio by clicking here. Here are the highlights: Over 25 years of business experience having owned and operated, as President and CEO, a financial advisory company in Florida and the past 7 years as a Principal and Co-Owner of a national retained executive search firm in Edmonton. Rick has led numerous senior leadership searches in municipal government, not-for-profit, construction, healthcare, manufacturing, advanced technology, real estate and finance. Though Rick had many excellent options available to him, we are thrilled with his decision to embrace our Small is Beautiful mantra and join our vision of building and leading the best boutique search firm in Western Canada; a firm committed to clients, candidates and community alike. Indeed, as you know if you read this space regularly, community matters to us. Rick scores very high on that front, too. His active community involvement has included the University of Alberta Hospital Foundation (Board of Trustees), the Centre Club (Board of Governors), Alberta Triathlon Association (Vice President), the Minerva Foundation (Executive Board Member) and the Thunderbird Athletic Basketball Association (Treasurer). He is currently on the Board of Trustees for the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation where he is Chair of the Community Relations and Fund Development Committee. Rick is an active member of the Institute of Corporate Directors and recently acquired his ICD.D designation and, entirely unlike me, Rick has represented Canada on the world stage in two sports. Most importantly, he is an all around good guy who finally tips the gender balance at our firm in favour of the boys! We are absolutely thrilled to welcome Rick to our fledgling enterprise and look forward to bringing a fresh yet familiar face to not only the Edmonton and Alberta search community but to the Pekarsky Stein family.
For those of you receiving this for the first time, feel free to read past editions by visiting our website before deciding to “unsubscribe”, though you may always elect to do that if you wish. For the 41.6% of you who open this every month, you will notice a few changes in the weeks ahead. Going forward, we will be publishing twice-monthly. The first of the month (or close thereto) will continue to feature my rambling thoughts and prose and feature a sampling of the projects we’re working on. Mid-month we will circulate our usual collection of articles of interest along with a compilation of our blog posts during the intervening few weeks. In keeping with our new format and Edmonton theme, we are highlighting this month a few of the positions we are currently working on in the Capital Region. I also bring to your attention a rather unique opportunity in the Fernie/Cranbrook region for a litigation lawyer…ski season is just around the corner after all!
Let us know what you think. See you in December.
Regards,
Adam
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This month’s featured positions:
Check out more at pekarskyco.wpengine.com/opportunities
