Skipper Otto – Sonia Strobel (Canada)

Stay weird. 

That’s the mantra Sonia Strobel continues to embrace eighteen years after launching Skipper Otto.

But that’s easier said than done, as she discovered early on in her entrepreneurial journey. 

“The hardest thing isn’t logistics or tactics… it’s constantly having to defend being different. To explain yourself. And deal with the sort of patronizing little pats on the head, like, ‘isn’t that cute, what you’re doing. Good for you, but that can’t scale.”

For Sonia, who had married into a fishing family, scaling was never the point of Skipper Otto. 

“I saw my husband, my father-in-law, Otto, and all these other fishing families working so hard and being paid so poorly. They were dealing with such uncertainty about if they were even going to break even year over year and taking on so much risk that’s inherent with fishing.”

Sonia couldn’t shake the feeling that the system itself was broken. And so, the former high school teacher and new mom set out to build a new way to connect independent fishers with eaters who were hungry for high-quality, sustainably-caught fish. 

“When I started Skipper Otto, I really didn’t think I was starting a business. I was trying to fix something that didn’t make sense… Could we not accept that this status quo system is the way it has to be? I really believe that we can have a system where food creates relationship and connection instead of just transactions.”

That belief is embedded into the DNA of Skipper Otto. The company’s business model, which Sonia adapted from the Community-Supported Agriculture model, has been built around a membership model.

Fish lovers sign up as members and pre-purchase a credit for the amount of fish they want to buy during the year.

Financially, this model helps reduce risk and cash-flow uncertainty for the fishers. Just as importantly, the year-long commitment enables Skipper Otto to build relationships and trust with its members through storytelling, direct fisher-to-member connections, and other initiatives.

The company’s deep commitment to relationship-building is evidenced in its 89% retention rate for multi-year members.

With nearly two decades under her belt as CEO, Sonia has been witness to countless affirmations that Skipper Otto is making a difference on many fronts, especially to the fishers and communities it’s been built for. 

“One of our fishermen was walking along the dock while we were offloading, and he said, ‘You know, ever since I started working with Skipper Otto, I feel like I’m a buyer.’ What he meant by that is that he used to walk along the dock and feel lesser because the buyers held all the power. Now he walks along, he high-fives people, and he can talk to the buyers on an equal playing field. He doesn’t feel like he’s lesser anymore.”

Despite all the evidence that Skipper Otto has been succeeding at exactly what she’d set out to do, the journey hasn’t been smooth sailing.

Time and time again, Sonia felt like she had to conform. 

“You walk into a room, and people are asking these questions about traditional investor relationships and raising capital, and you’re like, huh? I don’t do that. It makes you feel like, oh, maybe I don’t actually know what I’m doing here.” 

At one point, Sonia succumbed to the pressure to go mainstream. Encouraged to make a CPG product that could be sold in grocery stores, she took the bait and began working on a deal that would spell massive growth for the business.

But the further Sonia waded into the waters, the clearer it became that she’d be compromising everything that Skipper Otto stood for.

“It just didn’t work. Grocery retail required standardized, machine-cut portions, but those machines use jets of water to measure and cut the fish, which can water-log it. Our fish is hand-cut by skilled fish cutters, producing naturally irregular portions that need to be individually weighed. At the volumes the machine-cutting required on one day, fish from different boats would also have to be combined, making our personalized fisher labels impossible. The more we tried to fit the conventional model, the more we had to give up what mattered to us.”

The next time rapid growth came knocking at Sonia’s door, it was because the world shut down. As membership skyrocketed during the pandemic, Skipper Otto had the opportunity to accelerate its growth by moving into a much bigger facility.

But Sonia and the team questioned whether pandemic-era demand would last and decided that taking on a major fixed-cost investment could jeopardize the business and its mission.

“The decision-making rubric that we use for every decision is ‘does this still honour the communities that we’ve built or does it jeopardize them?’ I want us to grow, but growth has to deepen our impact, not undermine it. I’d rather have every member eating more seafood from our fishing families than simply chase bigger and bigger member numbers. Scale for the sake of scale has never been the goal.”

Finding a community of like-minded people as a Venture in Coralus’s first cohort was instrumental in helping Sonia realize she wasn’t alone in her desire to do things differently.

“The financial support mattered, of course, but equally important was being surrounded by people who were also imagining different futures, which gave me confidence that other people were asking the same questions I was.” 

Through the Coralus community, Sonia also tapped into a vast network of mentors, advisors, and well-connected fish lovers who actively supported her dreams for Skipper Otto and the larger food systems change at the heart of the business. 

As Sonia casts her gaze to the horizon, where the edge of the Pacific Ocean greets the expansive skies above, she remains as certain as ever that staying weird is the North Star for Skipper Otto and, perhaps, anyone who has a dream for a different way of being and doing in this world. 

“I think one of the biggest surprises has been realizing that our story isn’t really about seafood anymore… The details are different, but the underlying question is often the same: Do we have to accept the system as it is, or can we redesign it around the values we actually care about?

The past eighteen years have taught me that building a more human business doesn’t mean compromising on performance. If anything, it has made us more resilient, more trusted, and more deeply connected to the communities we serve. That’s what gives me hope. Not because I think we’ve found the answer, but because we’ve shown that there are more possibilities than we often assume.

I don’t think Skipper Otto exists because I had a particularly brilliant idea. It exists because a lot of people believed that another way was worth trying.”