Boiling Point Podcast

Entrepreneurs come from all different backgrounds. Some start with degrees in marketing and business, some start with degrees in other fields but with a natural curiosity and drive to innovate. Our guest today, Dr Ivan Zak has worked his way to fall in both camps. 

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Everyone has been affected by COVID-19 in one way or another, but certain businesses and industries are feeling the impact significantly. How are entrepreneurs who run businesses in these highly impacted sectors making it through these challenging times?

Enter our guest John Simon, owner of Kefi Travel and Canadvac Travel Services, both companies based right here in the Maritimes but who rely on people being able to travel out of and into Canada. John shares with Dave and Greg the experience of acquiring another travel company at the start of the pandemic. He details how he has kept his focus moving forward, and his no-quit attitude approach that is helping him to adapt and pivot as the pandemic continues to impact the travel industry.

We want to thank again our friends OpportunitiesNB who have been working with us to be able to highlight these great businesses stories of resilience during challenging times.

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We are thrilled to be launching a new partnership series with a special hour-long episode today. In working with a few sponsors like Opportunities NB, we will be focusing our next few episodes on featuring New Brunswick business leaders and entrepreneurs to talk about resilience. Right now, during uncertain health, lifestyle, and economic times building resilient strategies in your business and life is key to not just surviving but thriving.

Today, our guest and fellow podcaster is our good friend Matt George of Unsettled Podcast. We hear about Matt’s journey this year tackling a challenging health situation, making a significant career choice pivot to become a full-time entrepreneur and dealing with the unexpected growth of the new business while balancing health and wellbeing. Not to mention all of this happening on the backdrop of a global pandemic. Matt also uses the opportunity to flip the script and interview Greg and Dave in his podcast style to learn about their life moments that taught them resiliency and life lessons.

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The last few months of COVID-19 has seen much of the world working from home. There have been multiple reports of small falls in emissions that while a breath of fresh air, is not big enough changes to impact climate change overall. Once we move back to a new normal, how we do make sure we are more conscious of the impact the ways we travel to work has on our environment? How should employers manage the impact created by their workforce? Well, there’s an app for that, and it’s called Luum. 

Kelly Hostetler, Director of Marketing, joins Greg and Dave to tell us all about how Luum is using technology to help shift the mindsets and behaviours as we all commute to work. Luum has a series of integrations like tracking when employees use a parking garage, tracking calories burned for biking to work and also giving a company an overall picture of the environmental impact their workforce is having. Luum is the type of software that could potentially change how we all think about our commutes. 

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Do you sit down every year with your senior team and make a strategic plan? Maybe you have big plans of how you are going to grow, add more initiatives and keep building towards your next big goal. It’s great, you’re energized and excited, but as the year goes on, you find yourself slowly over time getting pulled into daily, practical tasks that need to get done. Soon, you can’t even remember your strategic goals, let alone know how you’ll achieve them. The new year hits and you repeat the same cycle again and again. Are you feeling stuck? Well, our guest today can help you Get Out Of The Weeds. 

Vince Marsh has 15 years of experience helping leaders of senior teams become capable of handling any problem in a strategic way that keeps them from getting pulled too much into the weeds. He speaks to us about the common issues he has seen senior teams run into, what some solutions can be to those and share his experience in writing his book, Get Out of The Weeds. This episode is a great listen for anyone who is struggling with carving out strategic time for themselves or their leadership team. 

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Have you built your business from referrals? Are you relying on a few major customers, but find it tricky to sell your product/services to other companies? Have you hired a 6-figure salesperson who through no fault of their own, couldn’t bring you in the sales you expected? Well, maybe it’s time for you to listen to, read a book written by or engage the services of our guest, Dan Englander. 

Dan’s company, Sales Schema, helps agencies grow by doing outreach, appointment setting, outbound lead generation and support. You can be the best practitioner of your craft, but still feel kind of gross about pushing sales. But Dan talks to Dave and Greg about how sales don’t have to be a hard sale situation. In Dan’s words, “You’re selling, you’re teaching, or you’re learning every day with your market.” Listen in to hear some sales leadership tidbits sure to help your perspective on closing your next deal. 

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Do feel like you’re an outlaw, rebel or misfit in your structured corporate career? Does innovation excite you? Do you thrive on projects that are driven by passion, that carry risks and need hard work to get the rewards? If you said yes to those questions, you might be a startup superstar just waiting to happen. 

Dave and Greg were excited to learn from Steve Kahan’s decades of experience in helping startups move from early-stage to going public or being sold. While listening to his tips about what he looks for when starting to work with a company and advice he’d give young people to find the right startup career to jump into, it becomes apparent, very quickly how he helped grow 7 startups to result in over $3 billion in value. His new book that is already a best-seller on Amazon (and audiobook!) “Be A Startup Superstar” is on our must-read list. If you are an entrepreneur at any stage of your career, this episode is chock full of the information you can use. 

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Featuring entrepreneurs who are making positive impacts in the world is not just the central theme of The Boiling Point Podcast, but for both Dave and Greg, it’s a personal passion. We feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from our guest Shauna Cole, who we consider a friend, colleague and community leader. 

With her recent Linkedin post “I Once Heard A Hiring Manager Say The N-Word” and her involvement in the Black Lives Matter march in Saint John, NB, Shauna Cole has made her voice heard, and it’s time we all listen. Shauna shares with us her experiences and the tipping point for her to make that post, change her career path and choose to help others find their best career fit with her consulting work and youtube channel, Career Interrupted. 

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Diversity in our communities continues to be a path to success whether it’s for economic, cultural or lifestyle purposes. Today, we’re excited to share a wonderful conversation we had with Jennifer Waldshutz and Lina Gharbiya who both work to bring and support Newcomers to the city of Saint John, NB. We even get a chance to view the Saint John is.. video completed in partnership with Hemmings House. 

This conversation helps to highlight all the opportunities that exist in Saint John, NB for Newcomers, but also speaks to the bigger topic of what municipalities can do in order to encourage and support the growth and diversity of their population. 

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Dr Bill Howatt takes the guest seat in this week’s episode as Dave and Greg learn more about the release of his new book, Stop Hiding and Start Living: How to Say F-it to Fear and Develop Mental Fitness. This book which is a different style for our prolific author guest and sometimes co-host takes a look at Dr Bill’s personal life as a backdrop to talking about how to develop mental fitness to deal with life stressors. 

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