For over a decade, Jodi Laking has been working with a variety of business owners to start and grow their businesses both locally, and across the country.
Having started her first business back in high school, and creating several others since then, Laking said it was her love for entrepreneurship that inspired her to help others succeed.
“In 2014, I started my current business, Work Smart Canada, which offers business coaching and consulting, but it also has customized programs. The areas I really focus on is setting accountability systems and capacity management for our entrepreneurs,” she said. “Everybody talks about time management and mindset, but if you don’t understand how to manage your capacity, you won’t be able to manage those two things. So I really focus on helping people understand that there’s a difference, and once we can get a sense of how your accountability system works and how your capacity works, you can be much more effective in being a CEO or being a business owner.”
Laking said that by 2018, she started playing with the idea of succession planning and how that ties into the bigger picture.
“When I started asking my clients questions like, ‘do you plan to be an entrepreneur for the rest of your life? Is this a goal of yours?’ a lot of them couldn’t think beyond the day-to-day; they were just so consumed with it. Then I started asking, ‘well, do you know what would happen if somebody came to try to buy your business?’ or ‘do you know what would happen to your business if something happened to you?’ and all those answers were no,” she recalled. “So, I then ended up doing a bunch of surveys with my current clients, I went through Facebook groups and did case study groups and I got so much engagement, and through that, I could see that nobody’s planned for what comes next. The idea gives people the willies and they’re very much in the mindset of ‘I don’t really want to think about if I’m not here, I’m here now and I want to focus on growing and making money.’”
While she wanted to move forward with her idea to help people with their succession planning, Laking said that between the pandemic, various life changes, and going full-time with Work Smart Canada, the idea was inevitably put on pause.
By the time 2024 rolled around, Laking said that she was happy, doing well, loving her life as a full-time entrepreneur, and had even moved from Brantford to Stoney Creek to be with her current partner.
She said that despite all of that, she wasn’t fully ready for what was about to happen next.
“My dad had been struggling with a lot of different health issues over the years, but in those last six months, they had been a lot more intense. I was here a lot more and he was in hospital a lot more and on Friday, December 13, I showed up earlier in the morning because he had an appointment,” she recalled. “He was struggling a lot that morning to get out of bed with his energy and just his general ability to move, but he got up and he got dressed with some help from my mom and my sister-in-law, and I showed up to take him to his appointment. I was just a little taken aback because he looked weaker and a bit more rough, but my dad came up those stairs and when he saw me, he gave me a big smile and gave me a big hug, and I took him to the hospital for his appointment.”
She said that while they were there, he was in good spirits, joking with the nurses, complaining about the cold and expressing his desire for an apple fritter and a boston cream donut.
After stopping by Tim Hortons on the way home, Laking said she dropped him off and got him settled, but that she noticed he was still having some troubles, and planned to see if she could get in touch with the VON or a PSW to get him some assistance.
“That night my brother had called to tell me that my dad was struggling to get off the couch, and so he and my mom helped him the best that they could,” she said. “They set him back up on the couch comfortably watching TV. He said he was fine, he was just tired and he just wanted to watch some TV and go to sleep.”
Unfortunately, the next day, they discovered he had passed away.
Laking said that what occurred over the next 90 days, let alone the next 12 hours, was a whirlwind of trying to sort out her father’s affairs and secure her mother’s future.
“People don’t realize that you actually only have so much time, or even hours in some cases, to notify different government organizations that this has happened or they fine you, or restrict access to your files,” she said. “We were going a mile a minute trying to make sure that we could secure everything my dad had worked so hard for like his pension, his RRSPs, his savings, and his bank accounts; we working so hard to make sure that those didn’t get frozen so my mom could continue accessing them to pay the bills that she still needed to pay. We were trying to change over his vehicle, cancel his license and his SIN number, and of course, there’s no centralized space to go with a list of everything you have to do when something like this happens.”
By the time the family got through Christmas and into the new year, they had learned a lot, but were exhausted.
Laking said after watching her mom trying to sort everything out, and helping her with what she could… she began to cycle back her idea from 2018.
“I hadn’t given any thought to this idea, but then I woke up because I dreamt about it. I kept thinking that I didn’t know if it was the right time, but the idea just wouldn’t go away,” she said. “I started thinking to myself, ‘what would happen if I was just gone? Would my partner have any idea how to access my business bank accounts, where my accounts are, how to even log into my laptop or access my emails or notify my clients?’ So, I started working on this whole concept of, not just creating this centralized space to help people understand the next steps in any kind of catastrophic event or any time that the loved one becomes incapacitated, but I started to take it one step further out of my genuine love of working business owners.”
As she began to explore this concept more, it became clear that the lack of planning could lead to even more complicated consequences for loved ones and business partners.
“Not only is your family going to have to deal with personal items, but they’ll have no concept of how to deal with your business assets if they’re not tied to it in any way, especially sole proprietors,” Laking added. “Nobody’s guaranteeing that they’re working with accountants or corporate lawyers. Over 50 per cent of Canadians don’t have wills, and business owners don’t realize that your will is personal and that a lot of the time you need to have an addendum, or you need to have a separate will specifically for your business, for trustees and beneficiaries and executors.”
After solidifying her idea and figuring out what exactly she wanted her new business to look like and to offer, Laking officially soft-launched Your Business Executor just this month.
She said that while it’s hard for people to think about the ‘what ifs’ and potential catastrophic events, it’s far better to be educated, organized and prepared, than not.
“If business owners aren’t organized to begin with, there’s a very unlikely chance that their next-of-kin, or executor, is going to be able to find anything,” said Laking. “So the first step is helping business owners get organized.”
That means working with business owners to organize and clearly document their accounts, investments, partnerships and affiliations, insurance policies, benefits plans, and other operational and administrative policies in one central place for their next-of-kin to easily access and follow.
She said step two is to bring in whoever you’re next-of-kin or business partner is, and loop them in so they know how to access business financials, assets and policies.
On top of all of that, Laking is providing a directory of tools and resources for both individuals, to learn about wills, estate planning, legacy planning, succession planning, and probate. As well as, offering a customized, guided planning tool, called “The Dahlias Planner” to help business owners document their plans, wishes, and operational business details in case of a catastrophic event.
Laking may still be refining the details of her new business venture, even offering her Dahlia Planner for free to a pilot group of entrepreneurs, but she’s looking forward to helping people and guiding them through the scarier parts of life and death.
Reflecting on the inspiration behind her work, she shared, “I lost my dad, and I learned from this just how broken and disconnected our systems are in the most chaotic time of our lives. I realized that there is a better way, and if I can be one small part of making it better for people when they experience this, then I feel like that’s a way I can honour my dad too.”
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
