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Blaine MacMillan is president of Cowan Imaging Group, which won the CAFE Family Enterprise of the Year Award for Northern Alberta.

Photograph by: Brian Gavriloff,
The Journal, The Edmonton Journal

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to put new decals on 1,100 Canada Post vans from Victoria to St. John's in two and a half months.

Mission impossible?

The MacMillan clan took the challenge, rented five motorhomes with trailers and set off cross country.

"My brothers drove the motorhomes, my sister Muriel helped, and we hired day labour in each centre," says Blaine MacMillan, President of Cowan Imaging.

"I don't think we could have pulled it off without the family pitching in."

There have always been MacMillan family members at the company started in 1945 by Blaine's aunt and Bud Cowan.

It's grown from providing decals and signage to large-format graphics for billboards, transit shelter advertisements, and murals.

And the company was just named Edmonton's Family Enterprise of the Year by the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise.

Although MacMillan bought out the last sibling partners last year, there are still five family members among the about 100 people working at Cowan.

"Being a family business has been really good for us. You have the confidence and trust a family truly has for each other. The highs are pretty high and the lows are not so low."

There does, however, need to be one person defining the company's goal or there's a chance you won't move forward, he says.

Cowan is as challenged as most companies by the economic downturn, but "we do work nationally and in the U.S. so we don't depend just on business from northern Alberta."

MacMillan's currently working at parlaying experience doing graphics for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, and the Commonwealth, World University and Masters Games in Edmonton into contracts for the Vancouver Winter Games.