Dear BTF Community,
In this interview, Celine and Allan Bacani of Vancouver-based Lee’s Donuts discuss:
- The history of the company and their ownership;
- The company’s growth and future plans; and
- Advice for other entrepreneurs on growing their companies.
Enjoy,
Mark
Husband and wife team Celine and Allan Bacani took over ownership of Vancouver-based Lee’s Donuts six years ago and have grown the business from one location to its current six and a commissary in the region with plans for national growth.
When asked what advice they would give to entrepreneurs looking to grow their business, Celine, the company’s COO, said: “I think the one thing that comes to mind for me is that your business will grow to the extent that you do. That’s some of the best advice I ever got. So if you want to grow your business, you really have to work on yourself because I do believe, and I tell this to my team all the time, that how you show up personally is how you show up professionally. So I think I attribute a lot of our success . . . to really working on ourselves and just stepping up to the plate in terms of personal and professional growth.”
Lee’s Donuts is a mom and pop donut shop located in the Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver. They have been serving handmade, quality, classic donuts based on original recipes developed by founders Alan and Betty-Ann Lee in 1979.
The Bacani’s will be speaking during a panel discussion on business growth at the upcoming Business Transitions Forum in Vancouver.
“Allan and I have a history at Granville Island. His family owns and operates a butcher shop for just about as long as the donut shop’s been around. And Allan and I worked at the butcher shop for almost 10 years as well in the family business. And so being of that community, we got wind of the donut shop being for sale, and that’s what prompted, sort of our next career move. And so it’s been uphill ever since,” said Celine.
“So we’re a basic donut shop, like donuts, how you would remember them in the 70s or 80s. That’s what we produce. We’re classic recipes. Your old school honey dips and old fashions and everything that you’d be familiar with for decades. We’re not really like the artisanal, fancy ingredient kind of donut. Our whole shtick is making sure that our product is accessible and not intimidating. That way it doesn’t matter how old you are, young or old, you’d be able to buy our product and feel totally fine with it,” added Allan, the company’s CEO.
He said when they bought the company at the end of 2017 their initial goal really was just to make sure they were breaking even. They felt blessed with a business that’s been around at that time for almost 40 years. So it had already established a very good will and good cult following of customers and people already had in their minds what their favorite donuts were.
“So, as far as Celine and I were concerned, we didn’t really have to innovate anything. It was more so an opportunity in operational gaps. And transaction gaps and digital marketing,” said Allan.
“Seth Rogen (an actor and filmmaker) has been a patron of that shop for many, many years, since childhood and after about maybe one year in business for us, we received an email from Netflix, a producer from Netflix, saying that they wanted to feature our store in their show. They couldn’t tell us exactly what the show was, but we had to sign an NDA. So I told Celine, like this could be bogus or not, but maybe let’s just sign the NDA and figure out what’s what, right? And, you know, long story short, it turned out to be the first episode of Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, which was David Chang’s show. Seth Rogen was his first guest, and we were featured in the first episode.”
Celine said his endorsement was the icing on the cake for the brand.
“Very quickly, this really started to become bigger than us.. And then, of course, COVID happened, and if you’re familiar with Granville Island in the Vancouver area, it’s known to be a tourist destination. It’s actually the number two tourist spot in all of Canada. But with the world shutting down during COVID, we found that the people visiting us and supporting us were all locals and discovering us for the first time. So that, combined with Seth Rogen’s endorsement, the Netflix show, we really had this kind of formula that, okay, we have something here, and we have a really good, strong brand to build off of,” she said.
“From a small business perspective, Celine and I would have been fine with just the one shop. But what ended up happening was during COVID, we had a lot of friends and family that that careers in other areas that had been furloughed essentially because of COVID, and we took them on and they eventually fell in love with the brand and helped us build it and helped us grow. So we decided for myself and Celine that we need to grow the business for them even more so. And we want to make sure that if anybody was going to help us build our vision, we want to make sure there’s no ceiling as far as their growth as well. So that was very important for us,” added Allan.
Today three of the stores are corporate owned and three are franchises.
Mario Toneguzzi is a veteran of the media industry for more than 40 years and named in 2021 a Top Ten Business Journalist in the world and only Canadian. He also made the RETHINK’s global list as a Top Retail Expert 2024.
