Meet Christine Andrews, Founder of Acme Works, Partner at The Deco Group and Workplace Strategist

YWiB Toronto has had wonderful experiences hosting events at Acme Works. We hosted a panel speaker series here from August to November, where we tackled topics such as building your personal brand, finding your career path and confronting challenging situations. At the end of our panel series, we sat down with Christine Andrews to talk about her personal experiences in business. She addresses raising a family while being a woman in business, taking leaps at new opportunities and imposter syndrome. You can find out more about Acme Works co-working space here.

Where did you work in the early stages of your career?

When I graduated university, I worked for an advertising and PR agency in Halifax as a very junior account executive. Eventually my husband and I moved to Toronto, and I was able to transition into more multi-national ad agencies. I worked in advertising from 1988 to 2002. I always worked on the client service and strategy side and in increasingly senior positions. I left the business because my husband and I had two young children and he had just acquired a business. We were both working 24/7 which didn’t leave much time for family. We had to take a step back and have a realistic conversation about that.

How did you make the decision to take a step back from your career to spend more time raising your kids?

My husband had equity in his company, and I didn’t, so I was the one who stepped away which I did for 6 years. There were parts of being a full-time stay-at-home mom that I absolutely loved but to go from a professional environment, running a department of 30 people to suddenly being the mom is a big transition. I don’t have any regrets and it was 100% the right thing for my family.

How did you get back into the workforce?

As my kids got older, I was exploring the idea of returning to the ad world because that’s what I knew. I got a call from CTV, asking if I wanted to become Senior Director of Business Development for a team they were putting together for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. I had been out of the working world for over 6 years and was freaking out because a lot had changed in that time. It was a fantastic project with a great team but a challenging way to re-enter the workforce, as it was very time consuming.

What started that passion for coworking spaces?

The building that my husband’s business was in had 10,000 square feet of emptiness. I had overseen the design and renovation of the building, so I knew it very well. I did a bit of research into workspace trends and office spaces to figure out what to do with this raw commercial space. I came across coworking, which was something I never heard of. The more I investigated it, the more it made sense to me on a couple of levels. First as an asset owner as a way to arbitrage the space. It also made sense to me as an individual who had just gone from being part of this massive, highly collaborative team to sitting in my little home office by myself. In June of 2013, we officially launched the coworking space called Acme Works. I did up a business plan and agreed to invest a year of sweat equity into growing the business, the brand, and the community.

I noticed you’re also a partner at The Deco Group, can you tell me more about that?

After ACME Works became profitable, I took a step back and thought, what now? I embarked on a year of information gathering from coworking conferences all over the world. I started making connections in the industry and ended up working as a consultant for a Canadian-based asset manager. While I was doing this consulting job, there were two people that I crossed paths with regularly in the coworking world. We became coworking consultants as 3 equal partners of The Deco Group. Rather than opening my own additional spaces, we pooled our knowledge of the industry and showed others how to do it.

What was it like when COVID hit?

Working with The Deco Group was super fun, and then COVID hit. Everything dried up and collective spaces based around bringing people together did not do well. Toronto was one of the most locked-down cities. We imposed massive covid protocols - at the height of COVID there were maybe only 10 people using the space. The industry was so punished, and asset owners weren’t very interested in exploring how to make use of extra space for coworking purposes.

How have things changed from when you first started your career vs what you experience now?

I started my career in the 80s and women weren’t always taken seriously. We were the ones that got the coffee, and we often watched our male colleagues get promoted faster or get paid more, simply because they were men. I remember making a huge pitch on a team that I was a key component of. A senior male colleague told me I did a great job and slapped me on the ass. At the time, we just moved on. I knew it was wrong then but as a woman, you couldn’t call out a senior male colleague for something like that - unless you wanted to be labeled a troublemaker. When I was on the Olympic project, two other men in my role were getting paid more than I was. I believe I was paid less because I was not the primary breadwinner in my family. I loved my career at the time but often things look different when you look back on them. I do think there is a greater acknowledgement of treating women more respectfully these days. I also believe there's still a massive way to go for gender equality. Women often think differently, work differently and we approach challenges in different ways.  

How should companies empower and support women in their organization?

In an ideal world, all organizations would hire and promote women based on merit as well as other eligible candidates (who may or may not be women) but still based on merit. Women are just as capable as men, but that strategy clearly hasn't worked in the past. The challenge with equity whether it's gender equity or racial equity is that there's always that nasty comment of ‘they just got the job because they’re a person of colour or she just got the job because she's a woman’.  Until there’s better representation, when you have two candidates of equal eligibility & merit, I do think employers should be hiring the person who isn’t adequately represented within their organization.

How do you think women’s careers have evolved over time?

What has hurt women’s careers in the past is childbearing and child rearing. I think we’re moving in the right direction to balance this out. I see so many young couples where men are taking parental leave which is a tremendous stride forward. COVID taught us that we don't all have to be in the office. If you can allow a woman to have her children and work from home, then that’s another great step forward. I hope that this is something that we can move towards as a society.

You talked about your imposter syndrome when coming back to work after taking time off. How did you address that?

It’s a real thing and I have suffered from it my whole career, even to this day. When I went back into the workforce for the Olympic project, I was concerned because I had never engaged with live sport before in any professional capacity. The team that came on board all had sports backgrounds and I stayed quiet in meetings, taking notes. After a couple of meetings, the president called me into his office and wanted to know what I was thinking because he said it looked like I had all the answers. In a way, my nervousness and doubt worked a little bit to my advantage because I wasn’t trying to be something that I wasn't. In the end, nobody hired me to be the live sport expert, I was hired to be a strategic expert. One of my tasks was to help Royal Bank, McDonalds, Petro Canada and other companies to connect with the Olympics in a meaningful way for their consumers and brand. What you're bringing to the table might be just as important or even more important than what others do.  

Did you have a mentor or sponsor throughout your career or are you a mentor to anyone right now?

I don’t have one person who really stands out as someone who officially mentored me. I was lucky that I had great bosses early on in my career. I've worked with younger associates, and I’ve always enjoyed being able to mentor them. Most members at ACME Works are a lot younger and it bothered me when they would say that I reminded them of their mom, but I've now come to embrace my role as official mom, so I do very much like that mentoring. I think it is beneficial whether it's an informal or formal structure.