Preventing BlowOuts with Erika Tkatchuk
It was cold, and although the season was still officially falling, it felt like winter was upon us. I was without mitts, so I rubbed my palms together for a few seconds once I got into Mikel Coffee Shop. The Barista’s warm smile thawed me as I placed my coffee order and shuffled to a quiet corner of the shop. I was toasty in less than ten minutes and perked just right to start our conversation. She walked in, unfazed by the weather, radiant in a tan blouse and plaid print scarf with her hair bundled in a tight ponytail.
Erika Tkatchuk is a fitness enthusiast, co-owner of Trench Gym in Regina and a mom to two young children. After becoming a mom, she quickly realized that traditional diapers didn’t work for her daughter’s blow-out episodes. So, she got creative and created her design for a practical and stylish diaper. That’s precisely how a simple solution just for herself quickly evolved into Lil Mak Diapers Co. In this interview, Erika talks about her experience as a mom and shares advice for other mothers interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Despite facing several obstacles along the way – including a global pandemic that severely impacted her business – Erika never lost sight of her dream. Whether you’re a new parent or simply looking for an inspiring story about determination and dedication, Erika’s journey is worth exploring.
Q: What is your weekly pocket of sunshine?
Erika Tkatchuk:
My weekly pocket of sunshine would have to be time with my family. That could be going outdoors or cooking with them. We do a lot of cooking and baking and spend time together. That would be my little pocket of sunshine. I love fitness, I lift weights, I run, I do all of that kind of stuff. But the thing that ultimately fills my cup is just being with family. It was hard for my husband and me to get pregnant. And so, just every single day with our kids is a blessing. They drive me crazy. I don’t want to act like it’s sunshine all the time, but it’s overcast. I still like overcast.
Q: Tell me about your company?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I have two companies. We own a gym here in the city. It’s called Trench Fitness. It is a membership base, it is personal training and it is nutrition consulting. After the birth of my first daughter, I started Lil Mak Diaper Co. it’s named after my daughter, Billie Makenna. It’s a line of disposable baby diapers designed to prevent poop blowouts. The OG Exploder, we call her. We tried every single diaper on the shelves. The super expensive ones, super cheap ones, diapers from all over the world and nothing worked. I contacted the development company out of Toronto, and through their digital imaging, they designed the prototype. I found a manufacturer, and they produced the diapers. Then COVID happened, and everything fell apart. It took two years to get them here. It was a process. There was a scarcity of materials. There were trucks that weren’t running, and there were manufacturers that weren’t manufacturing. And there was nothing I could do about it.
Q: What spark made you say, “Let me go try; I want to make mine. I can do this…”?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Honestly, we were on vacation in the Dominican, and we were eating and drinking and having a great time, and I was feeling bad about myself. I went to the gym, looked at myself in the mirror, and pulled out my Lululemon pants. It was like a bodysuit essentially, and I was like, “You know what? I feel like if a diaper was higher wasted, it would hold everything in. If it was holding all my vacation stuff in, it could hold in the diaper’s contents.” I worked with the developer, took the diaper, and heightened the waist. It was, essentially, like a pair of yoga pants. We changed elastic around, and it holds in the contents through just those two adaptations.
Q: It took two years for it to come; your kids are obviously out of diapers at that point. What has the feedback from other moms been like?
Erika Tkatchuk:
It’s been very positive in terms of how it works. The only thing parents are struggling with right now is the cost. If you can buy diapers at Superstore and use your PC points to purchase them, or at Costco, where you get one bazillion for a cheaper rate per diaper, people, because of the challenging economic times, are having to choose those brands.
Q: Let’s go back before the Trench Gym? What made you and your husband start the entrepreneur journey?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I have a dance background, and I wanted to be a dance teacher throughout the entire university. My mom was like, “You know what? If you get injured, your career is over.” It prompted me into fitness, and like one does, I followed a boy to Regina. I was working in a gym here in the city, and then I met my husband, who had a small personal training business. He was a full-time firefighter. and did a little bit of personal training. One day, I was like, “You know what? I’ll quit my job, and let’s start this and see what happens. “It went from a tiny little basement suite with maybe 12 clients to now we have over 250 members. We have employees; we have a gigantic facility. It went from literally nothing to the monster it is today, and we’ve been in operation since 2011. Kind of with the diapers, we took everything we didn’t like about commercial gyms and turned what we did like and turned it into a facility.
Q: You mentioned having difficulty having your kids; what was that process like, and how did that affect you?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I think it affected me significantly because I’ve always been able to work hard at something and accomplish whatever I wanted. When I imagined what I wanted my family to look like, it should be like, but it didn’t work like that for us. With our first, we had to go through IVF. With our second, it was just two years of trying. I feel like, throughout our fertility journey, I appreciate the body’s ability to do and the resilience it takes to sometimes create a family.
Q: How did that experience help you mentally? Did you feel like that affected any other aspect of your life as you went through the fertility process?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I think it made me very bitter and resentful of people who could get pregnant quickly. I didn’t understand my health, from a purely evolutionary perspective, why it was so hard for me. I think that aspect was hard. The nice thing is that I still do quite a bit of fitness coaching online. I’m able to identify with people that are struggling with infertility and who are struggling with any situation where they put the work in, fat loss, for example, but they’re not seeing the fruition of their efforts. It’s made me more empathetic and also harder working.
Q: How do you balance being a mom and a business owner?
Erika Tkatchuk:
With grace and a lot of humour. My husband and I are both self-employed, and we have the leisure of bringing our kids. We never did daycare; our kids just came to work with us. They’re athletic and agile because they’ve grown up in a gym. They were fulfilling orders throughout the summer when they weren’t at school. They sat around the gym or did personal training sessions while we taught classes. I think, how do I balance? I integrate because that’s all we’ve ever done.
Q: Do you have family over here that helps you out with kids at any time?
Erika Tkatchuk:
My family immigrated from Germany to Ohio, and my mom went to a chiropractor college in Toronto. And because in the early ’90s and late ’80s, being a female in medicine was still very tumultuous, especially being a chiropractor because one neck snap and you’re killing people. We moved to Canada because my mom could not be sued. I got a dance scholarship, Then did school there, met a boy, moved here, met my husband, and stayed here.
Q: Watching your mom leaving Ohio, USA, to Canada because of her profession, what did you learn from that?
Erika Tkatchuk:
It’s funny, I was listening to a podcast the other day, and it said that people always look at their childhood and try to identify with the parent they think did the most successful job. I always thought I identified more with my mom because she’s so hard-working, caring, and nurturing. But I feel like my mom mainly did the career aspect of parenting and provided for our basic needs and not necessarily our emotional needs. I feel like I am very much so assimilated by myself. I don’t know if I’ve learned that much from my mom as a chiropractor, but mostly what I don’t want to do as a parent.
Q: What has been your most significant victory and your biggest challenge?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Are you ready for it? Indigo wants to carry my diapers. I am so excited about it.
But the problem is that I’ve been getting by with no insurance. I have liability insurance, but I don’t have super expensive insurance because none of the boutiques I’m in require it. I’m trying to find an insurance company to insure my specialty product. As soon as that gets squared away, they’ll be on their website and in their stores. That’s been a tremendous success. The greatest setback was just the initial purchase order, the expense, the uncertainty and everything associated with COVID.
Q: COVID, a two-year wait time. Did you feel like giving up? why did you keep going?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Absolutely, but I didn’t because I said I was going to.
Q: Do you typically always do what you say you’re going to do? Where did you get that from, and how did you learn to do that?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I think dance. I was a highly competitive dancer and dance teacher for most of my life. I feel like because of the discipline I learned from different classes, different studios, and different competitions, I was able to apply that discipline to see things through. I come from a dysfunctional home; I don’t feel that much of my success as a human comes from my childhood. I feel like it comes from self-development and just seeing things through.
Q: Is perfectionist a word that somebody would use to describe you?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Absolutely. It’s something I fight every single day to be not. I say that grammatically incorrect because I feel like, as a perfectionist, everything needs to be perfect. I’m a Virgo, so it’s the double whammy of perfectionism. I fight so hard not to be a perfectionist because I see that manifest in my children. They always try their best in everything they do, which is excellent, but if they don’t feel like it is their best, they become very saddened by it. They’re very upset about things if things don’t go their way. I try to show them different ways that I’ve screwed up, things that haven’t gone my way, just to role model like, “Yeah, this went wrong, but I’m still here, and it’s okay.”
Q: What would you like people to describe you as instead of the word perfectionist?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Hardworking and kind.
It’s funny because my husband and I were talking about this the other day, and he was like, “I don’t know how people would describe me. You know how they describe you, Erika?” “How would they describe me?” I asked. “I think they said that you’re standoffish. “I don’t feel like I’m standoffish. I think that I’m just… I don’t know how I would describe myself. I just am. I’m very kind, and I’m very considerate, but I’m not very friendly.
Q: What motivated you to continue in your mission?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I think the thing that has motivated us is the people that rely on it. We have members that come every day. We have people that have been on nutrition programs for years. They require what we’re providing for their health. And so, no matter what, we will provide for their health. When transitioning from our old gym to our new facility, we didn’t have anywhere to train people, so we trained them out of our garage. We opened our home to our clients to come in and still get their training sessions. At this time, we had just built our house. We were in our brand-new house for three months, and we had random people coming in to do personal training at all day hours. What motivates us to keep going is that people depend on it.
Q: COVID and the gym, how did that go?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Terrible. I think it was hard on small businesses in general, but it was emotionally challenging for us because we understand the significance of strength training on your health. It was really sad to see clients stuck in their homes, their mental health was destroyed, and there was nothing we could do to help them. We rented out equipment, and we gave people whatever they needed, but at the end of the day, they required the community that we offer, and we weren’t able to do that. Because we weren’t in a central space.
Q: Do you have a piece of advice to give another mom trying to do something like this, create?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Okay. For a mom wanting to start a business, get a business mentor unless you’re a businessperson. I have one, and I call him my friend, Frank. Frank was an instructor at a business school. And through friends, we met each other, and he helped me design a business plan, helped me to set up my QuickBooks, to set up all of the business sides. If you’re a mom with a big imagination like I am, I have no formal business training. Find someone that has the business training so that they can help your dream come to life.
Q: Did having a business mentor play a crucial role in your journey?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I didn’t know how to do any of the business stuff. We hired that out at the gym. We don’t do it. We don’t even do payroll. We have someone that does all of that. Having someone in my back pocket that I can refer to for all the business has been integral.
Q: What is the greatest advice Frank has ever given to you?
Erika Tkatchuk:
Calm down. I’m just kidding. “It’s going to be okay.” The greatest advice he’s given me is that the next customer’s right around the corner. When you have periods when sales are slow, there will always be highs and lows. Having someone believe in you, believe in your vision and tell you that the next sale is right there just keeps you motivated and positive. When you’re an entrepreneur, it can be very easy to have those dark, dooming thoughts. It’s hard, especially in these economic times, to believe that your idea is viable. Someone right there that believes in you and believes in what you’re doing is huge.
Q: Do you mentor anybody right now? Would you like to mentor anyone?
Erika Tkatchuk:
I for sure would. Yeah. I am very involved with Special Olympics. I feel like a lot of the relationships and the connections that I’ve made with that organization it’s like mentorship because you’re never going to be their best friend, but you can offer them advice and friendship. That’s been, that’s good too.
Today, Lil Mak Diaper Co. is thriving, largely thanks to Erika’s dedication and commitment to making the best products for parents like her. The next time you’re faced with a blowout that threatens to derail your dreams, take a page from Erika’s book and keep pushing forward! And if you are looking for the perfect diaper to prevent blowouts? Look no further than Lil Mak Diaper Co., follow Erika’s lead and invest in a quality diaper that will keep your little one comfortable, dry, and protected.
