Huayna Picchu / Peru / August 06 2008

It might seem like a giant thigh-burning lunge from teaching classes in the comfort of a slick modern Edmonton yoga studio to leading clients up to Machu Picchu, the famed “Lost City of the Incas,” for a few early morning sun salutations. But Cole Williston was ready to feel the burn of starting his own adventure travel company. Through Plan It Adventure, Williston guides adventure-seeking yoga enthusiasts on 12- and 22-day trips through Peru. Daily activities can involve trekking through the Amazon rainforest, cavorting with primates in the nature reserve of Monkey Island, mountain biking in the Andean highlands, hiking through the dry-stone walls of Machu Picchu or building a playground for a remote rainforest community. Williston took a break between downward dogs and business plans to talk about giving eco-awareness a hit of adrenalin, helping out the communities he travels to and leaving the planet “more loved than when he found it.”

Making Something Bigger Than Yoga
It was the breathing with movement that made a lot of sense to me. And I was hungry for spirituality. Having been to only a few yoga classes, I knew I needed to learn more. In 2001, I took a three-month training and certification course at the Chakra Yoga Center in Koh Phangan on a beach island in southeast Thailand.

After I got back to Edmonton I taught for a year at Lion’s Breath yoga studio, which a friend Breanna Johnson helped open. Later, Breanna opened her own studio, Shanti Yoga Studio. So I began teaching there, among other places. It took some time to build up my confidence before I was able to move forward on any big ideas but there were elements that started to come together for me: a passion for travel, yoga and community service. I wanted something that I could make bigger than just myself.

Letting the Good Times Roll
Having taught yoga for five years, I convinced myself that I should go to school, so I took out a loan for a massage therapy program. Four months into it, I realized that I wasn’t excited. Plan It Adventure was the next step. I dropped out of the massage program, planned an itinerary and took the rest of the money to travel to Peru. I financed a second trip by teaching 25 classes a week for a couple of months. Frankly, I didn’t have a lot of money left over for advertising, but I knew that I could use my yoga contacts to spread the word.

There have already been so many highlights. For instance, while we were acclimatizing in Cusco – which is 3,300 metres above sea level – we went hiking, mountain biking and whitewater rafting, which also gave us some cardio training. We hiked up Machu Picchu at 3:30 a.m. to beat the lineups and then continued up the nose of the mountain to watch the sunrise. We were the first of maybe 200 other hikers, and we got an amazing view of the Inca ruins and the valley. Near the Peruvian border with Ecuador, we went dune buggying, surfing and to the mud flats. Then we stayed at a really cool yoga bungalow.

One of Michael Sikorsky’s first business ventures, when he was seven years old, was what he calls Desk Sales. “I would open up the drawer where I put all my top possessions and auction them off to my brother and sister. I would bundle items or hold back items till the next desk sale. I loved it.”

Flash forward to 2009. Sikorsky has started six businesses, made two exits and was forced out of a company he founded. He is an angel investor, software programmer and self-professed hair product enthusiast. And he’s done all of this with a computer engineering degree from the University of Alberta and the help of books. Thousands and thousands of books. Based in Calgary, Sikorsky has created what you might call his own personal MBA-style reading list and, in the open-source tradition he comes from, posted it on Google Books for everyone to see.

Sikorsky’s list offers a peek inside the mind of a successful young entrepreneur. Unlimited talked with him about how he got started, which books have influenced him most and why he doesn’t read in the bathroom anymore.

Were you an obsessive reader as a child?
No, it didn’t really hit me till around 12. Until then, I think I had read – by volition – a few Encyclopedia Brown books. I got passionate about reading when I realized how it helped me do stuff, like learning how to program computers.

You’re not just a serial reader, but also a serial entrepreneur.
The first real company I started, when I was 26, was Servidium, which ThoughtWorks bought when I was 28. After selling Servidium, I entered what I like to call my post-exit depression. You’re supposed to be happy, so, you feign it, but on the inside I felt like my “meaning bubble” had just been popped.

Why did you post your reading lists on Google?
I love what Google is doing for books. And I knew that putting my books online would help other entrepreneurs. Most people guard their book lists or forget what books helped them grow. Being able to search the books I’ve read for quotes, for instance, is really powerful. When I search my books list for the word “enzyme,” I find one of my favourite quotes, by Gérard Bricogne: “Mankind is a catalyzing enzyme for the transition from a carbon-based to a silicon-based intelligence.” [This appears as an epigraph in Mark Buchanan’s book Nexus.]

Would you have learned as much only from school?
Reading is how I learned pretty much everything I know, so if you said I could only have one of the two, I would pick reading. But I loved university. Reading plus school plus doing is the secret combination. And doing is at least 50 per cent of the equation. Doing gives context to everything you read in a book.

What do you read in the bathroom?
I used to read in the bathroom. Now my 18-month-old twin daughters always want to come in there with me. Basically, we floss and do makeup.

If you were to write a business book, what would it be called?
Opposite George: The George Costanza Guide to Business. The premise is, basically, to do things opposite to what people expect. Why start a company when you’re 40? Start one when you’re 20. U

This article was originally published in June of 2008

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
_Dr. Seuss

As far as I know, Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) never visited Alberta. Yet one of his most popular books has proven to be an astoundingly prophetic parable about the nature of 21st century Alberta: the tremendous wealth we have created, the grave environmental problems that have accompanied it, and the seed of a possibility for another kind of future, one in which economic health does not come at the expense of a healthy natural environment.

First published in 1971, the year Peter Lougheed led the Alberta Tories into power for the first time, The Lorax illustrates the unintended consequences of unfettered (if well-intentioned) capitalism. Lougheed may seem, from the vantage point of 2008, a thoughtful and compassionate Conservative with a strong environmental ethic. But the party he brought to power has embraced a Milton Friedmanesque philosophy that, despite all the government’s crooning to the contrary, has promoted economic, largely industrial development at the expense of Alberta’s environment. Only a Thank You For Smoking-calibre PR genius could argue otherwise.

As in Geisel’s Lorax, as insightful a social commentary as any episode of South Park or The Simpsons, the direct and indirect impacts of industrial activity aimed at providing “things that everybody needs” are devastating our forests, poisoning and depleting our water resources, transforming our climate, and hastening the disappearance of numerous species from our mountains, forests and prairie. To be sure, these activities provide jobs and generate wealth, but the environmental and social costs associated with what we have come to know as the Alberta Advantage are enormous. Continue along the path followed by the greedy Once-ler character, Geisel warns, and the future we leave for our children will be fundamentally different in ways I can’t imagine we would have wished on them.

Thankfully, a new generation of Albertans are coming to this realization much faster than the Once-ler did in the land of the Lorax. No need to wait until the rivers are fouled (or empty), the air besmirched, the climate inextricably warmed, the Swommee-swans and Humming-fish and brown bar-ba-loots gone, our cities depopulated and ruined. Time, instead, to rise to the greatest challenge of the 21st century: reducing our unsustainable impacts on the environment without compromising, perhaps even enhancing, our quality of life.

The antithesis of the Once-ler, the environmental stars profiled here represent the best and brightest of a growing constituency of Albertans choosing to pursue careers and business opportunities and (it’s impossible to put it any other way) lives that reflect their commitment to improving the state of the environment. Armed with the entrepreneurial, can-do spirit that has defined the province for more than a century, and bolstered by unparalleled wealth and triple-bottom-line thinking, these green hotshots are helping to develop and implement solutions that could turn Alberta into a true hub of sustainability. Into a global leader.

The variety and creativity of the work these people do represents the breadth and range of technological and policy solutions that will be required to make the jump from our currently unsustainable society to one that balances the needs and limits of the natural world with our increasing desire for luxury and comfort. There are no shortcuts; there will be no easy answers. The path to sustainability will take hard work and commitment, of which these entrepreneurs and environmentalists are in no short supply.

But there is more to the answer than simply discovering and applying technological solutions to environmental problems, or popularizing ideas that, if actualized, will help to transform society. The real transformation will be neither technological nor economic – it will be cultural. What makes many of the people profiled here exceptional is less the substance of what they do – cutting-edge solar engineering, say, or writing inspiring and well-researched books – than the courage and creativity and sense of responsibility (all hallmarks, by the way, of successful entrepreneurs) to choose careers and lives that veer from the conventional. Instead, they embody a new path to a more sustainable New World, the very beginnings of which we can only glimpse today.

“We need to be careful about heroes,” Marlo Raynolds, executive director of the Pembina Institute, told me as I prepared these profiles. “In a lot of ways we’re a hero-driven society – that someone else out there will save the day for us – and that gives us an excuse not to get off the couch. We’re not going to win this game with heroes. We’re not going to tackle global warming with a few heroes. Ultimately, we have to look at ourselves for our own inspiration and take our own action.”

A sustainable Alberta, then, will be a place where our environmental stars are no longer exceptional, a place where all Albertans factor in the environmental implications not only of how they spend their money, but how they earn it. Had the Once-ler incorporated this kind of triple-bottom-line thinking into his business plan when he first arrived on the scene in The Lorax, of course, there would still be Truffula trees and brown bar-ba-loots aplenty (not to mention clean air and water), and the story would have a very different ending.

Although none of them characterized it that way, perhaps that’s exactly what these Albertans are doing today. Regular people trying to rewrite the province’s story, so that it always contains so many of the things we are precipitously close to losing. U

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Danielle Droitsch
lawyer, executive director
watermatters + bow riverkeeper

I was a reporter for a newspaper in North Carolina. My editor asked me to cover a story about a pulp and paper mill that was polluting a nearby river. There had been fish kills and the community downstream had disproportionately high levels of cancer. These people needed help – not another newspaper article. I asked to be pulled from the story. It changed my life. I went on to become an environmental lawyer.

The intensity of our land use has grown to a point that’s unsustainable. Our water supply is decreasing and water quality is degrading. We seem to be operating on an assumption that we can build, drill, mine and pave anything and everything in Alberta. Every boom has its bust, and our water can’t be sacrificed as part of the deal. Our “business as usual” approach no longer works. We need new legislation that sets targets for managed growth for water, wildlife, air and landscapes. These targets would be established by considering the cumulative impacts of multiple activities on the landscape (water usage, oil and gas activity, recreation, urban and rural development) and then establishing thresholds based on a community vision and environmental protection. The only way to make this happen is by changing legislation, which would hold individual government ministries accountable to these targets.

Watermatters isn’t a big national environmental group, but I’ve seen our small efforts have a big effect. I know we’ve changed people’s opinions. I know we’ve influenced government decision-making. It’s true that a few people can make a difference. If only everyone thought that way.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Danielle

Matt Beck + Mark Blackwell
university of calgary students + co-chairs
alberta solar decathlon project

Beck (above right): I consider myself a systems entrepreneur. As Adam Werbach (U.S. Sierra Club president turned Wal-Mart consultant) announced a few years ago, “environmentalism is dead.” It is an outdated worldview that focuses on individual issues at the expense of complex systems relationships, when an understanding of both are needed to create a positive future. Through building an energy-producing home – rather than a home that consumes energy – we are showing Albertans that through efficiency and innovation, we can both reduce our impact on the environment and continue to develop our energy sector.

Blackwell: With a project like this we have a real opportunity to really change how people perceive sustainable housing design. Consumers need to be aware of how their actions – like switching to a more efficient insulation system – will decrease the demand for fossil fuels. There is so much criticism on the producers, but the place people need to be looking at for fault is in the mirror. Until people are able to manage how they live their lives and rely less heavily on fossil fuels, no real change will take place.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Matt & Mark

Claire Ellick
engineer, sustainable transportation
city of edmonton

I’m a bike ninja. OK, I also do strategic planning and design for bike facilities in the city, as well as operational reviews and improvements, and generally anything else related to on-road cycling. After I finished my engineering degree, I wanted to do something that benefited people and that I really believed in. That’s this job. Cycling has always been one of my biggest passions, and it’s great to have input on city policy with respect to how bicycles are integrated into our transportation system.

If you can avoid driving a car to work and get there by biking or walking, or by taking transit or carpooling, these are all cost-effective alternatives to driving a single-occupant vehicle. With increasing gas prices, I think people will start to realize how little sense it makes to drive alone everywhere. Cycling makes sense on so many levels – but the most obvious are the environmental and health benefits. Look at the rising obesity rates in North America. Cycling saves you time and dollars: there’s no need to drive to the gym and pay for a gym membership to sit on a stationary bike for an hour. Cycling can add so much richness to the quality of anyone’s life.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Claire

Jon Mitchell
group lead, environmental strategies
encana corporation

EnCana is the biggest natural gas producer in North America and one of the biggest companies in Canada. I work with the leadership of the company and our operating divisions to identify areas where we need to develop a corporate approach to sustainability issues, coordinate our activities to address these issues, and work with external agencies on developing solutions. While the work involves issues related to air, water and land, the majority of my work at the moment is leading EnCana’s climate change strategy.

There is no longer a choice about whether to think about the environment or not. This is business. Environmental issues must be managed as they can represent a significant risk to the bottom line, now and in the future. Those that identify the opportunities to excel will be better positioned than their competitors in the long run. You can debate how effective certain initiatives are, but there is no debate about the need for them.

Environmental issues are front of mind for boards and executives – it’s our job as professionals to provide advice and input to help them make informed decisions. The discussions are no longer focused on “if” but have shifted to “how.” That is why it is not enough to just understand the environment; you must also understand business and politics. How could you not be motivated when you work in this field? There has been no time when environment has captured the attention of the public, business and politics like it has right now. If I wasn’t motivated by that, I’d be overwhelmed.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Jon

Stephani Carter + Brandy Burdeniuk
interior designer, sustainable building material specialist + industrial designer
ecoammo, green alberta

Carter (sitting): Our companies are designed to make the transition to a more sustainable building industry fun and easy. We educate people about building green and choosing healthy building products and materials. There is no “organic door” to a world where everything is perfect. We are living in a time of transformation. Each of us has to pick what is most important to us and act on it. We should no longer point fingers at one another. Instead, we must encourage everyone’s green actions. If all the energy spent pointing fingers was used to take action, we would certainly speed up this peaceful revolution.

Burdeniuk: As an industrial designer, I am a trained problem solver. We help facilitate the LEED certification process and ensure that the vision of a green building is maintained all the way through the design and construction process. We try to simplify the process so that it isn’t overwhelming. I’m not going to lie: we’ve had our financial ups and downs, but now we are really busy and the money is steadily coming in. I think today it is possible to be both environmentally and financially sustainable. It is essential to have this balance, as it allows for long-term planning and realistic solutions.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Stephani and Brandy

Justin Thompson
energy-efficient homebuilder + rancher + wind power consultant

Spending a lot of time in the foothills of southern Alberta as a child I gained a love for wildlife and wide open spaces. I also spent a lot of time in the wind near Pincher Creek, so when it came time to look for work, wind energy was a natural fit. As for the green building effort, this was a very conscious decision to try and influence an industry that to me has no excuse not to improve its practices, because so many of the improvements are so simple to make.

Most struggles in our history have involved an external enemy. This time, we are the enemy: it’s a struggle within ourselves to change our consumption patterns. That’s hard to reconcile for most of us, especially amid such wealth in Alberta. I struggle with it all the time because I know my personal footprint could be smaller and my quality of life would not be threatened.

The myth of the incompatibility between profitability and sustainability has been perpetuated for too long. Time and time again, companies who do the right thing benefit from increased efficiencies, which lead to reduced costs or create new markets or demand. What is required are companies that are willing to take risks and step out of the status quo. I’m not saying being green is a business slam dunk, but there are so many examples of success that it’s time we put this question to bed for good.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Justin

Leanne Allison + Karsten Heuer
filmmaker + author

We undertake grand-scale expeditions into critical landscapes and tell stories about our experiences through films, lectures and books. The first project was the Yellowstone to Yukon hike (1998/99), which highlighted the need for wildlife corridors. In 2003 we followed an Arctic caribou herd for five months to their endangered calving grounds and back again (Being Caribou). Last summer, we canoed and sailed across Canada with our two-year-old son to meet author and environmental crusader Farley Mowat, winding through the settings of his stories along the way (Finding Farley).

Somewhere in our early 20s, we began to realize the places where we canoed, skied, mountain biked and climbed had value beyond outdoor gymnasiums. A series of wildlife encounters, some university courses in biology, and a couple of summer jobs with wildlife ecologists deepened our appreciation for our surroundings and shifted the emphasis from the activity to the place. For lack of a better term, we are in the business of environmental education. Our impact is pretty hard to measure. We could talk about book sales (tens of thousands), viewers of our films (in the millions), and lecture attendees (tens of thousands). But it’s all meaningless unless it translates into action. On that front, it’s the notes we get from individuals that make our work rewarding – notes that describe real changes people have made in their lives and what they devote themselves to because of our projects.

The next big breakthrough? Wow, we wish we knew. We’ve stopped trying to predict how change will happen. We only believe it will.

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Leanne & Karsten

Marlo Raynolds
executive director
pembina institute

Global warming, hands down, is is the biggest environmental challenge facing the planet. Never before have we had so much scientific brain power conclude that we need to make very significant changes in our energy system and our levels of pollution. If we don’t get on a track of deep reductions by 2020, we’re going to see significant changes that are not favourable.

The most important solution is having a very clear and adequate price signal on carbon dioxide pollution. Coupled with that, we need very strong regulations in the areas of energy efficiency, industrial emissions of CO2 and vehicles. Those two market-based mechanisms of price and regulation will drive a lot of change in behaviour. Boardrooms need to be given and shown incentives and reasons to build things differently.

There is no silver bullet for this one. Unlike the ozone challenge we had, with CO2 it is a much more distributed problem; it really requires a portfolio approach. We have to get a lot more out of our current consumption of energy: we need to be able to drive further on a litre of gasoline and we need to be able to heat our homes with less energy. We need to be more accessible to our workplaces, to our friends and relationships, and to the services we need. We also need different ways of producing electricity. Renewable energy is a huge opportunity, from wind power to solar energy and deep geothermal.

Ultimately, these changes have to be possible. The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. Environmental protection needs to be a design criteria in our economy, and in how we conduct business. And I think we’re starting to see certain companies really taking this seriously. U

top |  Click here to read the full Q&A with Marlo

Without the presenting and networking skills that Bautista has acquired, it’s doubtful he’d be where he is today. A recent Harvard Business Review study lays this all pretty bare. Without charisma, you can’t get funding and like anything it takes work and practice to get there.

Bautista has pitched publicly three times, at KidScreen, Venture Forum in Vancouver and Venture Prize and has won at all three. Discovery signed on to his project without a demo, getting on board based on the strength of the presentation alone.

He’s been to six or seven industry events a year for the past three years. To some people, that’s a slog but Bautista loves it. He gets a kick out of talking with his cohorts about what they’re working on and is very much a people junkie. Face-to-face networking is important but you can’t be everywhere at once. This is where online social networking comes into play. Bautista prefers Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“From a business perspective, LinkedIn has been good. I get introduced to people and I introduce people,” says Bautista.

“Facebook is more ‘friends’ but it’s become more of that personal network. Makes it easy to keep in touch with people.”

He sees a link between being a good networker and a good presenter. When presenting, you’ll have a script. Talking points that include things you should return to when you get off track. But when you’re networking, you don’t use a script, that would just be weird and awkward. It’s in these networking situations that you can work on your off the cuff, unplanned talk about what you do. So, as Bautista puts it “You have to have this arsenal of stuff to talk about without sounding like a robot.”

The better you get at dealing with people in unscripted, unplanned discussion, the more natural your formal presentations will be.

Of course it’s rare that people find themselves with a microphone and a slide deck in front of hundreds of people. You have to get your practice in and Bautista got his from pitching his product from a very early stage. By starting early, he got feedback and gained a comfort level with the process. Every pitch he did helped him refine his message.

Bautista always goes into a presentation with a plan. “What are the one or two things they need to remember and then I craft my pitch around that.”

He wanted to get people to understand the mystery and the intrigue of his property as well as the multi-platform interactivity. During his KidScreen pitch, Bautista mocked up a crash screen and played it off like his computer had crashed during the presentation. People in the crowd were surprised, muttering to themselves. Then he got a phone call over the loudspeaker from one of the “agents” in the product he was pitching, telling him that there had been a security breach. He kept going through the pitch and came to slide that needed a password. He had planted a clue for the password under the judges’ chairs, and they were prompted to look there by another phone call over the loudspeaker.

“At this point the crowd is loving it.”

This series will explore how entrepreneurs get funding, make contacts and close their deals, all by tracking homegrown techie Ken Bautista

When you’re exploring the world of dealmaking, it helps to have a bit of a B-movie background. Consider, for instance, actor Bruce Campbell’s advice:

For would-be entrepreneurs, getting it – whatever it is – can seem like a vicious circle. You don’t have experience so you can’t raise money. You can’t raise money because you don’t have experience.

This is where Ken Bautista comes in. Bautista is the CEO of SeekYourOwnProof, also known as the Central Institute of Exploration. CIE is a subscription-based online community that also features real-world educational activities. Aimed at tweens, it uses the gaming model to educate school-age children on science and history.

By tracking Bautista as he schmoozes in L.A., meets execs in New York and jump-starts opportunities back home in Alberta, we’ll explore how exactly the deal gets made. But first, let’s meet the man.

The enthusiasm Bautista brings to projects is infectious. The man is one of the busiest people in Alberta, but he’s always smiling. And he’s also an assiduous networker. (Just check his LinkedIn profile. He has so many connections, the business-focused social network merely throws up its hands and says 500+.)

Bautista doesn’t mind a full calendar either. He’s been the president of Digital Alberta (an advocacy group for digital media) and he’s bringing three TEDx events to the public in 2010. That’s not to mention a gig as founding chair of artsScene Edmonton, an arts-business facilitator, and his role as the figure behind Startup Edmonton, an accelerator and seed fund.

Bautista recently raised $1M in venture capital, combined with over $600,000 in seed financing from the TELUS Innovation Fund, Telefilm Canada New Media Fund and personal investments. He’s also closed a long-term deal with a major US media company. (We’ll have more details to share in coming issues of Deal Maker.)

The specialty of Bautista’s team lay in creative compelling characters and stories. But, like most online startups, the challenge would be reaching a critical mass of users. So their approach was to find a key distribution and brand partner in the US whose network and reach could be leveraged.

Bautista suggests not being intimidated if you have a product worth talking about. The US deal happened because of a “cold email” sent to a brand manager. Bautista got a call back from the brand manager a few minutes later asking, “Do I know you?” Not exactly, but the manager thought CIE was a great fit and ended up connecting him with key decision makers.

What was she thinking? In January 2009, as the economy started to fail, Eve Lessard traded her steady job in a human resources department for self employment. She took a few months off and then in April started bHired.ca, a freelance HR firm, on a shoestring budget from her Montreal studio apartment. “I started from scratch. I didn’t plan a lot,” she says. “I’d saved a little money but not a big investment for starting a company. I didn’t even have a laptop.” In a work ethic that speaks of her self-employment acumen, Lessard has found a path to early success – from her kitchen table.

How did you decide to become a free agent?

My parents were both entrepreneurs. It sounds cheesy, but maybe I have it in my blood. In 2006 I wanted to do it. I lived in Calgary and I had an idea to recruit eastern Canadians to work for western companies. The timing wasn’t right. It never happened. I returned to Montreal and then last summer it came back into my mind. I gave my boss four months notice. I knew all my life I was going to work for myself when the timing was right, and the timing was good for me but not with the economy. [She laughs.] I didn’t know in 2008 that we would be in a recession. When it was time to leave my job [in January 2009] I thought ‘What did I do?’

Are you recruiting for western companies?

No, the economy isn’t good for it right now. I’m doing recruitment working with small- or medium-sized companies that don’t have HR departments or big companies that need help. I don’t want to be a placement agency. I want to do things with integrity, quality versus quantity. I want exclusive contracts with companies, but right now I take what people offer me.

What were your fears when you started?

I didn’t have one that kept me up worrying. I can – and have – changed my life in 30 minutes. I like adventure. I decided I’m going to do it and see what happens. It was a good time for me to try because I don’t have kids and I’m young.

What skills do you need to be self employed?

You need a thick skin. You face rejection all the time. I thought I had thick skin – when I worked for someone else I had no problem picking up the phone and asking for things – but now I find myself hyperventilating before making a call. You have to be okay with not being perfect. You have to stay yourself. I know I can succeed if I be myself. You have to be organized and manage your time. It’s easy when you work at home to start to do the laundry and a thousand other things instead of what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s hard to keep a schedule. I get up at 7 a.m. and go for a walk to get a coffee so that I feel like I’m going somewhere.

Do you have any home office guilty pleasures?

I love 3 p.m. during the summer. I can get up and take a one hour walk. That’s awesome. When I’m sick or hung-over I can stay in bed. I love that. I can go on a trip anytime; I don’t have to ask someone. I always felt like I was in a cage when I worked for someone else.

What’s the downside to self employment? Anything you miss from your 9 to 5 past?

I like to work in quiet, so I used to get really angry with my colleagues who were loud. But I miss taking coffee with colleagues and happy hour. I miss having a team. And I really miss having a boss who can answer my questions. I have lots of questions, but no one to ask.

How did you feel when you were suddenly working for yourself?

There’s nothing like that feeling when you get that first cheque. It’s awesome. I did something all by myself and really earned it. That’s the feeling I was looking for.

How will you know you’re a success?

By next year I’d like to hire someone to help me part time. The day I do that, when I have lots of clients, things are going well. U

Free Agent, Pt. 1: How Vancouver’s Jeff Hamada grew a small online community into a global phenomenon – and made some money in the process

Look for a profile of Mimande in the February issue of Alberta Venture. Bacon closed in September of 2008. Her cookbook, We Eat Together, is an homage to local food and the community it inspires. It is available now through Poplar and Pine Press.

Julianna Mimande walks past 10-kilogram bags of black turtle beans and corn flour, past overhanging piñatas and soccer shirts, to the back corner of Paraiso Tropical on Edmonton’s 118th Avenue, where she scoops up two hulking three-litre cans of Empacadora San Marcos salsa verde.

“Making some tacos?” Jesus Gonzalez asks in obvious understatement.

“Yes,” she says, “and I’m looking for tortillas. Which ones are the good ones?”

They stare into the cooler. Gonzalez, who owns this family-run Latin American imports store, points to the Don Pancho brand and nods confidently, then tempts her with a container of homemade salsa roja casera. Of course she’ll take some. He helps her carry the goods to the counter and deposits them near a display of leather Che Guevara bags.

“It feels way more authentic to shop at these places,” Mimande says as we climb into her canola-powered, right-hand drive Toyota truck. “When you go to the giant wholesalers, it doesn’t feel like food. It feels dead. If you’re hungry before you go there, you won’t be afterward.”

That’s funny, because if you’re hungry before you enter Bacon, Mimande’s boffo little eatery, you won’t be afterward, either – but for entirely different reasons. You’ll be full of bison burgers and crisp tofu and organic greens. Bacon, which opened in April, is part of a small but growing trend: eco-conscious, sustainable restaurants such as The Coup in Calgary and ECOcafé in Pigeon Lake. Yet Mimande is not trendy. She’s just a stubborn gal who wears vintage dresses and rides a 1970s Raleigh Sprite bicycle she bought at a thrift shop for $20, and she wanted the business to reflect her values concerning waste, pollution, community and the planet. She has her own mind, as my mom used to say. So she gracefully ignored the statistics, the dubious business networking types and countless others who made the throat-slitting motion when she said she wanted to open a restaurant. So what if only one in eight restaurants survive its first few years? This wouldn’t be a fleeting hotspot on Whyte Avenue. It would be a neighbourhood joint supported by neighbourhood residents. And what better neighbourhood than her own?

Bacon, run by Mimande and her business partner, Cynthia Lilge, is located in a little 112th Avenue strip east of downtown Edmonton in Highlands, half a dozen blocks south of Mimande’s home. According to city and federal stats, more than a third of the community’s 2,666 residents are between the ages of 35 and 55, most own their homes, and many are teachers, healthcare workers and civil servants. In other words, prime restaurant patrons. They come in droves: tables of elderly ladies for soup and dessert, the twentysomething professional lunch crowd, and all manner of hungry customers in between.

The place is befitting a boss with her own mind. The menu is derived from fresh, organic and, whenever possible, local ingredients, or at least products purchased from local stores; there is neither Coca-Cola nor french fries; takeout containers, procured from Winnipeg’s Happy Planet Productions, are corn- and sugar-based, which means they’re compostable; staff compost food scraps and give the product away to gardeners; and, perhaps most importantly, the kitchen is free of the petty, gonad-wagging machismo Mimande endured for years as a server in more than a dozen restaurants. It took patience and perseverance to seek out unique suppliers and still make food that appeals to a wide swath of Edmonton. But anything’s possible when you’re Julianna Mimande.

“When I think of all the options I have and then I look around me, I think, ‘This is it. This is the best job,’” says Mimande, born and raised in Edmonton. “Like when you’re a kid and you play dress-up and you wear whatever you want. I feel like I’m playing dress-up every day.”

Bacon is proof you can open a restaurant and run it entirely your own way. OK, maybe not entirely. After insisting servers write their orders on paper for the first few weeks, she opted for a $3,000 Uniwell computerized ordering system. Prior to that, things were getting a little crispy at Bacon: cooks misread handwriting, orders went astray. “Everyone hated me,” she says. “And when we finally got it, I was like, ‘Hallelujah!’” She also refused to offer debit purchases and put a bank machine in the corner instead – another quaint notion that quickly bit the dust.

Both ideas were predicated on the belief Bacon would build a clientele slowly. But business was steady from week one. In a mere seven months, Bacon has prompted more media stories and reviews than the restaurant has tables (seven), and the cozy, multi-hued room fills to brimming nearly every night. She’s a bit giddy from it all, garnishing her success theories with words like “luck” and “serendipity.” But everyone who knows her knows the truth: she works hard. And she has a lot of generous friends who want her to succeed. Hell, half of them work a shift or two there every week, just for kicks.

Jeff Hamada has succeeded where so many web-savvy people have not. And he did it all by accident. Hamada took a blog, created a loyal, interactive online community and then monetized the whole deal. The result was Booooooom! – that’s seven Os – which gets 1.7 million visitors every month. A sign of how successful it is: GM advertises on the site.

Hamada trolls the net for work by virtually unknown artists and posts it under the sections Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! and Projects! (exclamation marks are his). Unlimited talked with Hamada, a former Electronic Arts staffer who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, about his unexpected international following.

How was Booooooom! born?
I took a year off school and worked at Electronic Arts. EA paid for my final year, but when I graduated, the company didn’t have a job open for me. I was sad about that. I started freelancing as a graphic designer about four years ago. I started Booooooom! about a 18 months ago as a personal blog to show all the art I made and the trips I took.

It’s changed a lot, though.
It changed early on. I didn’t think it was interesting for people to hear what I was doing, so I started posting art I liked, mostly work by lesser-known people on Flickr. I’d post something, email the artist to say I like his work and that I’d posted it on my site. The artist would get excited about it and mention it on his website. It became a conversation for art admirers. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. About six months in, everything went crazy, and now I get 1.9 million page hits a month. I wasn’t trying to make it grow. I just lost control.

Describe Booooooom!
It’s a daily inspiration site about photography and drawing. It’s different than a lot of other sites out there. I find artwork that I like by artists all over the world and I post it on the site, like an online art gallery. I really want to create a collaborative community.

I have another side to the site where we do group collaboration projects. I come up with an idea for a project and ask people to contribute. It’s an avenue for people to get inspired and make stuff that inspires others. I hope it becomes more of a focus of the site.

Could you describe a few group projects?
The last group project was a music video. Everyone downloaded the same music, filmed their own footage and submitted it. I stitched all the footage together. (See the footage here).

How much time does it take to maintain the site?
Now it’s a full-time job. I spend eight to 10 hours a day working on it. When I had freelance clients, I’d work on the site all night. I set it up to have three posts a day, so no matter where someone lives, when they go to the site there’s something new for them to see.

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

How does the site generate revenue?
This is something I’m still learning about. There are three ways to make money: You get paid to write about a product. I’ve never done that and I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. Or you can run advertisements from networks. I work with three or four networks that represent a bunch of companies. They pitch campaigns to me and I pick ones that work for the site. The third way is by having local companies in Vancouver sponsor the site. This is a one-to-one relationship.

The trickiest partnerships are with networks, because the products a network wants to advertise on your site are not always a good fit. They also want to sign long-term contracts, meaning that you lose control of what ads appears. But I can be pickier the more popular the site becomes.

Why do you think the site is so popular and continues to grow?
I am obsessed with analyzing the site and improving things that aren’t getting lots of hits. I paid a friend to make it more searchable and the topic I chose helped. No big sites are collecting the work that I’m collecting and there’s nothing going on for the community side of a lot of blogs. I put a lot of time into the site to make it feel alive.

There’s a stigma about art that only experts can talk about it. I try and make art inclusive. No matter what your expertise, you’re allowed to comment about the stuff you see. You don’t need credentials. I think the overall feeling is open and accepting.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

What would you like to see Booooooom! become?
I want to take it offline. I want to see some of the art on the site be shown in a [bricks-and-mortar] art gallery. I want the site to generate interest in the artists I feature. Beyond that I want to travel and meet the artists I cover and write about it. I want to publish a book of art. I don’t want to get rich. I’m not a business person that started this site thinking I could make money from it. The site is a lot bigger than the site I originally imagined. I’m definitely missing an opportunity to monetize completely, but I don’t want to be the mega-corporation of art sites.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

Jeff Hamada has succeeded where so many web-savvy people have not. And he did it all by accident. Hamada took a blog, created a loyal, interactive online community and then monetized the whole deal. The result was Booooooom! – that’s seven Os – which gets 1.7 million visitors every month. A sign of how successful it is: GM advertises on the site.

Hamada trolls the net for work by virtually unknown artists and posts it under the sections Art! Design! Film! Music! Photo! Junk! and Projects! (exclamation marks are his). Unlimited talked with Hamada, a former Electronic Arts staffer who graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, about his unexpected international following.

How was Booooooom! born?
I took a year off school and worked at Electronic Arts. EA paid for my final year, but when I graduated, the company didn’t have a job open for me. I was sad about that. I started freelancing as a graphic designer about four years ago. I started Booooooom! about a 18 months ago as a personal blog to show all the art I made and the trips I took.

It’s changed a lot, though.
It changed early on. I didn’t think it was interesting for people to hear what I was doing, so I started posting art I liked, mostly work by lesser-known people on Flickr. I’d post something, email the artist to say I like his work and that I’d posted it on my site. The artist would get excited about it and mention it on his website. It became a conversation for art admirers. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. About six months in, everything went crazy, and now I get 1.9 million page hits a month. I wasn’t trying to make it grow. I just lost control.

Describe Booooooom!
It’s a daily inspiration site about photography and drawing. It’s different than a lot of other sites out there. I find artwork that I like by artists all over the world and I post it on the site, like an online art gallery. I really want to create a collaborative community.

I have another side to the site where we do group collaboration projects. I come up with an idea for a project and ask people to contribute. It’s an avenue for people to get inspired and make stuff that inspires others. I hope it becomes more of a focus of the site.

Could you describe a few group projects?
The last group project was a music video. Everyone downloaded the same music, filmed their own footage and submitted it. I stitched all the footage together. (See the footage here).

How much time does it take to maintain the site?
Now it’s a full-time job. I spend eight to 10 hours a day working on it. When I had freelance clients, I’d work on the site all night. I set it up to have three posts a day, so no matter where someone lives, when they go to the site there’s something new for them to see.

Jeff Hamada’s own art work. Hamada has worked for clients such as Converse.

How does the site generate revenue?
This is something I’m still learning about. There are three ways to make money: You get paid to write about a product. I’ve never done that and I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities. Or you can run advertisements from networks. I work with three or four networks that represent a bunch of companies. They pitch campaigns to me and I pick ones that work for the site. The third way is by having local companies in Vancouver sponsor the site. This is a one-to-one relationship.

The trickiest partnerships are with networks, because the products a network wants to advertise on your site are not always a good fit. They also want to sign long-term contracts, meaning that you lose control of what ads appears. But I can be pickier the more popular the site becomes.

Why do you think the site is so popular and continues to grow?
I am obsessed with analyzing the site and improving things that aren’t getting lots of hits. I paid a friend to make it more searchable and the topic I chose helped. No big sites are collecting the work that I’m collecting and there’s nothing going on for the community side of a lot of blogs. I put a lot of time into the site to make it feel alive.

There’s a stigma about art that only experts can talk about it. I try and make art inclusive. No matter what your expertise, you’re allowed to comment about the stuff you see. You don’t need credentials. I think the overall feeling is open and accepting.

Content-wise, I was uncovering a lot of unknown people, like people with only 30 followers. But when I mention one artist, he tells all his followers and then 30 people are checking out the site.

What would you like to see Booooooom! become?
I want to take it offline. I want to see some of the art on the site be shown in a [bricks-and-mortar] art gallery. I want the site to generate interest in the artists I feature. Beyond that I want to travel and meet the artists I cover and write about it. I want to publish a book of art. I don’t want to get rich. I’m not a business person that started this site thinking I could make money from it. The site is a lot bigger than the site I originally imagined. I’m definitely missing an opportunity to monetize completely, but I don’t want to be the mega-corporation of art sites.

Why?
My audience is a tricky demographic. It can get turned off by advertising if it isn’t done right. I could lose credibility really easily, especially if I include some covert ads. U

Cameron Smith does not bring home the bacon. In fact, he makes it himself. For up to 100 hours a week, six month per year, Smith and Dana Ewart, his partner in both business and life (they sign emails from their work account “Cam and Dana”), make pretty much everything themselves – from peach galettes with fruit that was just plucked from the tree to elaborate al fresco dinners at wineries sprinkled through the Okanagan.

Originally from Ontario, the pair were kitchen competitors at top restaurants such as Toque! in Montreal and Scaramouche in Toronto before ditching their high-stress jobs to take a semi-sabbatical. After a stretch as tree planters, the 30-something pair set up Joy Road Catering in the basement of their home near Penticton.

Cameron Smith and Dana Ewart of Joy Road Catering

The work is still high-stress, and the challenges these entrepreneurs face is a little unusual. “It’s a lot harder dealing with hippie farmers,” Ewart says. As Smith puts it, “In a restaurant there are multiple deadlines and they can seem life or death at the time, but if a farmer has something more important to do they will bring that lamb tomorrow. Or if the raspberry field is wet, they won’t go out and pick the berries even though we’ll be pulling our hair out because we have a dinner that night with a dessert that needs raspberries.”

The perks of self-employment, however, outweigh the frustrations. “The restaurant industry is very fickle. You get a good review one day and the phone rings off hook. But if you don’t get reviewed for two weeks, your restaurant is dead,” Smith explains. “There was a real opportunity for us here. The ingredients were here, the farms are here, the wine is here and the clientele have educated palates and are excited about what we do. I think we’d still be successful in the city, but people here they get it. They see the vines, see where the wine came from, we see the person who grew the carrots.” Lower start-up costs and overhead make catering a smart business move for a chef. The ability to, as Smith puts it, change a menu on a dime, rather than sticking to a stale two-month old menu, for instance, is another benefit.

Ewart and Smith only operate when they can get fresh local food, which packs a year’s worth of revenue and work into half the time of a traditional catering company. They start up in May when the first wild watercress and peas become available and shut down when frost hits in November.

A typical day goes something like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., answer emails, make phone calls and write up shopping and prep lists. Create a schedule for that night’s event, assign staff tasks for the day, and write lists of what equipment and special ingredients they’ll need. At 10 a.m., the four full-time staff arrives (they also have a bunch of part-timers) and everyone preps food until 1 p.m. The staff takes turns cooking for the daily sit-down lunch – no brown bag lunches here – which is often the only chance they have in a 16-hour day for a proper meal. Later in the afternoon, they pack up the vans, triple-check their checklist and head off to the venue, where Smith and Ewart have 10 minutes to make themselves at home in a foreign space. The day ends sometime around 11 p.m. when they drive home, unload coolers, wash dishes and go to bed. Then they repeat that almost every day for the rest of the season.

“It’s pretty nuts. In summer, we’ll stay up all night Friday baking, go to the farmers’ market on Saturday, have our crew prep all the produce we bring home that afternoon and then it’s show time: two different weddings on Saturday and dinners at wineries on Sunday,” Ewart says. All told, they feed about 500 people on a given weekend, then spend Monday – their busiest day – ordering food and clearing through paperwork. “We crash in November.”

Like their schedules, the Joy Road Catering “office” – actually a basement kitchen retrofitted to accommodate Smith, Ewart, four full-time staff and a bunch of part-timers – is unusual. We counted nine pairs of prongs, for starters. Below, Ewart and Smith describe their space.

Ewart (far right) and Cameron Smith (in chef's white) preside over the Joy Road HQ

Anatomy of  a Kitchen

+ The pair went to an auction sale and, as Ewart puts it, “set ourselves up on quite a dime.” The chopping blocks ($75 each) came from an old butcher shop. “They have a history. They’re made with gorgeous piece of wood and have railway ties going through them,” Ewart says.
+ Big French doors lead to the garden and chicken coop. “We have a rocket launcher out back that we bought from our dear friend Angus An at Maenam restaurant in Vancouver. We use it to sear meats and make huge stocks and batches of steamy jam,” says Ewart. Every piece comes with a story. “There’s a crew who moved west and opened our own businesses at the same time. It was neat going through all those growing pains of opening our own business.”
+ Posters from numerous events Joy Road has worked at decorate the walls. Other art includes an oversized photo of an unlikely source of culinary inspiration: Albert Einstein. “It’s says something like great spirits have always encountered violent opposition,” Smith says. “It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it symbolizes how you need to go your own way, do you own thing, you cannot care what the establishment will say.”
+ The best part of the Joy Road headquarters is the view of the Okanagan – not to mention the outdoor beer tap. “That’s also where we keep our fridge,” says Smith.
+ “We prep in this kitchen, but our office is wherever we’ve been hired to go,” Smith explains. “The challenge is to haul around an entire kitchen of equipment and the food that goes with it.” U