You Can Do That Here

What is it about the large corporate environment that makes it so difficult to turn great ideas into market ready product? What is it about that system that so often waters down creative inspiration into boring middle of the road things?Whatever those factors are, it has become a popular refrain and a rite of passage in many cases for the young creative entrepreneur to pay their dues first at a big corporate giant.

From there they proceed to be both inspired by opportunity, and then crushed by the bureaucracy. After contributing some knowledge to that company they move on to launch their own smaller shops to help fulfill their own ideas and the ideas of others.

Keith Page of Nelson BC followed just such a similar path. A natural entrepreneur with a penchant for seeing better ways of doing existing ideas, he set out to set up his own entity to run ideas and thoughts through, with the plan of converting the best of them into money making businesses.

Launching that new entity began a series of attempted enterprises, some successful others learning experiences. What it really provided for him though was just what the name of the company implies. Green Light was born to say yes to new projects and the result is a growing cluster of online and digital products and services. 

If you had a choice, would you rather spend 2 hours a day commuting in a car, or walking through a quaint and beautiful small town to your office? Would you rather have the lifestyle amenities you enjoy like biking, skiing, hiking, fishing, taking in arts and culture, eating good food at unique restaurants and enjoying a locally ground brew at the funky coffee shop run by locals? Or would you rather be trapped in the concrete jungle?

Yes you might possibly make more money or have more job opportunities available to you living gin the bigger centers, but are you making a living? Are you making a healthy and fun life you can enjoy?

For creative and energetic entrepreneurs out there, places like Rossland, Nelson and Revelstoke here in the Kootenays are the realization of their dream. Like the name of our show says, if you have an idea, passion and energy, you can do that here, and you can probably work fewer hours, have a smaller mortgage, and be closer to all of the things you love in the process.

I sat down with graphic designed Shelley Ackerman and her husband John Snelgrove, owner of The Alpine Grind in Rossland to learn about what attracts entrepreneurs like them to town, and how we can get better at it.

What happens to your career when you love a sport so much that you feel the urge to live in the best place imaginable for that sport? What happens to your career when you spend your time pursuing the ultimate lifestyle, rather than the ultimate career?

In the case of Ethan Meginnes of Rossland and Paddy Kaye of Squamish, those two scenarios, were exactly what brought them together and launched their careers into the magical space of having fun and making money.

Originally in search of a cross country skiing getaway Ethan and his wife immigrated to Canada so they could live in Rossland and mountain bike from their back door. Living wholly within the mountain bike and adventure sports lifestyle on the coast, Paddy Kaye found a love in building the trails he and his buddies loved to ride. 

Merging a passion for trail building with a strong business acumen all under a shared love of mountain biking launched Joyride Bike Parks, the world’s pre-eminent mountain bike trail builders, from their home base in Rossland BC.

The family business. It's a noble tradition with deep roots. For millennia parents have handed over the reins of the farm, the shop, and the company, whatever it may be. Yes your real training and education growing up was the first decade or two of your life living within it. Wisdom passed down through the generations was your real university degree. As transportation and career options increased over the years the family business has been in decline. But why?

If you take the family out of the name, it's really a way to buy in either at a discount or free to an already established business. It's a turnkey operation that you've been studying for your whole life. Who wouldn't want that?

Gina Medhurst didn't know she wanted it, but in her late teens she felt the calling home from the City. Shortly thereafter the actual call home from her parents came, asking if she and her then boyfriend wanted to move home from the City and take over the Kootenay Forge Blacksmith shop in Crawford Bay. 

The transition turned out successful, but it was not without a lot of hard work, unexpected difficult challenges, and a wise guiding hand in her father.

We are celebrating the 40th episode this week of the You Can Do That Here! podcast by bringing back one of our favourite guests who kicked it all off on episode 1. Kaj Gyr of Nelson BC is the epitome of the Kootenay Entrepreneur and is living out the life many of us haven’t even dreamed of.

Kaj’s job from an outside perspective is one of living life to the fullest whether paddle boarding, backcountry skiing or tobogganing with the kids. Be it recycling and drying plastic bags or simply enjoying a cup of coffee, Kaj is the persistent malcontent. Always wanting and seeing a better way he’s put together a remarkably success run of converting ideas into products, licensing 11 to big name manufacturers and running a few himself along the way. Primarily working in the sports realm his latest innovation comes from the breakfast table.

For his latest venture forward of many in progress, Kaj’s simple and ingenious design solution to bring a better cup of coffee to the masses is trying a new route. For the first time Kaj is crowdfunding his coffee gadget through Kickstarter and like the process thus far. Being Kaj however we also talked about a better way to do crowdfunding sites for designer/inventor/entrepreneurs like him.

If you distill business… any business at all, what is all comes down to is a customer agreeing to pay money to a seller in exchange for a product or service. Put more simply. Without sales, there is no business.

Indeed sales are the most critical element of our business. If you ask most people, they will tell you they are afraid of sales, don’t enjoy it, do it when they have to, leave it up to the pros, or they simply don’t respect the position.

A third fact we also know is that most businesses launched, will end in failure. Perhaps there is a correlation here between these three facts. We know sales are critical, yet we don’t enjoy them or put the effort in they deserve, and then not surprisingly those businesses fail. Maybe I’m reaching a little bit with the direct cause and effect between those three, but the underlying fact is clear, getting better at sales is critical to your businesses survival and growth.

The good news is that Sales is not a born in art form, but rather a learned skill, and old dogs can learn new tricks.

Ian Selbie is a man who knows a thing or two about sales. He is not into his fourth decade in or teaching the profession, and has been around the block a few times. It stated in the early 80’s when he went to work for a young Steve Jobs at Apple Computers. By 1990 he was named Apple’s best sales person on earth.

18 years later he has trained over 16,000 sales people in 7 different countries. On May 19th in Nelson he’ll be leading a workshop to help Kootenay Companies ramp up their sales. I caught up with him over Skype from his Home Office in Vancouver and learned the 3 critical steps to making sales, and got 1 tip we can all use to boost our sales immediately.

Have you ever met a completely one dimensional person? Probably not right? How about a one dimensional entrepreneur? Does such a thing exist? So if people and entrepreneurs especially are multi-dimensional people, why is it that most all of the business programs and ideology preach the necessity of specializing and zeroing in on a specific target market? There is good reasoning behind that methodology, but as a new breed of entrepreneurs are proving, there are other ways.

There are many ways of connecting ones product or service with the end customer. Traditionally a business finds a need, and then fills that customers need with a better, cheaper or faster solution. More and more we're now seeing a shift towards why and how businesses operate rather then what and for how much they sell it. You could say the business world is becoming more human.

Geoffroy Tremblay, now of Riondell on Kootenay Lake's beautiful East Shore is just such a multi-dimensional person. He's also an entrepreneur with a wide array of interests and skill sets. After having a child with his wife, the two wanted something other than the 9-5, didn't want to do just one thing, wanted to work together, and wanted to work with other creative folks who shared their ideals. Bringing together a suite of online design and branding skills with a yoga practice, Thai massage and healing, Studio Ponukki was born.

I sat down with the self-described black sheep, and learned how Geoffroy and his family are bending business to match their lifestyle desires, rather than changing their lifestyle to fit the business world’s needs.

What do you do when you can’t find what you are looking for? You make it yourself of course. At least some people do and thank goodness for them. Yes entrepreneurs are perhaps a rare breed that when they have an idea on how to make something better they take action on it, create it for themselves and often in the process create something that many others would want as well.

The snowboard industry like so many others in recent years has been going through a movement away from traditional big manufacturers and further towards small handmade, customer, high quality, small manufacturers.

From an education and career as an animal biologist, Greg Fortier of Revelstoke, BC was lured away from his home in northern Alberta by the siren song of Reve's big mountains and big snow.

Techy by nature, he was in pursuit of the ultimate board. When he couldn't find it he decided to build it himself. 4 years later trapper snowboards is becoming a recognized niche brand of high quality handmade boards using local materials and labour while being inspired by the areas unique big mountain culture.

I connected with Greg to learn about his start up story, the challenges along the way and why being paid in high fives trumps the big money of the corporate world any day of the week.

So today we’re going to be doing special show about the future of technology. Where is it going? How will it affect and change our lives? What do we need to know and what do we need to do to be ready for it.?

Let’s call it Techtopia 2035. Let’s take a little look forward, and walk down main street Kootenay town turned Techtopia. Our guide today? Jean-Marc La Flamme out of Revelstoke, BC. As an early developer on the web JM played key roles in a number of the websites we use every day and has some bold ideas, thoughts and predictions on where we might be going based onwhat's happening right now. But let’s let him tell that story.

Defining moments. They are particular focus points in your life you can look to where in a flash, our realities and futures are altered.  They are moments in time where our course changes and we begin sailing in a new direction. It could be the addition of a new baby to the family. It could be the loss of a loved one, or further still it could be a significant injury, and a long recovery time allowing one to think deeply.

In the case of Steve Fisher originally of Golden and later Nelson, both him and his best friend found themselves recuperating from serious injury at the same time. Having pursued the professional ski bum and outdoor adventure enthusiast lifestyle as his primary passion, being immobilized for lengthy recovery with the threat of not being able to play as he once did provided time to think.

That's where his entrepreneurial story began. Seeking out an opportunity to buckle down and make some serious money for his family, he sought out an opportunity, and has come up with a unique solution, setting him and his formerly injured best friend, come business partner up for major growth and success with their company GEM Services.