SPEAKER_01: 0:00

And you have to start at square one before you can do square eight. So if you start at square eight, you're gonna get it wrong. And so we make them go backwards to force out that process of creativity and innovation at the start so that they can then slingshot ahead and move faster.

SPEAKER_00: 0:20

Welcome to another episode of Sell Me This Podcast. On this week's episode, we have a fantastic discussion with Craig and Brandy from Alberta Innovates. We dive into some incredibly important conversations for young and starting entrepreneurs, the importance of sales in growing your business, and how you can take those first steps in building the community for yourself. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to another episode of Sell Me This Podcast. I am super excited today to have both of you with me. Um I'm gonna dive right into things, Brandy and Craig, and just get you to introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about who you are, and and I'm also really curious about kind of how you two got connected. So I don't know who wants to go first and who's kind of the brave uh volunteer.

SPEAKER_01: 0:57

Sure. Craig always puts me in the line of fire first.

SPEAKER_04: 0:59

So I think it's the Brandy and Craig show. Usually Brandy sits on this side and I sit on this side. So today we're doing things differently.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06

It's all I usually sit on that side, and so I feel like we're all just playing musical chairs today. So this is New Year, New Me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12

Uh yeah, so I'm Brandy uh of the Brandy and Craig Show, and I've been kind of in the innovation space for close to 10 years, but I started as an educator. So I went to school to be a teacher and then was like, ooh, this is not where I can make change. I want to help people change the world, and entrepreneurs are the place to do that. So I ended up at the University of Lethbridge running a student entrepreneurship program, and I had no idea how to teach entrepreneurship. And Craig was at Blue Valley College at the time, and he was sending emails out to people being like, hey, I have these canned workshops. And I was like, oh my god, please come. Please come now. Please teach me all the things. So that's kind of how we originally got connected. And then you kind of were the point of the stick on some of this stuff, eh?

SPEAKER_04: 1:49

Yeah, so my background is uh sales guy, ended up doing executive MBA, decided I want to do a startup. I ended up with a really cool idea, ended up in Silicon Valley, funded by a tier one venture capitalist, became a dad, came back home, put a place of CEO, and started getting asked to go do all these coffee meetings. So I was doing like six, eight coffee meetings a week. And then one day I got asked to go teach entrepreneurship at a university. So I taught entrepreneurship for three years, uh, got kicked out, too many students became entrepreneurs. Turns out it was a problem. And then I decided I wanted to keep doing what I wanted to do. So I cold called the dean of the business school at Bow Valley College, and I went in to see him, and he escorted me to a room where there were two other people, and I'm like, this is an interview. Why am I here? Like, well, we've got all this money we've been given and we don't know what to do with it. And I gave them some ideas, like, those are good, you should come do something. So we started by just doing a project, it was what, 90 days long, and then a few months later, they point back up and said, Can we do this full-time? And then after a while, I decided I didn't want to just do it for Bo Valley College. There was, there are, 26 publicly funded post-secondary schools in the province. It only a handful, like literally five of them, have resources. If you want to be an entrepreneur, I'm like, I want to do this across the entire um province. So I reached out to some folks who said, Here's some money, go get started. And Brandy was one of the first people that said, Come on down, and we went down a few times, and then we realized how well we get along, and then all of a sudden we decided we're gonna bring in a very famous guy named Ash Moria. We brandy wrote a grant. Um, we got a bunch of money, and that just became the point of the stick. We've brought in some of the best speakers on the planet into the ecosystem, and we get along like siblings. So it's like, let's just find a way to keep doing what we do. So we do a ton of different things, and we do it as far away as Istanbul, Singapore, Christchurch. Yeah, right. So we do it, you know, virtually these days, we go everywhere.

SPEAKER_00: 3:53

That's amazing. I think the power of virtual, you can you know, you can be right here, you can be in Lethbridge, and you can be in Istanbul at the exact same time. Um, I I love the analogy that you get along like siblings. Hopefully, there are no fights during the show. Um I get along with my sister. That's true. We have we was that can be security if we need to if we need to break it up here. But we'll we'll try our best to keep it civil. Um you know, entrepreneurship, and I'm I would say I'm fairly new on the entrepreneurial side of things. Like I I launched our company two years ago and then came from kind of a storied um corporate career before that, and I feel like I was always a bad employee. Um and and I feel like maybe that made me a good entrepreneur, I don't know. But but it's alarming when you see some of the stats around entrepreneurship in itself and kind of the sheer decline um in people going out on their ventures. And I think Calgary is a little bit unique in that, and maybe um Alberta maybe has a different spirit, but as you're teaching your curriculums and your courses, what is it that's changed that that people aren't getting into entrepreneurship in the same way? Do you have opinions on that?

SPEAKER_01: 4:54

Oh, that's interesting. I mean, it's been a few years since we've been officially teaching curriculum, right? Um there's just so many pathways, right? And so I think I'll maybe double down on a little bit of a point that you talked about of like, I was a bad employee, maybe a good entrepreneur. I think it's the same for students and other things, right? Is we built all these structured programs, and like when you start a company, it's not structured. Entrepreneurs don't like structure, they don't like being told what to do. And so it's almost counterfactual sometimes on those pieces. And I think a lot of people are interested in entrepreneurship but don't have the resilience or the soft skills to actually push through to get to the noise, and the market's just so much more competitive.

SPEAKER_04: 5:35

Well, and I think there's also another dynamic that goes on. So I had this goal at one point try and find a way to um postpone interest and payments on student loans if you became an entrepreneur. And I did a fair bit of research. I got introduced to the chief statistician for Stats Canada, and he helped me get access to some data. And it's interesting that says, you know, when there's a recession, more people become entrepreneurs. When the economy is reasonably good, they tend not to. And I think what ends up happening is people get some sort of package, they've got this extra time, they want to do something with it. So I think part of it's also environmental. And I think part of this is what we're trying to find a way to solve, is people look at entrepreneurship and say, it's it's not something that I can do because it's too far out of my reach, so we try to find a way to bring it down. Like we did a session last week for a bunch of tech people in Toronto, making it more accessible to folks that might be think it isn't accessible for them.

SPEAKER_00: 6:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 6:30

And the average age of an entrepreneur in Canada, can you guess?

SPEAKER_00: 6:34

Um I'm going to guess 43. Oh, actually, okay. I'm not I'm not 43, but I uh I I read a stat somewhere that it was 45, and I was like, maybe I'll just I'll try to ground the edges a tiny bit. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 6:47

And so when we look at kind of I think those environmental factors Greg is talking about your your kids are gone, your student loans are paid, hopefully theirs are too, right? Like now you've got your free time, you're starting to think about that flexibility in your work in different pieces. So it just takes a long time to get there. And you're pushing 23-year-olds to start companies. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 7:08

Well, and I and I I love that you're building some of that entrepreneurship curriculum and those stories and kind of have that that that plan where you've done some of that because um, you know, to your point, there is no playbook, right? And you're I think the idea of being scrappy, the idea of being resourceful and kind of figuring it out, um, I imagine would be an incredibly challenging curriculum to build.

SPEAKER_01: 7:28

It's hard, right? And I think people like to build, right? And so they'll build, build, and with AI it's so much easier to build, and everyone goes, I've got this crazy idea. ChatGPT coded it all for me. It's gonna be perfect. And you're like, well, who have you talked to? And they're like, my mom.

SPEAKER_00: 7:42

Well, and and I we say this to our customers all the time too, right now, where where I think that like the the technology, and I'll knock on wood here because I know there's some um there's no wood around me, but um that you know there's some in incredibly smart people that are working on tech, but the tech for the most part is the easy part now. Yeah, and and it's all of that stuff around it. Who are you talking to? How are you getting out there that that I feel like is the challenging part? Um are you both saying the same thing too?

SPEAKER_04: 8:08

It does have an impact. We're actually working on something to try and find a way to solve the problem. So we're we're not quite as guilty, but almost as guilty as some of the folks we help. We've we've got this perspective that one of the things that gets in the way of people being successful entrepreneurs is finding people that have the problem you solve so you can talk to them. So we're working on something, it's a slow burn project that if you come to us and say, Hey, this is my idea, this is the problem I'm solving, can you find me people to go talk to? So we have a community we're building over on this side that we can then tell about this problem, and those that have the problem can then put their hand up and say, I'm willing to be interviewed by Keith. So we're working through some of that. The question really is, what's the motivation of the people that want to help? And how do we find a way to tap into that help? So, right now we call them insiders because there's this whole group of folks that love to say they're, you know, an early stage investor or working on a startup, and how do we find a way to tap into that? And I think the important thing is we're tapping into the emotional side of that, and that's one of those pieces where a lot of founders miss because they look at the functional thing they do, they don't look at the other things that are so important.

SPEAKER_00: 9:22

Well, and I love that there's that focus on the customer feedback that you're talking about as well. And um, you know, I know that there's a lot of focus on raising money and investment and all of that stuff, but I you know, maybe coming from that sales background myself as well. I think that it all has to start with the customer, and I think that that's the best PhD that can you can come from. And all of the feedback, it doesn't matter if you've raised four million dollars if you don't have any customers.

SPEAKER_01: 9:46

And like you you end up burning out that bridge because investors will go, well, where's your traction and where's your sustainability? I think the biggest error we see people early stage founders is they mix up users versus customers.

SPEAKER_00: 9:57

So what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

Yeah, so they'll focus on the people that benefit, right? So kids are a great example if you want to do something to solve a kid's problem. Perfect. I'm gonna build an app around kids. How do I talk to kids, right? Like how am I gonna I don't want to be this adult interviewing kids and being like, okay, well, who's paying for it? Just helping people understand that the person you need to solve the problem for is your paying customer first is not necessarily the people are gonna use your tech. You have to make different value composition sets. We find that a lot in B2B, hey.

SPEAKER_04: 10:24

Well, and especially when people think about this and they say to us and lots of other people, we have no competition. Like you always have competition. Someone might not do the exact same thing, but someone's solving the same problem. And the challenge is if people aren't spending mostly money, sometimes time and resources, to solve that problem today, to convince them to all of a sudden do that where they're not already, it makes it really hard to become successful.

SPEAKER_00: 10:50

Well, and I think this actually was a conversation you and I had a while ago, which is you know, even the status quo. Yeah, it the status quo is a is a competitor. Like people doing nothing is actually just as dangerous as them going um maybe with a competitor or alternate solution sometimes.

SPEAKER_04: 11:05

We had that on a call this morning we had for a group across the US and Canada, is around this whole concept of competition and how unhappy the people have to be in order to switch. So the data tells us that if you ask someone on a scale of one to ten how happy you are with what you use today, if they don't give you a seven or less, they're not gonna switch.

SPEAKER_00: 11:27

Interesting. So that's the magic number. So seven or less.

SPEAKER_04: 11:30

That's one magic number. There's another magic number we use on occasion.

SPEAKER_01: 11:34

So if you want to find that out, talk to twenty-seven people.

SPEAKER_00: 11:37

Okay. So what's the what's the secret about twenty-seven?

SPEAKER_01: 11:40

So a lot of entrepreneurs, especially when they're starting, they go, Well, how do I know when I've done my discovery? Like, how do I have enough evidence? And it's like, well, it's up to you. But uh 27 is a statistically relevant number for us. So as long as you have the same kind of group of people that you're talking to, you can interview 100, you can interview a thousand, you can interview 27, you'll have roughly the same averages in your aggregate data.

SPEAKER_00: 12:03

Interesting. And so I have to ask, how did you find that out? Like that's a um oddly specific number.

SPEAKER_04: 12:10

Um that was something I came across when I did my executive MBA when we're doing some statistics. People say round number is 30, but if you talk to a statistician, they'll go, you don't need 30. And here's the thing: if we tell people 30, they forget. You tell them 27? It's memorable. If they remember, I remember the first time we did this, we used to run a special boot camp for a weekend boot camp for students, and we would send them down to a five-beek boot camp down in Silicon Valley if they do a really good job. We pay their way. Uh, and we on one occasion said to them, hey, the goal is to get the 27. And what we noticed that weekend is guess what? A whole bunch of teams went out and got the 27. So we realized we need to tell people what that number is, because now they've got a goal.

SPEAKER_00: 12:51

I love it. And so I think there's a little bit of framing that's required here too, because um, you know, we we dove right into the conversation, and I I think that there's some context that both of you bring to the table with the work that you do with Alberta Innovates that I think is incredibly important as well. And and so maybe we'll take a couple steps back and um go back to, I don't want to say your day jobs, but the you know, the the work that you do on a day-to-day basis. What what do you do with Alberta Innovates and kind of how does that influence some of your um perspectives that you have as you're helping some of these growing organizations?

SPEAKER_01: 13:22

Totally, yeah. So we're both TDAs, uh, which stands for Technology Development Advisor. And I always joke because we don't check, I don't necessarily say we don't check feasibility, but it's not the number one thing on our list. We're really looking at commercialization and fit. So we're we're business advisors. And we all have close to 200 clients that we work with across the province that come in in our different regions and we help them prepare for non-dilutive grant funding that we offer, but all the extras that come with it, like our networks, our experience, helping them figure out do I have problem solution fit? Do I have product market fit? Am I ready to talk to investors? Who do I talk to? Right? Because a lot of times people will just go to PE firms at Pre-Seed and they're like, no one's taking my calls. I'm failing. And you're like, well, you're just talking to the wrong people. Uh Julian Gordon's thing.

SPEAKER_04: 14:06

Yes, how far will the right answers to the wrong questions get you? So PE. So every now and again, Brandy will catch and I will catch each other on the acronym police that's okay.

SPEAKER_01: 14:18

Yeah, private equity, right? So these are the big dogs that'll come in and give you hundreds of millions of dollars if you have a great idea. And people go, Oh, I need this one. And you're like, that's not quite how it works.

SPEAKER_00: 14:28

Just give me$100 million on that. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 14:31

Yeah, yeah. So it's it's just kind of this process of helping them understand the journey, and we're really there as coaches along the way and connectors. So the goal is to try to make sure that we're rising the tide. I'm in Lethbridge, and so there's 11 of us around the province. We're hiring one right now in Grand Prairie or Fort Mac area. Yeah. Um, and we're there on the ground. So not only do we work one-on-one with the companies, but we're also there as a community resource. So Craig's involved with Platform Calgary and all those different pieces. I sit at our regional innovation network table and just give that support back to our nonprofits that are trying to figure out how do we get our different regions to find a spot in tech? How do we bridge these gaps? Because we have some powerhouses across the province that sometimes get forgotten.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

Totally. And and so I I think that this is an interesting structure because from my perspective, it's unique to Alberta and might take a little bit of time to explore. So we have Alberta innovates, but then we also have these RINs that I think really connect a lot of the province when you think about some of the the IP of the knowledge and and some of the we'll say like geography specific specific technologies. Can you explain a little bit of that that structure for people that might not be familiar with it?

SPEAKER_04: 15:42

So Regional Innovation Network, so Brandon and I and the rest of the TVAs, there's something in Canada called a technology readiness level. So you need to get whatever you've got to a TRL of three or higher, and then you can fill out a form and get access to someone just like us. But if you're earlier, how do you find a way to get started? So what Alberta Innovates did, I don't know how long ago now. But they decided hey, there are all these folks in all these different places that are looking to get in. How do we find a way to put in place these resources, this infrastructure? So Grand Prairie, Ford McMurray, Lloyd Minster, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge Calgary, Red Deer, and Pintan are the primary ones. Sometimes they collaborate, sometimes they compete. Um we do a fair bit of them for them on a provincial level. But the goal really is how do you find a way to do something locally? Because proximity has an impact. If you bump into folks that are in your own ecosystem, you're much more likely to have those conversations and those collisions that happen. And this is why I think physical spaces or even events become that so important because you end up with these collisions that are on planned, serendipitous. Sometimes entrepreneurship is luck. Right? I remember it's been a while now, but I had a lady from Ukraine that showed up at a platform one day and said she just moved here, she was doing software testing, she was trying to find a way to get a job. And literally that night, at an event, launch party, bump into a CEO, we're having a conversation. What do you need? I need a software tester. I'm like, you don't. It's like, yeah, I need a software tester. So literally, like the next day, they go like this, right? Two weeks later seeing a job offer.

SPEAKER_00: 17:23

That's amazing. And you know, I one of my favorite podcasts, and I think it was one of the original podcasts, I don't remember how I built this uh with with Guy Raz. And at the end of every episode, he'd say, you know, um, were you you good or you lucky? Um and and I think you're you're spot on. A lot of that entrepreneurship, um, there is a degree of like serendipity or luck, or kind of of those random connections. And I think Calgary does an incredible job of that as well with the ecosystem itself.

SPEAKER_04: 17:49

Well, and I think that's one of the things that Brand and I do really well. I'm not saying the rest of us don't, especially the two bus. Um you come talk to us, and we've got so many connections and so many ecosystems that it's amazing how just one text, one email, one phone call like opens a door and it completely changes someone's trajectory.

SPEAKER_00: 18:08

Yeah, and and I don't I have the you know, I'm in Lethbridge a little less often than I'm at platform, but every time I'm at platform, I feel like you have a parade of coffees that you're I feel like you're the most well-caffeinated person in Calgary.

SPEAKER_04: 18:18

But so a good question. My coffee consumption starts at about 4 45 in the morning. I limit myself to one, so I will do other stuff other than coffee for the rest of the day, but you're right. Sometimes both of us have those days, and and I've learned this from Brandy is that you can't do our job like all day exactly the same. You would just get totally burned out. So um we both have Mondays pretty much set aside for planning, and we have pretty much Friday afternoon set aside, set aside for catch-up, which allows us in those three and a half days that are left, just go hard spending time with clients.

SPEAKER_00: 18:50

And so is that a lot of the the day-to-day then and kind of just making those connections? Because if you you know you mentioned 200 um organizations you're representing, you know, Craig, I I think you said you're around somewhere similar. Um, that that's 400 organizations between the two of you. I just even keeping in touch with them, I feel like would be a full-time job.

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

Yeah, it's a lot. And I mean everyone comes at different cycles, right? So the fun thing with Alberta Innovates is we have the carrot of funds. So most people will come for the capital. So we always joke like the extra secret sauce you get is the coaching in the community. And that's usually like from an education standpoint, right? We always ask kind of, hey, what was the best impact of your funding? And they always go, Oh my gosh, I didn't even know to look at these blind spots in my business. And so their their timing isn't always the same, I guess, to answer your question. So we we work with them kind of in tranches, and then it's just, I don't know if it's memory or what it is, but it's it's those pieces of as long as you stay up to date with us, if we have that recency or that proximity in our brain, then I'll know to think of you. And so I always just tell clients, anyone, if you've talked to investors or have relationships, even just sending a quarterly update of an email of just like, hey, we're still around. Here's what we've been doing, here's where we're struggling, here's an ask. And then when I'm in my meetings, I can be like, oh, that connects to this. Maybe it doesn't, but I'm gonna introduce you guys because magic might happen.

SPEAKER_04: 20:10

And so sometimes we do the same thing, although we might do it a little bit differently. So I don't know, probably a few times in the last couple of weeks where we've been doing something together, even if it's online, right? A name will come up in the conversation. So what ends up happening is you take a picture and you text that person and say, We're talking about you. That's just one of those ways. One of my favorite stories is there was a very senior venture capitalist who uh was doing adventures, and it was an after-hours thing, and I'm chatting with this lady and we're having this conversation. She brings up this person's name. I'm like, Oh, Sean, wow, I haven't talked to Sean for way too long. Let's just say hello. So, what did I do? Went like this, took a picture, sent it to Sean. Next thing I know, 30 seconds later, he's FaceTiming us from his helicopter while he's piloting, and I'm like, shouldn't you be paying attention? He's like, Oh, that's a new level of distracted driving. Like those things where you have those interactions and you maintain those relationships. Um, I have a super cool, we have a super cool connection in Toronto. Um, he sold his first company for$957 million US. Every time we go to Toronto, we spend some time. And every now and again say to him, I feel lucky that we do this as great. Like this is not luck. Like you're like you say, Oh, you guys train on this like all day, every day. This is something you do really well, right? There's no luck involved to make it happen.

SPEAKER_00: 21:32

So I have a question as well. So when like there's a lot of people that I that I talk to, and I would put myself even in that bucket sometimes, where they're always looking for that intentionality around some of the networking, right? So who like I'm going to this event, I want to meet X, or I want to um get a lead or get a new customer or get some connected to an investor, whatever it may be. Um how do you balance the kind of broad scale ecosystem development and having some Of those just general conversations and being generally curious with that intentionality of kind of how you're spending your time.

SPEAKER_01: 22:08

I think it's all for me, at least anyways, I won't speak for Craig, but it's based on goals, right? And so if you don't know, we sometimes use this Lewis Carroll, the guy that wrote Alice in Wonderland, right? If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. Right? So it's like if you know where you're going, you have to make those movements, and then it just helps you say yes or no to certain things. And when we talk burnout, I think that's where entrepreneurs go. I call it the ooh shiny syndrome. Yeah. Right. Because it's like, oh, I had this really cool conversation with this guy that makes guitars. And I'm like, okay, what does that have to do with your AI business that's helping with voice detection?

SPEAKER_00: 22:39

We might do some guitar stuff over here.

SPEAKER_01: 22:41

Exactly, right? Or whatever it is. And so it's just helping stay focused on the right things at the right time for the momentum and being open to those opportunities. So I like the word that, you know, curious is the biggest piece, right? Being open for those, but just being able to focus on that area of if it doesn't help in that direction of what you're doing, you can easily learn how to say no.

SPEAKER_04: 23:00

I think it's it's um I'm trying to remember who wrote the book, but there's this whole giver's game mentality, right? Which I completely agree with. So I think what's really important is that when you go to an ring event, you've always got the other person in mind. How do you find a way to help that person help that person? And then at some point what they're gonna do is they're gonna ask you, Great, you've been super helpful. How can I return the favor? And I remember once uh when I was down in Silicon Valley, it was actually a Texas Hold'em poker tournament held by Tim Draper, one of the most famous adventure capists on the planet. Uh and William's like, Great, what do you do? And I told him my story and how I ended up in California. He's like, Wow, that's an awesome story. How can I help? And what I pulled out of my back pocket was, I want to meet this person named Guy Kawasaki. He says, Guess what? Guy's a friend of mine. So here, I'm gonna text him, here's his number, I'm gonna tell him he needs to give you 30 minutes of his time. And I got 30 minutes with Guy Kawasaki. So I think part of the secret is if you're you're still being intentional, but you need to find a way to give and then wait for someone else to give you the chance to say, hey, would love to do this, and then you need to always have something in the back pocket. Who's that guy? Who's that gal you want to get introduced to? Because maybe, just maybe Keith just happens to know whoever, you're like, Oh, I know that person. Let's text them now, right? Let's take a picture and tell them we're talking about them.

SPEAKER_00: 24:17

So are people afraid to make that ask then? Like, is it like because I feel like there's there's knowing the ask, then there's making the ask, and being also prepared so in that moment you're not being like, let me come back to you in 15 minutes. Because I feel like if you say, Okay, well, next time I see you, I'll tell you what I want, it probably doesn't have the same impact.

SPEAKER_04: 24:34

Yeah, and likely that actually ever happens. So this is one of the things that we talk about. We talk about something called Ohio.

SPEAKER_01: 24:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 24:42

When we talk about Ohio?

SPEAKER_01: 24:43

Sure. So it's only handle it once. So if you can essentially realize if you can do it in 10 minutes or less, do it right then and there, because otherwise you're gonna forget about it. And I think when it comes to relationships and connections, that it's that transactional velocity, right? Of being able to do those things quickly. And I really like Craig's example. We see this happen all the time in pitches when you do pitch training, and people will ask for mentors at the end or hey, I want a connection to an investor. And we're like, what kind of investor? Right? Like, be specific. Because if you come with this general, oh, I want help with it investment, and you don't know me, what are you gonna do? You're like, oh, I don't know what you need, and you don't want to put in the effort to think about it. So it's just putting yourself in the other person's shoes a little bit to be how can I make it as easy as possible for someone to help me.

SPEAKER_00: 25:27

I I love that you said that because I feel like sometimes with those broad asks, you're almost outsourcing the thinking.

SPEAKER_01: 25:32

Totally.

SPEAKER_00: 25:32

Um you're saying, okay, I I'm not quite sure what I want, but maybe hopefully you'll know. And maybe you can connect those dots for me.

SPEAKER_01: 25:40

And it's like Jesus take the wheel, and I'm not that kind of person, right?

SPEAKER_00: 25:43

Like just cross just cross my fingers and yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:46

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 25:47

It's true, because I think what we're trying when you're asking for help, you're trying to let the other person connect some dots. So generically, someone goes, I'm looking for a mentor, great. In what space? Well, looking for someone in the not-for-profit sector. Okay, great. Can you give me some examples of companies they might have worked for? Yeah, I'm looking for someone who was a VP for someone like Big Brothers, YMCA, or Red Cross. And I can easily go, oh, hang on a second. Red Cross, VP, you should talk to Steven. But if you don't give us those specifics, it's harder for us to connect those dots.

SPEAKER_00: 26:15

The amount of requests you're now going to get for connections to Steven is going to be uncanny. It's just your inbox is going to flood. The good or bad news right now is he no longer works for the Red Cross. Um and so I I feel like you're you're both a wealth of knowledge in this space. So you you you have this group of um startups that you're mentoring. Are are there common problems? Like it seems like there's some like maybe around the sales or some of the connection, but like what are some of the challenges you're seeing that are universal amongst these cohorts of people that you're mentoring?

SPEAKER_04: 26:43

Well, how long do we have to do that?

SPEAKER_00: 26:45

Um we have we can keep going for as long as you want. There's all the reasons not to become an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01: 26:51

Um I think so kind of the last two and a half years, Craig and I have been on a journey to make something called attraction canvas. And the whole reason why this came about is we notice that people get stuck. And I'll let you maybe pull out some of these things, right? But we have all these tools and all these pieces, and then people get comfortable in the spot they're in, and then they can't get into the next set of gears for whatever reason. And so we've tried to help create this process so that people can go, okay, how do I get enough evidence so that I can move forward? And it's it's just that putting that foot in front of yourself, which I find most entrepreneurs get stuck in. And sometimes I like to use the analogy of like pinball. So if you're playing with pinball and you have three balls in the air, you might really like, we'll say technology is one, and maybe you're a technical founder. So you're really focused on that pinball, and you're gonna let the other two balls drop. You're gonna lose the game. You have to stay focused on all three, right? You have to stay focused on you, you have to stay focused on your tech, and you have to stay focused on the market. And so it's just helping teach people to zoom out a little bit and stay focused on all three things, not just pigeonholing into the stuff that we like to do.

SPEAKER_04: 27:55

It's true, and I think part of this process is there's something the founder has to do all on their own. And the problem with the founders is they either like to hang on to it too long or get rid of it too early. So being very specific around and intentional around when do you find a way to let go. And I think a lot of founders especially have this fear of trying to sell something. So that's why we have a process we use called enrolling, which allows you to pick up the phone, talk to almost anybody, and you just say, Hey Keith, my name is I'm working on this problem for these people. Would you be willing to give me 20 minutes just to share your perspective on whether or not I'm going in the right direction? And it's sometimes it's like a light goes on. I've got a client who um taught this to a junior salesperson within a week had 11 customers like this. Um we've got another guy named Chris who we taught this to, and he does this now, and he gets a 70% success ratio. So sometimes it's just little things because it's a combination of not just competence, but it's also confidence. And if you don't have the confidence, sometimes that holds you back. Um makes me think of um Sheena. Her book was um how to overcome the confidence gap. And she says courage comes before confidence. So you have to have the courage to reach out to people, then you become confident doing it.

SPEAKER_00: 29:08

And and I think that there's a whole bunch of research that that started to talk about that idea, which is where do people get confidence from and it's from doing. 100%. And and it's it's a really there's some really interesting studies around it that talk about you almost like that uh adage of fake it till you make it is actually super true.

SPEAKER_01: 29:27

I say that a lot to my female founders because the the research in in the gender space is that if if we're looking corporate, right? So in promotions, men will apply for jobs if they're 60% sure that they'll get it, women wait till they're 80% sure.

SPEAKER_00: 29:41

And I I had the exact same conversation with my wife the other day and about that exact same change where you know I'm I'm pretty sure I can do it. Um I'll click apply and I will just cross my fingers and I'll figure it out. Whereas whereas I think she's of the you know mentality, it's like I want to master the skills, I want to make sure I kind of have everything figured out and I want to know that I can do it exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 30:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 30:00

And there there is that that difference there.

SPEAKER_01: 30:02

And so it's just learning how to learn different, if you will, right? And so I think the biggest thing, if we go back to the interview piece, people always go, well, how do I find 27 people? And I go, You don't need to find 27 people, you need to find one person. Like, well, what am I supposed to do? You ask one question at the end.

SPEAKER_00: 30:16

I love it. I'm just gonna start small. Yeah. And then that one person might know another person. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 30:21

So it's just asking them. And so when I did this for my own startup when I was doing my masters, um, we were interviewing people in healthcare because we were looking at uh solving problems with homeless youth. It was during COVID, so good luck finding any of them. And I always asked for three contacts at the end. And I always got at least three. And I had them text or email right then and there because people forget. So I taught people Ohio on those calls for me, right? And then you just carry that momentum forward and keep it going, and it's pretty impressive how quick it can grow.

SPEAKER_04: 30:52

Well, and I think that and so my my last question is different for Brandy's, not saying it's any better or worse, but my one last question is where do I find more people just like you? Because I want to figure out where else I can go. So we were having a conversation a while ago with someone who makes some special equipment to help hockey gear drive faster. And we help them go through this very special process called bifurcation that helps them identify who's their ideal customer, which in this case was moms with teenagers to play hockey three times a week or more. And the question then becomes where do you find moms just like that? And we go, they go to the hockey venus, right? They go to all the games. Well, they don't. They're called hockey dads and soccer moms for a reason. But in that conversation, what we learned, because we've had that conversation multiple times, sometimes moms go, Yeah, but I go to all the tournaments. And when you can figure out where your customers are, that's half of the battle to say, how do you find a way to get more?

SPEAKER_00: 31:42

Interesting. Well, I'm not a hockey mom, but I also play hockey a couple times a week and have the same issue, so I might ask ask you for some info on that afterwards. Um I I want to go back to the traction canvas a tiny bit because I feel like it's a really interesting concept. And so if I'm looking or working with both of you on the traction canvas, like how do I start to kind of work through that? Is it um how do I consume that information? Um, how do I get started with using that framework and that model um for my business?

SPEAKER_01: 32:10

Putting up both in the spot. Yeah. Yeah. So to look at the resource, the best way to go would be to go to helpastartubout.com because we have a recording of it. So you can kind of work through it. I would say we we use the term slingshot, which is this notion of it doesn't kind of really matter where you are along the process of starting your business to scaling it. You can't skip steps. And entrepreneurs love to try to skip steps, right? So we use this term slingshot because it's like painful to pull the rubber back sometimes to go back to square one. And you have to start at square one before you can do square eight. So if you start at square eight, you're gonna get it wrong. And so we make them go backwards to force out that process of creativity and innovation at the start so that they can then slingshot ahead and move faster. And that's really what that canvas is all about.

SPEAKER_04: 32:56

Yeah, you've really got to get a sense of what's the problem you're solving, who's got it, how are people solving that problem today, and then how do you find a way to validate those assumptions? Because you create these assumptions, and we hear entrepreneurs say all the time, I know, I know, I know, or and you're like, Well, you don't know, you believe, so how do you go away and validate those assumptions? And this then becomes part of that whole process of enrolling as you get to go away. And what happens in this process when you talk to total strangers about their perspective on your idea, sometimes what happens is they start to layer stuff on top of your idea and like, hang on a second, this idea is really great. You should go talk to Guy Kawasaki. That's also part because now you're getting interested guy by somebody who knows them and their barrier goes down, and all of a sudden you're way more successful.

SPEAKER_00: 33:42

I love it. Okay, so I feel like there's there's infinity lessons within here. Um in terms of how do I say this? Like I th I think that in terms of what you're saying, like even when you first showed it to me, um it's crazy how accurate it is in terms of those stages. And so I I remember we were having coffee at a platform, and you I think it was even before your first webinar, and you were kind of showing some of the initial workings, and and it was uh I felt kind of personally seen because I was like, ugh, I can see I'm I'm exactly right here. And um I haven't done these steps already yet. And then as I go to friend friendly writing down notes over here, I was like okay, well, I have to do this and this and this. Um are you getting that same reaction as you're starting to unveil it and show it um to people and kind of get that same market testing yourselves?

SPEAKER_01: 34:27

Yeah, I don't know. We haven't done it too much one-on-ones, hey. A lot of it's been the one-to-many things where we go through the teachings, but it has been really cool to see people submit their canvases that are filled out to us to find out where the gaps are. And it's always, I find, at the early stage side, right? Because we tend to validate through the lens of our solution.

SPEAKER_03: 34:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:47

And that's why I think enrolling is a really brilliant strategy, because you're learning.

unknown: 34:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:51

And that's the target. And you're going to get those introductions to those people to help you figure out where that goes. And we did that with attraction canvas even, and that's why it is the way it is, because we asked people for advice. Like, well, people are going to miss that. They're not going to understand. And we even had, so it's kind of in three stages. And we used to have a hard stop where it was like, if you didn't have 10 customers, you cannot move forward. And then a whole bunch of people were like, well, 10's an arbitrary number.

SPEAKER_00: 35:14

What if I have one really big customer?

SPEAKER_01: 35:16

Exactly, right? And so it's just, it comes in as a tool to help with conversations for direction mostly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 35:22

It's been super interesting because in our own process up enrolling, going to all these angel investors, VCs, like all these different groups, um, a couple of things happen. A, they would go, hang on a second, you need to come do this for my group. So we had one venture capitalist who said, I'm going to bring my entire portfolio together, you need to come spend 90 minutes with that portfolio. So that you know, that's an example of what happened. We've had a couple of folks come to us because initially we were thinking it's designed for first-time founders, launching their first product. Well, it turns out whether you're going into a new market, launching a new product, there's all kinds of ways that people now have taken this concept and said, hey, I can use it over here because I'm a large accounting firm, provides a bunch of services. I'm going to open up an AI group. You need to come talk to my folks in the IA space because IA space. Because they need to go back again, go back to slingshotting and go, let's go back to the problem. Who's got it? How do they solve it? And making it simple, and I think the one thing we did a really good job of, and we spent a lot of time. If you could see all the iterations we went through during this time frame, it's I I think it's a great story to tell. We should actually do a video just about that one day.

SPEAKER_00: 36:29

So on the journey for yourself.

SPEAKER_04: 36:30

That journey and I had a point of the story. What was the point I was going to make? What was I talking about? We're talking about the canvas, the sling the slingshot, the iterations, VCs. Good question. Now I'm being an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01: 36:44

Okay, well, I'll fill in the gap while he's figuring it out. I think the biggest piece for me at the beginning is we teach people not to do things at scale. And that for our tech founders at the beginning, that's all they're talking about is I want to scale, I want to scale, I want to scale. And we go, no, your job is not to scale. We've, you know, I think we talked a lot about networking at the beginning. It's about relationships and it's about people. And so what I like about the traction canvas is it makes you go back to that part of the business.

SPEAKER_04: 37:10

Well, and I can say the point I was gonna try and make was perfect. Linear, like it's very it's very here's the starting point, here's the ending point. Instead of going back and doing all these circles, that was a large part of the process is how do you just let someone feel like they're making progress and goes to the next step.

SPEAKER_00: 37:26

Well, but but and I I love what I love what you're saying, and I also love that idea of kind of trying to avoid the scale at the beginning, because I can tell you 100% that I made the exact same mistake in our business. And so I I came from a world where um you know the the last businesses we'd that I was with, we s we scaled quite significantly. And so I was operating from a point of you know um you know tens of millions of dollars and um hundreds of people, and like there was a lot of pieces to play with. And then coming to, you know, essentially me and my MacBook and my home office to start off with, and as we started bringing on our first people, I was so focused on okay, well, how does this operate at 10, 20, 100 people? And and we just we created way too much infrastructure for the the three-person company we were at at the time. And we almost had to go and undo some of that structure in order for us to actually um move forward.

SPEAKER_01: 38:18

Totally. Yeah, we teach a board game called Playing Lean that teaches that process a little bit, right? Because the one advantage you have as a startup, as a value prop is you can move faster than your big companies because you don't have the bureaucracy. So if you build the bureaucracy from the beginning, now you've lost that key advantage.

SPEAKER_00: 38:33

Totally. Um I feel like we're we're starting to like, I feel like we could talk for 400 hours. Um there was a first on the show today, so Craig, as you walked in, you actually added to the bookshelf versus took something away here. Um not that anyone's ever taken anything from the bookshelf. But we don't have a we don't have a theft problem. But um what what did you uh what did you bring here?

SPEAKER_04: 38:55

Yeah, so one of the things Brand and I've been doing now for almost four years is every month it's called Founder Fridays. You go to founderfridays.ca, and every month we do this. We on the first Friday of the month, we interview an author of a book we think is relevant to the journey of innovation, entrepreneurship, ecosystem building, all of that stuff. We then interview the author on a Zoom call that's free for anybody to join. And then what we do at the 45-minute mark is we give away a link. And if you give us your mailing address, and if you live in Canada, we'll actually ship a free copy of the book anywhere across the country. So uh Shannon is number 38. She is on Friday next week. It's free to join. You go to founderfridays.ca. You can also see all the recordings, almost all the recordings of all the people that we've done in the last three years in chain. So when you first get there, you can see all the book covers, and you can go, hang on a second. Mike McAllowitz? Like, I want to listen to Mike McAllowitz, or I want to go listen to Renee Malbourne, or I want to go listen to who is the lady that did the one about screwing up?

SPEAKER_01: 39:56

Kristen Hadeed.

SPEAKER_04: 39:58

Kristen Hadid. And sometimes it's Brandy and I, and sometimes it's different people that we bring in to interview. I remember when it was Kristen's turn, I'm reading the book, and I'm going, I can't do this interview.

SPEAKER_01: 40:10

This, by the way, was the first time Craig took a book suggestion from me.

SPEAKER_04: 40:15

No, this is not forever. So I'm like, I'm I'm like, I'm so captured to this book, I can't do this interview. I'll cry. So Brandy and a couple others did this piece. I had two minutes at the end.

SPEAKER_02: 40:26

Huh.

SPEAKER_04: 40:27

So all I had to make. I did not make it through my two minutes before I was a total tearjerker. So sometimes you get to hear from me, sometimes you get to hear from Brandy. We do most of them together. Sometimes on occasion we'll bring in somebody else.

SPEAKER_00: 40:39

That's amazing. Well, I'm gonna sign up 100%. I I think it sounds great, and I'll make sure to put in the show notes a link to it as well. Um, anything special about this book specifically, or is this I'm sure there's lots special about it. That's a good question.

SPEAKER_04: 40:51

Um, so I think we both had different ties to the book. I don't know how much you've had a chance to read yet. This is actually your copy. Perfect, right? Um, I've read the introduction, and and here's the thing there are folks called catalysts, and we consider ourselves very much like this. And and we just go faster than a lot of other people. We see opportunities, we do things, we take some risks. Sometimes the hard part is if you do that on your own, you burn out. So part of this is also helping people realize there's a whole community because I wouldn't be able to do what I do if we weren't being able to do this together. I would just it wouldn't work.

SPEAKER_01: 41:23

Yeah, and I always say, like, so when I started at student entrepreneurship, I had probably my first entrepreneur that was super gung-ho, and I remember he came into my office one day and he hadn't showered for a little bit, and you were like, oh, you know, like just the student final time. And then two weeks later I got a call from anyways in the psych ward. We said, Brandon, I had a mental breakdown. I burnt out.

SPEAKER_02: 41:44

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 41:44

I don't know what to do about my business, I don't know what to do about school. So this was a big reason why I have this book for entrepreneurs when they're starting, because you can wind up in this silo. And I think in business, sometimes we forget to be honest and share about what's happening in our lives. And as an entrepreneur, it's not just your job, right? It bleeds into so many aspects of your life, and you have a spouse or a partner and your family or your friends that help lift you, and we forget. And there's something, you know, entrepreneurship is the loneliest business or journey you're ever gonna have, but there's millions of entrepreneurs and people around going through the same thing as you, and we just forget to reach out and share and ask. So that's kind of why we were bringing this book in from my perspective, is having some of those brutal conversations that we sometimes gloss over.

SPEAKER_04: 42:25

The cool thing is because of this loneliness problem, one of the things that Brand and I do at the beginning of every one of these is the first thing we do is we get people to take their LinkedIn profile, put it into the chat, and then depending upon the topic, we'll have them pick different things. Remember, we interviewed um who was Costa Rica? I was on a beach in Costa Rica, I think it was Tony Ulrich. And then all of a sudden we started finding it's like, where are you gonna go for your next vacation? All of a sudden people found these things they had in common and they're not connecting with people, and this is also part of that journey of being an entrepreneur and why we like to do stuff like this. Because sometimes you'll get two, three hundred people on a call and they're from all over the planet. Now you're building a network outside of just Calgary, Alberta, Canada, North America, whatever. And one of the reasons that becomes important is the data actually says you're 350% more likely to become successful as an entrepreneur if you start building your network outside of where you actually live.

SPEAKER_00: 43:20

Interesting. And and I think that that's uh so just globally and everywhere the world and see where the world takes you.

SPEAKER_04: 43:28

Sometimes people come from a different perspective, and this is why we do some of the stuff we do, is when we talk to ecosystems and incubators and accelerators and post-secondaries scattered all over the planet, they think differently. We get to learn the way that they do things, and we then get to bring that back in the province. While at the same time, we're bragging about how good things are in Alberta.

SPEAKER_00: 43:47

Yeah, and and I think Alberta's an incredible and it's very special place, but I agree that the world is also a very big place and and perspective is king.

SPEAKER_01: 43:55

Um Absolutely, yeah. And there were some stats I was reading, I don't know the specific number, but most Alberta. Albertan businesses don't make it to export out of the province. So when we talk about growing your network outside, it helps you understand well, what are the market dynamics over there? Is there maybe a partner or distributor that now you have a warm introduction to so that you can start to grow your business and have some of those cool partnerships?

SPEAKER_00: 44:16

I I love it. I feel like our conversation went by in uh like a blink of an eye here. Is there any last things that you know that you would like to leave with our listeners, um with you know, even people that be listening around entrepreneurship, around the journey, around um words of wisdom that both of you have as they're they're kind of getting started on their journey and as they're building their businesses?

SPEAKER_01: 44:41

Yeah, I think for me, I'll basterized usually what I say is I'll try anything twice because the first time always sucks, right? And so just remembering that it's that resilience piece. Everyone's falling on their face, we've all made mistakes. The fun thing is when you're starting a business, nobody's paying attention to you when you get started. So it's a really good time to make those mistakes so that when you become big, now you've learned.

SPEAKER_04: 45:02

I think one of the things that Brandon and I try to do as soon as possible is we try to get to entrepreneurs as early in the journey as you know we can find a way to make happen. Because what happens is this thing called sunk cost mentality. You put some effort into something and you're less inclined to let it go. You figure, okay, it's like if you have a car and you put new tires on a car and all of a sudden something else goes wrong. Well, I just spent$1,300 on tires, I'm gonna go do this. So if there was one piece of advice that I would have for every entrepreneur that's getting started or wants to be an entrepreneur, we have a session we do called Will My Idea Fly? And I think it's the must-do thing for anybody who's thinking about uh being an entrepreneur. So go to help uh start about, go into the resources section. That I think is if you're an early stage entrepreneur, it's the best piece of advice you can get.

SPEAKER_00: 45:52

Amazing. If people wanted to connect with you, if they wanted to meet you, if they wanted to learn more about you, if they wanted to add to your daily coffee consumption, um what's the best way to do that?

SPEAKER_01: 46:03

Well, we're a little different. So, me, it's email or text. And for Craig, it's on LinkedIn. Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_04: 46:10

Randy's been on LinkedIn since she's 17 years old. I got on on day eight. So we have this massive network. So LinkedIn for me is always the best place to start if you're a total stranger. And then one of the pieces of advice that I would give to lots of folks is if you ever email either one of us, make sure your cell phone number is on the bottom. Sometimes we don't have time to reply, but we'll call or text and start that conversation in a different way. So yeah, LinkedIn for me is first, but once we're connected on LinkedIn, I'm gonna want to move to text as fast as possible.

SPEAKER_01: 46:40

Absolutely. Yeah, how many unread emails do you have?

SPEAKER_04: 46:43

Uh I finally got checked this morning. I have 280,000 unread emails in my inbox.

SPEAKER_02: 46:47

That's it, eh? That's it.

SPEAKER_01: 46:49

Well, that's the thing I think a lot of first-hand founders, right? They're just like, oh, they didn't answer my email. And you're like, yeah, because there's 280 other thousand emails that have been unanswered. So it's just they're busy. It's not that they're ignoring you, right?

SPEAKER_00: 47:00

Yeah, no, it's I think follow-up is key sometimes.

SPEAKER_04: 47:02

Totally. Like even for us, um, we have one lady, uh, Heather, who, and even for multiple authors, we'll email them once or reach out on LinkedIn once, nothing happens. The nanoseconds you do a follow-up, they're like, oh yeah, I didn't get back to you. We're off to the races. Um, I laughed because Heather was this one that we tried that with. She's like, hang on a second. Are you guys a bunch of scammers or spammers? Like, this seems like way too good to be true. So, what do we do? We reached out to someone we had in common and said, Hey, Joanne, can you just tell Heather that we're real? The nanosecond she says we're real. She's done multiple things for us then, but when we first got started, yeah. Um, so I forget Heather's last name. Kernahan. Uh Kernahan and the book. Uh Unstuckable. Unstuckable. There is a chapter in there. Uh somewhere around like the last 20 minutes, she talks about 10 things you can do to think big and act big. They would be the other things. Once you've done our with an idea fly, I think there's some real gold nuggets in that recording.

SPEAKER_00: 48:01

I feel like I have some homework coming out of this episode myself. And so I I'm I'm super grateful for both you take coming on the show today. This has been a phenomenal conversation. Um, I'll make sure to put a lot of the things we've talked about in the show notes too, just so people can find too.

SPEAKER_01: 48:14

We'll send the links for you too, so you don't have to fish.

SPEAKER_00: 48:16

Oh, thank you so much. And um, I I feel like we have a follow-up conversation at some point in our future. This has been amazing. Um, and thank you so much for the chat today.

SPEAKER_04: 48:24

Can I just do one last thing? Of course. I think, yeah. I'm nervous. This is the thing about being an entrepreneur. We have to do this on a regular basis. And so we try this at the end. It's like um when we do at the end of our sessions, we get to say, okay, we want everybody in the room or that's on the call, we want you all to raise your right hand. So, Keith, do me a favor. Raise your right hand.

SPEAKER_00: 48:42

I almost got it wrong there. Raise your right hand.

SPEAKER_04: 48:45

And then here's the thing you have to do. You have to bend your elbow and you pat yourself on the back. Oh, okay. Because as entrepreneurs, you're doing all these things, and when you look forward, all you see is all the things yet to get done. And what you don't do often enough is you don't stop, you don't turn backwards, you don't look at all the things you've done, and pat yourself on the back because you're part way through that journey. And this is what I think a lot of entrepreneurs can learn to do a better job of.

SPEAKER_00: 49:08

I love it. I feel like that's a phenomenal way to end, and now my shoulder is out of place. But um thank you so much, and I look forward to having you both on again.

SPEAKER_02: 49:17

Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_00: 49:18

Thanks. If you've made it this far, like and subscribe on YouTube, or follow and leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform so you don't miss any future episodes.