The next winter, she was back on the slopes, this time in a sit ski.

Six years later she would find herself on the podium with a bronze medal around her neck at the 2006 Paralympics in Turin, Italy.

To get there she had to chart own path amongst a patchwork system of government funding, sponsorship and personal fundraising that would make even the most seasoned entrepreneur stand up and take notice.

As a member of Canadian Paralympic Alpine Ski Team (CPAST), all of Joines’ touring and competition costs are covered by Alpine Canada and CPAST sponsors. She has to cover all her personal expenses on tour, including food.

Joines has two personal sponsors, which get the head and shoulder areas on her racing gear for a minimum donation of $5,000 annually. Alpine Canada then takes a 15 per cent commission. Her head sponsor, Maritime Salient has been with her since it approached the team looking to donate some money four years ago. Her shoulder sponsor, Del Metals, comes from a personal connection – her boyfriend’s brother.

“They each have a patch on my competitive gear. I can also put them on my website and blog about them,” she said. “It would be nice to give them tax receipts, but we can’t because Alpine Canada isn’t a non-profit organization, so typically I’m able to provide them with any good press I can give them.”

As a Senior A-carded athlete with Sport Canada, Joines receives bimonthly funding to the tune of $3,000 or $18,000 each year depending on results. And her results have been solid, with her best year coming in 2008 when she won the overall title with 15 gold medal finishes on the World Cup circuit.

“It’s a consistent income,” she says. “But it only covers the bare necessities. The sponsorships vary greatly from year to year, and they may even give me nothing.”

In the lead up to the 2010 Paralympics in Vancouver, the controversial Own the Podium program has played a huge part in Joines’ preparations.

“Own the Podium gave us a lot of support. The program is quite intricately involved in our sport because they base their support on the potential to win medals, and our team has the potential to win a whole lot of medals,” she says.

The 15 targeted athletes on the Para Alpine team have benefited from $1,281,103 in funding through Own the Podium. From that money, they’ve received an extra coach, a nutritionist and guest speakers.

Joines fills in the rest of her budget with donations of goods and services from her extremely supportive local community. She learned quickly about the generosity of her hometown when she bought a dilapidated miner’s shack as her home in Rossland B.C. It needed a considerable amount of work in order for her to live and move around comfortably. The community came to her aid, providing the time, services and materials required to finish the job.

“Over the course of the project we ended up acquiring about $90,000 in sponsorship,” she says.

Canadian Olympian, Maelle Ricker.

Never in recent memory has the launch of a product been so prescient. Annie Leibovitz’s somber, muscled photo of Tiger Woods on the cover of Vanity Fair was eerily timed given the golf star’s recent troubles. Just as Woods became the first athlete to make US$1 billion, his “transgressions,” a bizarre car wreck and sudden sabbatical eclipsed the accomplishment. The scandal also hurt the lucrative Woods brand. Management consultancy Accenture quickly dropped Woods as its spokesperson and AT&T hung up on the star. Good publicity for Vanity Fair; not so good for the bottom line of America’s top athlete.

Olympic-sized Markets

It might be coincidental that the Woods scandal hit around the same time that other athletes were gearing up to compete in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. But the two events highlight the complex, layered business of sports marketing, a side that most of us never think about when we’re sitting up in the bleachers: the buying, selling and branding of athletes. For pro athletes, this is part of the game. “It happens the day you sign with the NBA. That’s what older people tell you, is that you’re a business now, whether you like it or not,” Chris Bosh, a forward with the Toronto Raptors who starred in the documentary First Ink, told CBC Radio’s Jian Ghomeshi. He could have been talking about any sport.  (An honours student and philanthropist, Bosh also just signed a deal with Warner Music.)

Marrying sport and business and entertainment is natural for Bosh. He’s less of a basketball player and more of a personality. This is something Olympic athletes experience in a shorter, more intense period as marketing campaigns gear up for 15 days of competition, rather than a whole season. And despite a recession, companies are coming on board. In late 2009, for instance, Proctor & Gamble signed up six athletes for its Olympics campaigns, saying that “The athletes will be fully integrated across numerous marketing channels including advertising, public relations, in-store merchandising, mobile, digital and direct mail.”

John Furlong, CEO of organizing body VANOC,  says, “There has been no better time in the last 50 years to be a Canadian winter athlete. Sponsors are hiring athletes in jobs tailored to them, and corporations are sponsoring them.” The benefit, especially for those who don’t have lucrative contracts to fritter away, is that “Many can finally do what top athletes around the world have been allowed to do – train full time without having to worry about losing a job.”

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

At a showing of recently discovered films by the late Vancouver artist Kate Craig, I ran into a gang of girls who worked for Lululemon. I should have known. The screening, followed by a dance party, enforced a strict dress code of pink and leopard print all night. Lululemon design assistant Niamh McManus still managed to stand out from the crowd, hoisting a giant leopard print shoe that doubled as a seat over her shoulder.

VITALS: Niamh McManus, design assistant, Vancouver

Tell me about your job as a design assistant at Lululemon.
I work on the Run line. The line’s lead designer comes up with the direction for the season and I pull images and help create a theme. The lead designer then looks at all that trend info and decides what the direction is. Then we start production, and make samples and detailed technical drawings. After that, we collaborate with technical designers, pattern makers and product developers to create the final product.

Is working in fashion as competitive or glamorous as it seems?
There are a lot of people who want to be in the industry because of that perceived glamour. It’s hard for me to say because I was handed a good opportunity right out of school. Everyone works long days. It can’t be a nine-to-five job because you care – and that consumes your life. But I try not to think about the harder aspects of my job. One of my fears of working in fashion is the relentless pace. At the same time, you still have to squeeze creativity out. Creativity is delicate. I’m paranoid that if I’m not gentle with it, then one day it will just leave.

Getting hired out of school? That still happens?
I know a lot of people who have had a harder time than me. What I’m learning now is that design is only the tip of the iceberg in apparel. There’s not much room in fashion for designers compared to all the other people you need to create a product. For instance, there’s 17 of us on the design team at Lululemon. On the production side there’s around 60. I always thought during design school that starting my own line was my goal, but I think that I couldn’t be as successful if I had my own business straight out of school. There’s just too much to learn. U

Laura Trethewey is riding the train from Toronto to Vancouver and meeting regular Canadians along the way for our Job Training series. Every city she stops in she’ll ask one regular person about what they do for a living. Unlimited is posting the conversations on our interactive map.

Who:

The topography of the digital landscape shifts constantly as the tectonic plates of technology form and reform, seemingly overnight. Five or six years ago, for instance, venture capitalists weren’t sinking hundreds of millions into the development of iPhone apps. Digital advertising, meanwhile, has gone from the peripheral vision of most web users to a key part of the online experience.

Stephen Beck of Engine Digital in Vancouver. Photo by Amy Pelletier

Stephen Beck has watched this shift, first as an interactive art director at a Vancouver-based ad agency – though nobody really calls them ad agencies anymore, they’ve become one-stop-media shops – and then as the co-founder of Engine Digital. Over the past seven years, Engine has shifted its focus from web development to online advertising that’s like nothing you’d find at Sterling Cooper. “We decided early on that, for the most part, we would need to look outside our sandbox for the kinds of clients who think big, and expect big things from their creative partners,” Beck says. Those partners include Blue Man Group, Nintendo and Telus (along with creating Telus’ digital campaigns they worked on its corporate social responsibility report).

Beck’s own career represents a kind of morphology not unlike what’s happening in technology. When he was laid off as an interactive art director at a local agency, he gathered a colleague, Richard Gallagher, and they launched their own studio. They soon brought in Kele Nakamura as a partner and technical director. “Our start-up was very grassroots,” Beck says. “We used our network to generate our first client projects.” Eventually those networks expanded; even the economic downturn didn’t have as great an impact on them as it did for other digital agencies.

Engine Digital and Beck’s place in the slipstream of online commerce has become a paragon for a new kind of work, one where the person and the professional drive each other. (“There is no such thing as a part-time innovator,” he says.) Beck’s online presence – on Twitter and LinkedIn – supports the brand of his company. His Twitter feed reflects this intermingling with reverent (and irreverent) commentary on his industry, sometimes linking to innovative projects or ideas. Mixed in is that loosely curated, quirky stream of thought inherent in the medium. Sample tweet: a link to someone who’s re-tweeting the entire script for Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

He’s looking for this same fluidity when he’s recruiting staff. “When we interview,” he says, “we’re looking at the relationship that this person has with the Internet, and whether they know the rules and have a desire to break them.” AsThomas Edison put it, “Hell, there are no rules here – we are trying to accomplish something.”

Podcast: Batman Was an Entrepreneur

Sean Wise, venture capitalist, comic book aficionado and author of the book How to be a Business Superhero, talks with contributing editor Greg Hudson about what entrepreneurs can learn from Batman and the Green Lantern.