Some businesses start around a boardroom table.
JUSTGO grew up on the road.
When Lisa Ostrikoff first began building JUSTGO on Vancouver Island, her daughter Ella was there for plenty of the decidedly less glamorous parts.
Cleaning vans. Helping prepare them for travellers. Moving things around. Organizing gear. Tagging along on road trips. Doing the kind of behind-the-scenes work that rarely makes it into the finished photos.
But somewhere along the way, the work became something else.
As JUSTGO evolved from a Vancouver Island campervan rental startup into a much larger collection of road trips, stories, photography and video, Ella began evolving with it.
Today, Ella runs Media Operations for BizBOXTV, working professionally across video, digital media and content production across Western Canada. But part of that path began years earlier with JUSTGO — first helping with the grunt work behind a growing campervan business, then increasingly getting behind the camera and creating content of her own.
Her love for the outdoors and Vancouver Island made the transition natural. What started as helping her mom became years of exploring, photographing, filming and experiencing the Island — eventually contributing to one of the many creative skills she now uses professionally.
From Campervan Grunt Work to Creative Work
In the early days of JUSTGO, there was no big production team.
There was simply a lot to do.
Lisa had already spent years working professionally in media, including television news, video production and digital storytelling. JUSTGO gave that experience a completely different canvas: Vancouver Island itself.
Ella initially helped wherever help was needed.
The work around a campervan business can be considerably less romantic than the finished Instagram photo suggests. Vehicles have to be cleaned. Gear has to be organized. Trips need preparation. Things break. Things get wet. And somebody inevitably has to deal with whatever the last traveller left behind.
Ella experienced that side of JUSTGO first.
But she also experienced what happened after the work was done.
The road.
The beaches.
The forests.
The campsites.
The ferries.
The places you find because you decided to turn down a road just to see where it went.
And increasingly, she began helping capture them.
A Shared Love for Vancouver Island
For both Lisa and Ella, creating media around Vancouver Island was never simply about producing content.
It came from wanting to explore.
JUSTGO road trips became opportunities to photograph and film places across the Island, from familiar destinations to small discoveries that might otherwise have disappeared into a camera roll.
Over the years, that accumulated into thousands of pieces of original JUSTGO media documenting Vancouver Island through different seasons, road trips and stages of life.
For Ella, those experiences also helped develop an independent creative perspective. Her love for the outdoors, travel and Vancouver Island increasingly became part of what she chose to photograph, film and share herself.
And JUSTGO was very much a family adventure along the way. Ella’s younger brother, Pax, appears throughout years of JUSTGO photos and videos too ~ camping, exploring and growing up against the backdrop of Vancouver Island.
In many ways, the JUSTGO media archive became more than a collection of travel content. It became a visual record of years spent exploring the Island together.
Today, Ella runs media operations for BizBOXTV Media Systems, bringing the creative skills she developed along the way into professional media production.
The daughter who once helped with the grunt work behind JUSTGO had become the most creative person behind the camera.
Two Generations. Two Perspectives.
Working together does not mean seeing everything the same way.
And creatively, that is probably a good thing.
Lisa approaches media with decades of professional experience behind the lens — looking for the story, the context and the larger picture.
Ella brings the perspective of a generation that grew up with visual media as an everyday language.
One might notice the story.
The other might notice the moment.
Sometimes those become the same piece of content.
That combination has helped shape part of the enormous visual archive behind JUSTGO: professional storytelling mixed with the much less polished reality of simply being somewhere beautiful and wanting to capture it.
The People Behind Travel Media Matter
There is more travel content online today than ever before.
But there is a difference between describing somewhere and knowing somewhere.
JUSTGO has spent years building its Vancouver Island travel library through firsthand experience — driving the roads, visiting the beaches, staying at campgrounds, exploring communities and repeatedly returning to many of the same places.
Ella has been part of that history.
That matters increasingly as JUSTGO continues expanding beyond its original campervan roots and deeper into it's bigger vision of Vancouver Island travel media and discovery.
The objective is not simply to tell people that Tofino has beaches or that Vancouver Island has beautiful campgrounds.
Anyone can generate that sentence.
The interesting part is showing people what it actually feels like to be there.
From The Road to The Next Generation
There is something fitting about Ella becoming a Media Operations lead after spending so much of her younger life around BizBOXTV x JUSTGO.
What began as helping her mom exposed her to something much bigger: entrepreneurship, media creation and an unusually close relationship with Vancouver Island.
And what Lisa started documenting through JUSTGO years ago is now being seen through another set of eyes.
Different cameras.
Different perspectives.
Different generations.
Same Island.
And still a lot left to explore.
Keep Exploring With JUSTGO
Explore Vancouver Island road trips, destinations, camping ideas, original video and stories from years spent travelling the Island.
And if you are ready to experience it yourself, find your campervan, RV or motorhome, choose a direction and JUSTGO.