CEO Today Global Awards

Canada 15 www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today Global Awards 2019 to host a worldwide community of visitors at visitor levels that put us at the same level as key tourist anchors in the country, like the ROM. So, my role is to champion the right investments in the organization and the right revenues to pursue. To capture growth opportunities means focusing on all aspects that make our scale-up to a world-class botanic garden successful: what is our visitor journey going to be like from 250K visitors a year to a million plus visitors a year? What is our visitor data and technology strategy? What’s our P&L picture and long-term investor strategy? These questions are top of mind every day for me and my goal is to align our teams on chipping away at these answers. 4. How would you describe TBG’s mission and vision in your own words? What does this mean to you? We are interconnected: our relationships across our global economy and our relationships with our surrounding environment. We need places in the world like the Toronto Botanical Garden to pause, reflect, be inspired and learn about our curated surroundings – and at the same time, we are a call to action for protecting and celebrating the green spaces that make our quality of life great. 5. As a charity, how does TBG remain funded and successful in its endeavours? I take the view that we are wealth advisors on an international stage as we build a world-class botanic garden that will scale up to serve a million-plus visitors a year. We are saying to our donors, our investors, your investment is sound with us because we are investing in our organization systems to operate smart and transparently; we are pursuing a path forward that is visitor-centric and places sustainable revenues at the heart of our program growth; and we are reinvesting in our organization with the revenues we achieve, with a focus on becoming an innovative, world-class botanic garden 6. What do the gardens provide in terms of education and how does it achieve this? As we grow to become a living museum supporting a million plus visitors, our education programming is incredibly exciting and central to our mission. We support learning across all ages with a view into many disciplines that tie into our Living Museum, horticulture therapy is just one example. Our demographic snapshot is rich and will continue to develop as we scale-up – currently, over 26 languages are spoken at our gardens. Our collections and how we curate them are the basis for our education. I’m looking forward to our education programming as we plan for a greater infusion of technology: online learning, tech-supported interpretation programming. Wellness is a growing area of interest, and ravine restoration is as well – ravines are the lungs of our city and Toronto Botanical Garden has such a vital role. Education at Toronto Botanical Garden comes in many formats and we are going to continue exploring the formats that resonate with our growing visitor numbers. I’m most interested in the net impact we have on our audiences as we present learning experiences: the learning our visitors gain from our collections and their appreciation for the relationship between people and our green spaces. What we learn from our visitors is key to shaping innovative, successful programming into the future. 7. TBG has a rich history spanning back to 1944—in what ways would you say it has advanced or expanded in recent years? I believe our most significant advances are: The pace of our scale-up: we are investing in our business foundation and pursuing high- value revenues that allow us to reinvest in the organization so that we have all the key infrastructure in place to curate the living museum experience – with an enriched collection as we expand our gardens 10-fold. Our mindset for scale-up: strengthening our business plan, incorporating innovation and technology and strategic partnerships into our future plans because when jumping from 250K visitors to a million plus a year, means we need to be on top of our game to maximize audience engagement. 8. Are there any further expansions planned for the future or ones that you hope for? We have two expansions underway and these are perfectly complimentary: the physical expansion of our Toronto Botanical Garden – growing over 10 times in size, and our organizational expansion where we will be doubling this year our our operating budget and grow our programming to inspire, educate, elevate the wellbeing of our visitors, and stay connected with them. Expanding in a global context means we are never done our organizational growth. Our challenge is to stay relevant to our growing global audiences. Credit: Malcolm Geast