The Kid Who Made & Sold Stuff
When I was still in junior school, I was often selling stuff. I would make jewellery and then sell it at a stand in the local shopping centre. They used to have special days where kids could set up a market and sell things, I think that’s pretty cool.
I was also a nerd, and played a fair bit of MtG. I found out that I could order boxes of boxes directly from a supplier for a fraction of the cost. I’d then sell them off at just below retail and cover my cost. The remaining cards I kept for myself, Free cards baby!
Another thing I did, thanks to a lot of help from my mom, was sell baked pies in high school. I’d set up a table near the school cafeteria and just before lunch, my mom would drive up and drop of a few dozen pies. I’d sit there and sell them to the other kids. They win because the food in the cafeteria was crap, I win because I got good at maths and made some money. And I like to tell myself my mom won because she enjoyed supporting me being entrepreneurial. :)
Scooping, pouring, and scanning
After we moved to Canada, my first job off the bat was at Baskin Robbins. It didn’t pay much, but it was a sweet gig (see what I did there)?
At that time, my dad owned a little coffee shop and I’d help out there from time to time.
The coffee shop was, well, let’s just say it wasn’t my dad’s favourite adventure. He sold that and bought a Fitness Center. After high school in Vancouver, I moved to Victoria for my undergrad. When I was home over the first summer, I helped out at reception at the gym, smiling, waving, sweeping, and scanning membership cards.
Painting things
In my second year at Uni, I became a College Pro Painters franchisee. That meant I had the rights to a particular set of area codes within Victoria to whom I could market and provide exterior painting services (a first year franchisee is only allowed to do exteriors).
Aside from learning how to prepare and paint houses, I have to say that CPP had an amazing training and mentoring program for your entrepreneurs.
We learned everything from setting up the business - Business registration, Insurance, banking and how to get a bank loan, how to interview, hire and do payroll, how to do finances, prepare work schedules, budgeting, and on and on.
We also learned how to market, back in those days it was traditional. We would go to high schools and university classes to get kids to come with us, walk around a neighbourhood knocking on every door and giving our pitch, leaving a flyer, and these kids would get paid per name they go. That was lead generation.
Then sales - how to follow up the lead, what to say, getting the appointment, how to price the job, how to ensure the decision makers were in the room, asking for decision criteria, confirming they were happy, and asking for the sale. they didn’t mess around.
I did this for two years and learned so much. It was hard work, but so much fun and I earned a ton of cash doing it.
Websites in 2004
As part of our Entrepreneurship specialization at UVic, we had to get into groups and come up with a business idea that we could start and execute on in just a few weeks. There were prizes for most revenue, most profit, most sustainable, best team work etc. Nothing unexpected.
I got lucky and was in a team with a buddy who was into tech which was a thing back then. He told us about something called Drupal that would make it easy for us to create websites. He seemed to know what he was doing so the rest of us were “sales”.
We went around knocking on doors trying to convince local businesses that they needed a website. Back then not only was making a website difficult, but nobody even knew they wanted one.
Anyway, it didn’t matter in the end. We found one customer and that’s all we needed. We sold them on making them what we would now call a landing page for $1,000 and boom, won the competition on almost all counts. I think the profs had to give one of the other teams the teamwork prize because, well, we couldn’t have it all could we.
Finding a Job
At UVic Business we did a lot of networking events, which today are just called events I guess. It was a dinner thing and we got placed at 8 or 10 seater tables with a mix of other students and “business leaders”. I met a guy we'll call Jack who was only a Cpl years older than me, super friendly and seemed to be killing it in real estate development for a big firm I’d never heard of. We’ll come back to Jack in a bit.
So after I graduate I’m on the market for a job. I wanted to work in real estate so I did the usual thing and sent my resume to every real estate developer in Vancouver. One place called Trilogy was nice enough to call to tell me no dice.
About a week later I get a call from the same company asking me to come in for an interview. I was confused, but not about to tell them they already shut me down. So in I went and got the job. Sweet.
It was almost a year later that I find out my boss, John Evans (brilliant guy), didn’t even know I was the same guy he had already turned down. He got my contact info from his son who got my name from his employee , my dinner buddy, Jack! I think I still owe him a beer.
From Vancouver to Montreal
I got hired at the same time as another guy. And we were told in no uncertain terms that there was actually only one position available, so let the best man win. That set the tone.
At Trilogy I was a “Development Assistant”. This essentially meant a lot of research (looking for potential land deals, getting info for the managers about their current development from the titles office or the architect, or the city), a lot of excel (crunching numbers on development deals, running proformas etc), and Powerpoint and pitch decks (presentations to the city, zoning committees, and importantly, potential LPs in the deals).
John Evans, the founder and CEO and my boss is a no BS kinda guy. He knows he’s great at what he does and he gets shit done. My favourite example of this is The Opus Hotel in Vancouver. Originally, the plan was to build a condo hotel. That means you build a hotel, but title is split up per unit and each unit is sold to individual owners. A management company runs the hotel, and the owners share in the profits of the operation. Anyway, they couldn't get sufficient pre-sale buyer interest in a hotel project to make the deal happen, so John effectively said “fuck it, then I’ll keep the hotel myself”. And he did, got the financing, built the hotel, it became the best boutique hotel in the city for many years running.
Fast forward a few years and I’m there. John and his business partner Tom (if John was the visionary sales guy, then Tom was the financial mastermind behind the scenes) bought a struggling hotel in Montreal with the plan to turn it into another Opus on the other side of the country.
I had already been helping the development manager out on the Montreal project with some of the renovation plans, specifically the construction of a massive supper club in an unfinished wing of the building. We were doing this all from Vancouver. I was apparently doing a decent job because John and Tom invite me to brunch one Saturday morning. That was a big deal for me as the junior guy in the company. We start chatting and John says, “progress on Montreal is moving to slowly, we need feet on the ground to represent us properly. We’d like you to go to montreal for the next few months to build the restaurant. When can you move?”
I say, “wow, that’s amazing, thank you! My mom’s birthday is this week, it’s important I be here for that, I’d be happy to leave the next day”. in classic John fashion, he says “we’ve already booked your flight, you’re on the redeye tonight. We’ll fly you back for your mom’s birthday”. And that was that.