I have been retired now for almost 10 years so not all of my information is up to date. When I retired the Firm name was MacKay and Partners, short version, MacKay LLP, Logo was MacKay.ca.
The original name was Holley, MacKay &Co. Al Holley was my first partner who went on to a successful business career in 1977. We started the Firm in 1969 together having both been students at the same Firm. Al was making $750 and month and I was making $600 and we had one client between us. So we started small!
Our first office was in Vancouver and we expanded in 1970 to Whitehorse Yukon where I spent the next 10 years. We had entrepreneurial partners in the 70s and opened offices in Yellowknife and Edmonton without any client base and built from scratch. After I returned to Vancouver in 1980 we opened in Kelowna, merged with a similar-sized Firm in Vancouver (Chambers Phillips). The latter was a major milestone as it put us into the larger local firm bracket (with 50 staff) and gave us recognition in Vancouver. The Kelowna office was amazingly successful under the leadership of Don Turri. In the nineties, we expanded to Calgary and Surrey. We also had an office in the far, far North, Iqaluit, which we ultimately sold to a partner.
The proceeds from that sale gave us the initial funding for our Partners retirement fund which has become a very important contributor to the longevity and success of our Firm.
Our major accomplishment is our fifty-year history which very few Firms achieve. To do that we had to fend off numerous attempts by the big Firms to swallow us up. We were and remain fiercely independent and thereby control our own destiny.
Fundamental to our success has been a sense of fairness in our Partnership affairs which stems I believe from the early decision to give each partner a single vote (not weighted by seniority or history). A corollary to that is that profits have always been split based upon performance so the incentive has always been to produce and not rest upon your laurels. We have also had a policy of trying to encourage our students and professional staff to aspire to become partners many of whom have which gives a strong common culture in the Firm.
Iain MacKay
Crowe MacKay Founder