The keen observer may have noticed that my business partner Shelley and I share the same last name. We get asked about this all the time, and it is both a short answer and a long story.
Shelley and I are siblings. Our father, Dean Walker, was a successful editor and business writer in the late 1950s and 1960s. Seeing Corporate Canada's ever-increasing need for communications help, he founded Yorkminster Publishing in 1973, quickly growing it into a thriving business, creating magazines and newsletters for many of Canada's largest companies.
By the end of the 1970s, my sister was attending the Ontario College of Art and designing some of dad's publications. It was "old school" back then, with a drafting table, markers, and lots of Letraset. She still has a flat-sided finger she accidentally sliced down to size using an X-acto blade and a steel ruler.
I soon followed suit in joining the family business, spending my high school summer vacations ferrying copy around for approval from executives in the gleaming skyscrapers of Bay Street. Soon after, I graduated to taking photographs.
Shelley kept working with my father. I rejoined the enterprise after university, gradually taking over the writing and editing and finally, with my dad retiring, assuming control of the business in 1999. The company continued to thrive, and its scope grew internationally in focus. By the late 2000s, we were covering our clients' operations around the globe and publishing in English, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Armenian, Bulgarian and Serbian.
Here is when I became the black sheep of the family. In 2009, I decided to try something different. I stepped away from the business and joined Queen's University's Faculty of Engineering Applied Science and established their first Marketing and Communications unit.
Even here, Shelley and I kept our working relationship, producing the faculty's biannual alumni magazine together.
In 2020, I returned to consulting, and in 2023, Shelley and I decided to launch Custom Creative Newsletter Specialists, capitalizing on our deep (and lengthy!) experience producing engaging corporate newsletters with the latest in digital technology.
Well, there you have it—a tale of unbridled nepotism and newsletters.
PS – and the tradition continues. Shelley’s son Taylor Mason is a tremendously talented communicator and marketer. Check out his website: https://www.talemaker.ca/
