- President and chief executive officer, FDC Brands, Vancouver
After working his way up the food chain at a North Vancouver A&W, from drive-through attendant to manager in three years, Yuri Fulmer was faced with a tough decision.
The A&W head office had decided to downsize its presence in the chain, and was franchising out 120 of its 180 locations. Employees like Mr. Fulmer, who was planning to go back to university in the fall, were given the chance to buy a restaurant. His decision to bite turned out to be one of the smartest he has ever made, although he says he hardly felt that way at the time. After all, he was just 18.
"You lie awake at night and do math on the bedroom ceiling, adding things together to make sure you're going to make it," he recalls. "But I thought, most people go into the business doing something they don't know a lot about. I had a lot of corporate training running A&W restaurants, so I thought it was a once in lifetime opportunity."
He had always thought like that, which is how he got to Vancouver in the first place. Leaving his native Australia at 16 to see the world, he fell in love with Vancouver and stayed put.
He intended to do the same thing with this business; he put all his money into the venture, while his mother remortgaged her condominium to help pad the bank loans. He barely made ends meet in the first year. But business picked upquickly, and soon Mr. Fulmer bought a second location, then a third.
Eventually, his company held assets in seven A&W restaurants and 27 Pizza Hut locations in British Columbia and Alberta. In 2006, his FDC Brands acquired the entire Mr. Mikes Steakhouse and Bar chain, and rebranded it.
Mr. Fulmer hasn't looked back; he has no regrets about not obtaining a university education and says he has never been happier.
"I've always been prepared to make change in my life when something wasn't working out," he says. "If I have to make teen burgers myself at one A&W in order to keep working for myself, I would rather do that than have any sort of senior management or executive job working for somebody else."