Events

The Speaker 

Katrina Vanderveen and Stephanie Rempel are the Co-CEOs and Co-Founders of Fortify, a Winnipeg-based wellness collective offering naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, nurse practitioner care, mental health support, osteopathy, massage therapy, dietetics, and health coaching.

Best friends for almost 20 years, Katrina and Stephanie turned their friendship into a business partnership — a decision that also means sharing a household with their families, under one roof, while co-leading a growing company.

Together, they’ve built Fortify into a multidisciplinary practice grounded in the belief that people deserve personalized, professional care over generic health advice. Along the way, they’ve developed a hands-on approach to co-leadership built on clear roles, honest conflict, and protecting the friendship that started it all.

Katrina and Stephanie speak candidly about what it actually takes to build and sustain a business partnership, drawing on their own experience as co-CEOs, best friends, and business partners as the case study.

The Talk

Eight years ago, we did something either brilliant or reckless: we became Co-Founders of the same company, after being best friends for almost 15 years. People love the highlight-reel version of that story. This isn’t that.

This isn’t a talk about running a company with your best friend specifically — it’s about what any partnership needs to survive: how to divide responsibility without resentment, how to disagree without it becoming personal, and how to protect the relationship underneath the business once the two start to blur.

Whether your business partner is a co-founder, a spouse, a sibling, or someone you’re only just considering going into business with, Katrina and Stephanie will share the specific practices that have kept Fortify — and their friendship — intact through real conflict, hard decisions, and three years of building something together.

You’ll leave with:

A framework for splitting responsibility and decision rights without resentment
Ground rules for disagreeing without it turning personal
How to protect the relationship underneath the business once the two start to blur
The one question they ask each other every year to keep both intact

Expect honesty over polish: what’s actually worked, what almost didn’t, and the one question they still ask each other almost daily to keep both the business and the friendship on track.