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It’s mr. Mark henry. And he is one of the co-owners of the copperhouse up in yellowknife, in the northwest territory way up in the north land in canada.
And mark can’t thank you enough for joining us. It’s great to see you again. So thanks for being with us, mark.
Yeah, of course. My pleasure. So, mark, first question is, how is everybody up in a fairly isolated place like yellowknife to begin with?
How is everybody doing? And how is your family and all your staff healthwise doing? You know what we’re doing? Okay. I think probably the best way of describing is from a business standpoint, we’re pivoting, were obviously transitioning to a new business model.
Health wise, we’re lucky enough very few cases of landed in yellowknife and up to do with the government implications of no closing down the border. You can’t get in here unless you live here. So it’s pretty tight and pretty rigid from that standpoint. So everybody’s doing while health wise, but it certainly is a transition. Social isolation is being taken to an extreme here and that and not obviously effects the service industry.
So how is the supply chain in an area that, let’s face it, isn’t exactly 2 minutes or two hours away from I guess, really, you know, down south of you, edmonton is really the closest supply chain. How’s the supply chain working at this time of the year? And, are the i’m assuming the winter roads are probably closed at this point? So how’s all that working?
So at this point, no interruption whatsoever. So cisco, all the big chains, everybody is flowing goods as usual.
You ordering is different. You’re not doing not sitting down with the wraps face to face. You’re doing it all over the phone so that there’s transitions. But at this point, food is flowing, and there’s no indication that that’s stopping any time soon.
Well, that’s wonderful. So you all have adapted to touchless contactless service at the cooperhouse. I would like to have you explain a little bit about how you all transition so quickly, rapidly, and keeping your staff reasonably employed. But you wanna tell everyone a little bit of what you all did to basically reinvent yourselves. Right. Yeah.
You know, the pivoting process to touchless were predominantly a seated restaurant. That was our focus. But we always had touchless or take out as an option. And we always had, the buildings. Actually, mold very actually set up for a drive through every community.
So part of the model, but like any restaurant you’re just so focused in time is scarce, and we never really got to it and exploited it to the degree that we wanted to.
You’re gonna find a silver lining in all this. It’s allowed us to focus on this part of the business model and grow it. And there is a learning curve to it, for sure, and trial by fire. Because our competitors essentially shut down as well. And the whole town shows up at six o’clock ready to order, and they want their food.
So we’ve learned, we’ve learned through demand and we’ve adopted. Now, it’s pretty, though. Have you pretty much been able to keep most of your back of the house crew intact? For the most part?
Yeah, you know what? When we’re looking at our objectives of what we want to come through this period, is predominantly staying whole, you know, maintaining the existing crews so that when the dust settles, we can take steps relatively easy.
And that’s really what we’re focused on. That’s excellent. Brian, do you have a question for mark? Yeah. Where? How is like some kind of wrap things up with the same question, which is honestly, you know, we’re all in the restaurant business in the world that we’re doing everything we can think of to help.
What do you think of as a kind of what we could be doing more over? What should we be doing? To be able to help more restaurants? You know, I think from our perspective, our approach to this is acknowledging that everybody’s in the same boat.
Nobody’s making tons a hay at this point, and so it’s just a matter of getting through and you really push in the philosophies of competition aside and really taking a supportive role?
That’s probably the biggest thing. And, you know, it builds unlocked come lottery between your competitors on goodwill. But the public recognizes as well, and that’s really been of value in terms of building our brand image within the community.
So being supportive and help in others with their online ordering process that is completely new to them was one of things that we did. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time today.
Yeah, of course. Well, thank you. So, mark, anything else that you could share with anybody as far as other than staying healthy and safe? I guess that’s the order of the day.
Yeah, you know, that’s part of it. A kind of building off of the last component were finding success is we feel a little bit liberated with this new business model and that, you know there’s no rules in this environment is whatever.
Whatever sticks is the approach. And so, you know, having that freedom, we’ve essentially taken the model of okay. The community wants to buy local. That’s a big portion you’re hearing that. And then people are so supportive of what we’re doing because they recognize the impact of power mean impacted here.
So you’re the by local movement. What we’ve done is we’ve essentially opened up our online platform to essentially all all businesses that have a product that don’t have a medium to get it to market.
So, you know, there’s a local track interior here in town. We recently launched here going into list their products.
So that’s the type of thing that we’re doing. And again that’s building strong the brand prudent with the public so that’s for the things I recommend as well. You know about community approaching camaraderie. This is a big part of coming up, the other end strong.
That’s a wonderful piece. A nice thing. To kind an end down here on good friday and wishing all of our friends on the north territory, northwest territory and throughout canada. Happy easter.
Be safe, be healthy and thank you. Mark, we appreciate please give a hello to all of our friends up there in yellowknife. Thanks for being with us. Bye for now.
Right on. Appreciate it. All the best guys stay safe.
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