Volunteering – or perhaps more simply, just helping other people – annually has a spot on lists dedicated to the most common New Year’s resolutions. From building houses to distributing food to the hungry, caring for the elderly, coaching in athletic programs or mentoring at risk youth, doing more for other people can take on a variety of forms.

If the extra time needed for volunteering isn’t something that’s available, you could always make a difference while taking a job with a social enterprise. Or, if you’re passionate enough about your cause and figure your goods or services could bring in a fairly consistent revenue stream, you could always join the entrepreneurial ranks and start your own social business.

What’s a social enterprise, you ask? Good question. For a quick explanation, check out (this hyperlink) to another Unlimited story.

In the meantime, here’s a look at two social enterprises trying to earn a bit of money in an effort to make Edmonton a better community.

Live Local

FAST FACTS

Website: http://www.live-local.ca/

Year Established: 2010

Social Goal: support and develop sustainable, vibrant communities by supporting local independent businesses

Number of Employees: 8 (mostly part-time)

Number of Volunteers: usually one or two on staff

Revenue in 2011: About $900,000

Even with more than two decades of experience in the hospitality industry, when Jessie Radies and her husband Darcy opened the doors to the Blue Pear in 2000 she wasn’t quite prepared for the solitary life of operating an independent fine dining restaurant.

“I came out of the franchise world,” Radies says. “When my husband and I bought this fine dining restaurant, he was in his element as a chef because he came from the gourmet world working for an independent restaurant.”

The volume and prices of the downtown Edmonton restaurant weren’t what Radies was used to from her days working for large chain restaurants. She had a feeling she wasn’t alone and figured there would be strength in numbers, so seven years ago she started a collaborative program with other restaurateurs in the city.

“The original goal was to grow market share for independent restaurants and make them more profitable,” Radies says. “I found 10 or 11 others that got what I was trying to do. It worked, the businesses got busy and I started to get calls from people saying we need something like that for our industry.”

At first, Radies was hesitant. Her expertise was in the hospitality industry and the collaboration was started simply as a goal to increase revenue among local, independent restaurants. “Then I started to connect the dots,” she says. “Local businesses are part of a successful, resilient and innovative community. The picture got bigger for me and I realized there was opportunities for all local businesses.”

That original collaborative program morphed into Live Local. The not-for-profit organization launched in February 2010 in an effort to bring together groups and individuals who are committed to encouraging people to eat, dine and shop in local businesses. “I want local businesses to be successful because without them, communities can’t be successful,” Radies says.

While Live Local’s broad social goal is to support and develop sustainable and vibrant communities, the organization does it in three specific ways. The first is by selling food from local producers through an online store. As well as promoting local fare and supporting local farmers, producers and manufacturers, one per cent of the revenue generated by Live Local’s online sales goes to low income families.

The second is through a member program that offers gift cards and loyalty programs. “It’s similar to a chamber of commerce, but for small local businesses,” Radies says. “We help businesses work together and promote other local businesses.”

The third is to bring businesses together to offer perks for employees to help small businesses recruit and retain employees.

By fuelling the local economy, Radies hopes that the quality of life increases in the community, opportunities emerge and poverty is reduced.

“I think there’s a place for all businesses,” she says. “But people need to understand, so we can make proper choices and understand the benefits and costs of the decisions they make.”

Sage Savories

FAST FACTS

Website: http://www.sagesavories.ca/ordereze/1000/Page.aspx

Year Established: 2008

Social Goal: to provide seniors who have transportation and mobility issues with high quality, nutritional food in their homes

Number of Employees: 4

Number of Volunteers: 4 permanent volunteer roles

Volume of Ready-made Meals: average 1,500 per month

Sage is an Edmonton institution. The Seniors Association of Greater Edmonton has been around for more than 40 years, providing a wide range of programs and services designed to improve the quality of life for seniors. As well as offering health services, housing services, tax services and social services in Alberta’s capital city, Sage operates the Sunshine Cafe in downtown Edmonton.

“Clients were having difficulty meeting their daily food requirements,” says Karen McDonald, director of community relations with Sage. “They were coming to the cafe to order food and get an extra portion packaged up to take home.”

So, the not-for-profit organization created Sage Savories in 2008. “The idea was to provide access to quality food in the home for seniors who had mobility or transportation issues, or even food preparation issues,” McDonald says.

The line of Sage Savories was designed with consideration to lower sodium and lower fat content. The menu includes 18 different prepared and frozen meals, five different soups and six desserts. Many of the soups and meals are included in the Heart and Stroke Foundation Health Check program.

Sage also publishes an annual directory of seniors services. “There’s every service you could have for seniors and caregivers,” McDonald says.

The 260-page guide is delivered for free to more than 600 organizations in Edmonton and also available for free at a number of magazine racks throughout the region. The free service is made possible by selling ads.

“If the directory didn’t deliver results they wouldn’t advertise as a volunteer,” McDonald says.

That’s the biggest challenge, McDonald says, of operating a social enterprise – applying a business lens. While she spent 10 years in marketing in the for-profit sector, many social entrepreneurs don’t have the same corporate background and are more likely to focus on the social outcomes instead of the financial opportunities.

“You need to always think about applying that balance,” McDonald says.

Many of us kick off the New Year with a hangover. Some of us kick off the New Year with a hangover, our pants around our ankles and last night’s decorative ribbons in our hair. But when the headache subsides, what will your New Year’s resolution be? It could be launching your own startup. You know: that idea that’s been rummaging through your mind but has yet to be put in motion.

Tech startups are a popular business endeavour these days. Unlike traditional business enterprises, which typically require more manpower and a steeper upfront cost, startups can be done cheaply, with minimal overhead. “The common misconception is that you need a lot of money,” says co-founder of Startup Edmonton Sam Jenkins. “The barriers to entry have been reduced fairly significantly, especially in the past two to three years.”

Startup Edmonton is essentially an incubator for entry-level entrepreneurs in the city. The non-profit firm aims to invest in 500 entrepreneurs in the next five years. Investment is chosen based on the novelty of an idea, and its ability to solve problems – the trademark of any successful startup. But because support is readily available, and because the up front cost is minimal, competition will be cut-throat. You will need to sharpen your big idea before you take the leap.

Jenkins is in the midst of unveiling his own software startup after the New Year. The idea has been brewing in his mind for about a year (you can’t know, it’s top secret.) While he’s been a part of other startups in the past (VentIQ, Control-F1), this is the first time he’s taken the reins. For others like him, he suggests making modest, achievable goals from the outset. “You hear people say, I wish I had a million dollars,” he says. Chances are that’s unattainable. You can’t always strive to build the next Facebook. Rather, with his latest startup Jenkins set numerous “milestones” to hit over a short period of time.

Jenkins says the main inhibitor is not a lack of initiative, but a lack of “stomach to take on the risk.” So, when the day-old whiskey and gin stop roiling in your gut, swallow your fear and get to work, he advises. And don’t worry too much about feasibility right away. There are networks to join and classes to enroll in where you can get the conversation started.

Edmonton and Calgary are hotbeds for startup companies. Whether you’re creating video game software or a data-gathering website, there are places to go to get schooled before you dive in. One place to go is DemoCamp Edmonton 17, held on Jan.18, 2012. There, all the tech advice and business questions you have can be directed towards people who understand the nature of successful startups. “Networks exist more than ever,” he says of the event. It can get you thinking: “Okay, who’s going to use my product.”

Of course, that’s just in Edmonton. There are Democamp events in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Hamilton, Halifax and other cities as well. Just Google them.

Pieter Boekhoff, owner of the online problem-solving outfit Fenture Solutions, says taking the first step is all it takes to make a gleaming idea tangible. “It really all came down to making one small decision first,” he says of Accelerator YYC, a tech startup incubator based in Calgary. He started Accelerator YYC along with Victoria and Christian MacLean just over two months ago. Entrepreneurs looking to launch their businesses can sign on for six months use the rented space in downtown Calgary. In that space entrepreneurs can network, research and consolidate ideas before Boekhoff will “release them into the wild,” he says.

The office space provides an environment most business hopefuls wouldn’t find elsewhere, Boekhoff contends. “It’s a huge exposure space,” he says. It also allows people to sink their teeth into a project before entering the early stages of running a business. “A lot of people find (that period) overwhelming.”

It goes without saying that the commitment must be there. Jenkins, now the director of business development for iomer internet solutions inc., will be leaving his post to pursue his startup fulltime. The single biggest detriment to your fledgling startup will be a lack of initiative, not business sense, he says.

So, stop swilling back cocktails and get to work. At the very least, take an idea that’s been used and refine it, Jenkins says. That’s what many recently successful startups have done. “Today’s ‘new breed’ of startups are really focusing on building and improving, and then reiterating.

If you passed Paul Graham on the street, you wouldn’t think much of the quiet, middle-aged white guy wearing a button-down shirt and khakis. That’s unfortunate, because if his revolutionary ideas were absorbed in our economic brains, the economy would be in a far more advanced place.

Graham is in charge of an operation called Y Combinator. If you’re not a coder or entrepreneur you may have never heard of them but Y Combinator is the Mount Olympus of the startup geek world. Getting into the program is what every dude (participants are overwhelmingly male) with an entrepreneurial bone in his body wants to do. It has successfully nurtured and started hundreds of different consumer Internet startups since 2005 including Scribd, Reddit, Dropbox, Posterous and many others and has spawned a host of copycat start-up accelerators and incubators.

It works like this. Twice a year it invests a small amount of money (an average of $18k) in a large number of startups. The founders move to Silicon Valley for 3 months during which they work intensively with the Y Combinator partners to get the company into the best possible shape, help with building their project and refine their pitch to investors. At the end of each cycle there is a Demo Day, where the founders present their slide deck and pitch to investors.

Success has followed around Y Combinator for a number of reasons. It helps that Paul Graham is brilliant. If you can clear some time in your schedule, go read his essays (this one on How to Lose Time and Money is a particular favourite). But aside from his brilliance, there are some structural no-brainer factors that make Y Combinator a success.

• It attracts extremely motivated outside talent
• The presence of high quality, hands-on mentors
• An investment environment that understands the products being built

And, of course, there’s the willingness to fail. The willingness to accept that your original idea might not be correct and that you will have to change your business if you want it to survive. Called a pivot in geek speak, a term coined by entrepreneur and lean start-up swami Eric Ries, it’s shorthand for acknowledging that your original assumptions were incorrect and changing your business based on this new information.

This is essential in the startup world; it’s not like opening a Laundromat or a 7-11. Startups are inherently risky ventures that are seeking to capture new value in markets that don’t exist yet. When you’re trafficking in unknowns, failing gracefully, consistently and continuously are important to your survival. Sometimes (OK, often) the companies involved are outright failures but you can’t read a successful entrepreneur’s bio without coming across a couple of previously failed ventures.

Michael Parkatti is a manager of economic research and analysis with the Government of Alberta and a former entrepreneur. He’s been involved in three different startups, with one of them being a project that went through Y Combinator in 2008.

“One of the biggest problems in our society in terms of quashing innovation is the negative social perceptions around failure,” says Parkatti. “We shouldn’t be afraid of failure. The more startups you have, the more arrows you have to hit the target.”

Parkatti has experienced failure as an entrepreneur firsthand. His Y Combinator startup, Mindmobs, was a project that went through many different permutations, but at its core, it was an online app to help make large groups of people make better decisions using what’s called the Delphi method. It didn’t work out, the passion for the project waned, life intervened and Mindmobs passed away.

It quickly becomes a tiresome cliché if you hang out in startup world for too long, but you’ll hear this lionization of failure over and over again. It’s a gigantic change of pace from the mentality that drives the resource-based economy of Alberta and indeed Canada. Alberta’s relationship with failure is far more straightforward. If you failed, you’re obviously deficient and that makes a lot of sense. When all you have to do is get the oil and gas out of the ground, when you can’t deliver the goods, you’re not worth investors’ money. It’s not like you’re taking gigantic risks with your life savings on an idea that hasn’t been proven yet. You don’t have to go out there and sell the barrel of oil you just drilled; there is a gigantic open maw of a market out there. If you fail in that world, it’s likely because you weren’t very good at your job.

Still, Parkatti doesn’t regret a minute of it and calls it one of the best, most productive experiences in his life.

“It’s hard to characterize what kind of productivity a human being is capable of until you put yourself in that kind of situation,” says Parkatti.

He and his co-founder rented a house in the area and worked from there. There were weekly dinners with a speaker and there you’d catch up with the other founders, show off your progress and bounce ideas around.

“To be truly successful in any startup, you have to put yourself in that pressure-packed situation where either you succeed or you fail. Y Combinator is just a distilled version of the full-time entrepreneurial process. You have a 3-month time period where you’re going to have to show something at the end; if you don’t show anything, you’re done.”

This burn-the-boats mentality finds you with highly motivated entrepreneurs solving problems and creating products in places that people aren’t even aware of yet.

Kevin Swan is a venture capitalist with Inovia Capital. A farm boy from central Alberta, he fell in love early on in his professional career with the energy and excitement surrounding startups. He cut his teeth at one of the first social networking startups, Nexopia, which was based in Edmonton and targeted at teens. Athletic and tall with dark hair, he looks like a former high school quarterback.

Swan loves startups but struggles with their sometimes random nature.

“As someone who’s been involved with startups for so long, it’s almost a little disheartening that most of the successes you see are from people who’ve backed into them. From people trying out an assumption, failing and then figuring something else out,” says Kevin Swan.

This flexibility you see when it comes to failure really stems from something very basic. Entrepreneurs don’t really know what they’re doing. They’re making it up as they go along. They may be super confident that they’re going to solve the problem and become a success but typically they have no idea what success will even look like. If this kind of humility was applied to other sectors of the economy, imagine what could be possible.

You think politicians or bankers or executives have any idea what’s going on with the massive systems that they’re in charge of?

The economy of the future is going to have to be able to adapt. It will have to be lean and nimble and deal with upcoming shocks. An economy that embraces the geeky ideas of Paul Graham and Y Combinator is the only kind of economy that makes sense.

What happened when American banks and automaker were not allowed to fail in 2008? While the U.S. government may have stopped a sudden catastrophic collapse, did they do more harm than good? Think of all of all the subsidies that prop up otherwise harmful activities that would fail given the correct price signals. Your McBurger is only under $5 because of a complex raft of government assistance programs. The cookie-cutter housing developments on the fringes of cities with names that evoke the Italian countryside are propped up through preferential zoning and tax breaks for new homeowners.

Of course, there are certain things you don’t want to fail – the state, the social safety net or the foundation of your house – but there are major portions of the vampire squid economy that need to fail like cheap Walmart alarm clocks.

Bigger, faster and cheaper failure is important to the continued existence of the economy and it’s time we talked about it like adults. Our world is rapidly becoming more volatile: climate change, global aging, peak oil, ecological collapse, rising food, financial markets run amok, the list goes on. Global markets and hypercompetition are only increasing. Our most talented people will not settle for a lifetime of humdrummery and office routine. Those who can’t fail will end up stagnant and struggling. This applies to individuals, corporations, cities and states.

The accountants, bureaucrats, politicians and economists who are in charge need to realize that it’s time to get serious about failure. The ability to churn out trillions of mass-produced widgets at the lowest cost with the least amount of defects no longer defines success.

Embrace failure and simultaneously embrace success.

Mark Holtom knows a thing or two about waiting. Along with his business partner Ben Bertrand, Holtom has learned first-hand that taking an idea from the pilot stage to production requires a solid business plan, a lot of money and even more time.

Unlimited featured the entrepreneurs and Innovequity, their company that aims to change the way buildings are constructed, in a six-part series called Project Start-Up. From January 2009 to November 2009, we followed Innovequity’s birth and growth and the milestones in between, covering topics from the initial business plan to efforts to secure cash flow. While Holtom and Bertrand reflected on what worked and what didn’t, a panel of experts shared their thoughts.

Fast forward over a year later and Holtom and Bertrand are still slogging away and slowly approaching the point of commercialization of their product, a machine that automates the construction of walls and floors of inhabitable and industrial structures. “As a whole the process just takes longer,” says Holtom of running a start-up company. “You have to just add an increment of time and increase it for how long you think it’s going to take in business.” If you think a task is going to take two days, Holtom says there’s a good chance in actuality it will take a few weeks.

While Holtom and Bertrand likely know the term “time-consuming” better than most, their efforts are producing very real results. In a warehouse in Drayton Valley last September the entrepreneurs watched their prototype finally come to life. The automated prototype of Innovequity’s primary product, the Geometric Construction System (GCS), started up, and the results were as impressive as expected. Twenty minutes later a full size floor, complete with heating, ventilation, plumbing and electrical lines, was produced, all without human hands. The ability to automate the manufacturing of modular structures will save money and time and increase the consistency and quality of the product, the entrepreneurs say.

“The success of the technology and proving that [the prototype] works was definitely the largest highlight,” says Holtom of the past year. “We’re getting really close [to commercialization], but we’re not at that hump yet.” Now that the prototype functions, Innovequity must ensure that the structures it produces meet regulations and building codes. If this step of the business process mirrors the previous ones, time will likely be the dominant theme. “It really does take just time, period,” says Holtom. “Even if you send a simple document to someone to review, they have to review it, and then their council has to review it, and then they have to suggest changes, and suddenly getting a simple loan contract signed can take two months, when in my simple non-bureaucratic-red-tape brain I think that should take two days.”

Holtom’s observations align with the advice lawyer Hector MacKay-Dunn offered Innovequity in Unlimited’s January 2009 issue. MacKay-Dunn was part of the expert panel that weighed in on what Bertrand and Holtom were doing right, what they were doing wrong, and what they should do next. Set a realistic time frame, was MacKay-Dunn’s advice: “Every time you do something the first time, it takes longer than you expect.” That has been Holtom’s experience exactly, and it’s one that he now reluctantly accepts. “When there are so many levels of balances and checks, that’s just life,” says Holtom. “And that’s something that I’ve just grown accustomed to.”

Launching the company during a recession created further slowdowns, as funding from both provincial and federal sources tightened. “It took longer to get everything done, but things still moved forward,” says Holtom, noting machine shops were not as busy so completing those tasks worked well. Understanding the research and development side of the business has also proved to be a learning experience, one that Holtom says Innovequity has become better at navigating. “There are jobs in just being able to get government grants,” says Holtom. “It’s been ridiculous how many times we’ve been asked since we’ve raised these kinds of funds, ‘Can you come do that for our company?’”

Aside from practicing patience, there have been some highs for Holtom and Bertrand. Innovequity won the Screeners Award of Merit at TEC Edmonton’s VenturePrize competition, an accolade presented to a business plan submission that shows excellent promise. “That award is given to highlight and encourage promising start-ups,” says Kendel Ferrier, program co-ordinator at VenturePrize. With the award came media exposure, monetary compensation and, in Holtom’s words, credibility. “Our business plan is an award-winning business plan, so it validates that and it really helped out,” he says.

Additional excitement has come from longtime Innovequity supporter NAIT signing on as a shareholder and the hiring of one more employee. New employee Louis Hui is based in Ontario and is responsible for business development, including looking for business opportunities in Eastern Canada. Looking forward, Holtom says Innovequity is in the midst of exploring potential markets and is negotiating between marketing the product towards disaster recovery efforts and staying within commercial Canadian markets. His belief in the product and its potential continues to push him and the business forward, even if it is a slow go. “It’s been a learning process and it still will be,” says Holtom.

The most obvious reasons for starting a business are monetary. Profit, money and wealth draw entrepreneurs out of regular employment and tease them into starting their own businesses. But in some cases, it’s the power of an idea rather than the temptation of the dollar which leads entrepreneurs to start new companies. In these cases it’s a labour of love and Unlimitedmagazine.com caught up with three Alberta entrepreneurs who are working through the difficult and unprofitable first stages of building a business.

The Schoolteacher

Founder: Steve Boyko

It’s past 8 p.m. and one Sherwood Park teacher is grading his students work under the electric light at a local Starbucks. Marking papers and coaching basketball doesn’t leave Steve Boyko much additional time to devote to his new business, Koofa, but he works into the night undaunted.

Koofa is an Internet-based career mentorship program for students. Boyko says the program would have benefited him as a young student. “Mom thought I would be a good auditor,” he says with a smile. He realized at 10:30 a.m. on a career-shadowing field trip that he wasn’t bound for an auditing career.

Boyko has now worked for three years as a teacher and spends what spare time he has growing Koofa, a project he’s been developing since last summer. He wants to build Koofa into a profitable company that human-resource managers can use to engage with students directly. Students in turn, are able to get career advice directly from working professionals and human resource managers. As a teacher, Boyko thinks his system is a big improvement on existing resources for students.

“My hope would be that I can branch this little project into a company,” Boyko says. He sees benefit, and revenue, accruing from both corporate and student-based user groups. While he realizes that Koofa’s ability to generate income might only happen after major time spent in product development and networking, it’s a goal that he thinks is achievable.

Still, Boyko is learning the entrepreneurial ropes. Like many similar entrepreneurs, he’s taking the time to learn how to take a product to market. He’s learning to build a network and create support for his company. Boyko has also engaged the help of successful entrepreneurs who will guide and mentor him through each step of the company-building process. Boyko’s experience is not unlike that of other entrepreneurs, who try to take a product from the idea stage to market – all while working full time.

The Dynamic Duo

Founders: Trevor Belsher, Sean Healy

Sean Healy

“I started in the restaurant industry 23 years ago,” Trevor Belsher says, his hands wrapped around a frothy cappuccino, “and the music I heard back then I still hear today.”

Belsher manages an Original Joes location in Edmonton’s Varsity area close to the University of Alberta. Belsher, with business partner Sean Healy, intends to build their music-inspired start-up company, Robot Rhythm, into a revenue generator, but realize that requires a major time commitment. Both continue to work full time – Belsher at Original Joes, and Healy doing software development – but are trying to get their product into restaurants across the city this year. While Belsher tries to market the product, Healy serves as the operations manager.

Robot Rhythm is their early stage start-up, which, according to Belsher and Healy, should give restaurant managers more control and more creative input on the musical playlists which set the tone at restaurants across the city.

For Belsher and Healy, launching a company in their spare time is a daunting task; it can require countless hours and while both will continue to work, they hope Robot Rhythm will become a profit producer. Despite their optimism, the pair are approaching the marketplace cautiously.

Belsher and Healy attended Edmonton-based angel investor Randy Thompson’s entrepreneur boot camp for coaching on launching their business. Belsher learned a major lesson at the camp: “Ideas are kind of worthless,” he says, “it’s the execution of the idea that’s important.” Belsher will begin testing Robot Rhythm at his Original Joes location this January. Healy says, other restaurants have begun expressing interest, but the pair want to work out the kinks in their system, before officially bringing it to market.

Belsher says that setting an appropriate tempo in a restaurant has a major effect on the place’s atmosphere. It’s as important as good music at a house party, Healy says.

The business plan includes a subscription service to the software, coupled with mobile applications on smartphones. The mobile apps, the partners say, will let managers control what songs are played in their restaurant but also allow customers to make requests. As a result, Belsher says, the requests will provide a feedback platform that lets a manager match the restaurant atmosphere with what the patrons want.

The Music Man

Founders: Christian MacLean

Between his leading role at a successful consulting business, launching Start-up Calgary and founding a new tech company, the last six months have been draining for Calgary entrepreneur Christian MacLean.

MacLean is using his spare time to work on a new social media application called Cardinal. “We’re looking to curate your existing social network,” MacLean says of the new company. Cardinal is a tool that lets users on social networks like Twitter and Facebook post and share their favourite music. The concept is simple; MacLean thought of it as he listened to Alexisonfire’s latest album, Old Crows/ Young Cardinals, and wanted a way to share his music. While the tool might not be profitable immediately, MacLean – and the nine-person team working to grow Cardinal – isn’t discouraged.

For MacLean, entrepreneurship is a labour of love. Given his already overloaded schedule, it couldn’t be anything else. “We’re hoping in the next 18 to 20 months to have really nailed down what the revenue stream looks like.” At present, Cardinal is a free download on Apple Inc.’s mobile application store. While MacLean intends to continue offering Cardinal on other platforms, like the Android system, for free, he thinks the company can become profitable by collecting music data.

If Cardinal is able to understand what people are listening to, what’s popular and what key influencers are saying about music, MacLean says, that information would have a clear monetary use for artists and record labels.

The excitement in MacLean’s voice is palpable as he discusses Cardinal, the start-up company that he intends to spend the next two years developing. “There’s nothing quite like [starting a business] and meeting some amazing people and capturing that lightning in a bottle. I know that’s a cliché, but that’s kind of what it feels like. Honestly, the air crackles.”

While the company isn’t generating cash flow, MacLean doesn’t regret pouring six months of his time into the project. “Would I do it again?” MacLean repeats Unlimitedmagazine’s question incredulously. “I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Showing up at the office in the same style of outfit a colleague is wearing is one thing. Showing up in that colleague’s old clothes is quite another. With the new “swaptorium” Thredup, that’s theoretically possible. Frequently called the fashion world’s answer to Netflix or Zip.ca, this internet start-up offers a kind of dating service for shoppers.

Here’s how it works: you tell Thredup what kinds of shirts you want and also upload details about shirts you no longer wear. The company, which was a semi-finalist in the Harvard Business School’s business plan competition, then matches your clothes with new owners while you’re sent items that meet your fashion criteria, all by pre-paid envelope. Thredup is a “network effects” business. Each new member improves the experience for the existing members, the company explains, by adding their thredup-able closet to the mix.

The only caveats: no bartering, no photos (to keep it simple) and no MC Hammer pants. One more thing: Thredup has a Golden Thredup Rule to send only what you want to receive. 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

In 1714, the British government used the power of crowds to solve one of its most bedevilling problems: how to navigate ships across oceans and seas. Any competent sailor could use the sun to tell latitude, but determining longitude was a bit tougher. This was pre-GPS, when captains relied on dead reckoning. That’s the official term. In other words, they launched into vast dark waters with little more than educated guesses to guide their ways. The government offered 20,000 pounds to anyone who could reliably determine the longitude of a ship at sea. This was an early form of what we have come to call crowdsourcing. Back then it went by a name you might expect in a Herman Melville story: the Longitude Prize.

Fast forward roughly 300 years to 2006, when writer-turned-media clairvoyant Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in an article for Wired, and then wrote a book on the topic. Quick definition: Crowdsourcing takes a job traditionally performed by an individual or small team and outsources it to the “crowd,” a large, undefined group of interested people. (Howe has a much more exact definition on his website.)

Ever since Howe introduced the idea, companies have been refining their techniques to harness the power of crowds. The following organizations have used crowdsourcing to improve the customer experience, find gold and, of course, make money. They’ve done it through cash rewards, appealing to a vocal niche of people who wanted a hand in creating the products they consumed and by building vital online communities.

Threadless

Nobody makes money off of T-shirts, right? Well, Threadless does. Members of its online community submit T-shirt designs that are put to a public vote. A small per cent of the most popular designs are selected for printing and sold through the organization’s online store. Designers of those T-shirts receive cash, store credits and positive reinforcement from their peers (go, team, go!). Threadless has sold out every line of T-shirts it has produced and generated $17 million in revenue since 2006. It sells an average of 90,000 T-shirts a month. In fact, the Calgary-based crowdsourcing platform Chaordix gave them a perfect rating in its case studies of crowdsourcing campaigns.

Why it worked: Threadless has a built-in positive feedback loop. A designer who has their design chosen not only gets the cash but he or she tell anyone who will listen about the achievement. The company’s advertising and new customers come from the people who design the product they sell. Simplicity itself.

TomTom Map Share

GPS navigation system TomTom uses the wisdom of the crowds to provide a better map for customers. Its Map Share program lets users collectively update and fix maps. Changes are submitted, verified by TomTom and sent to Map Share community members, improving the quality of the maps that TomTom customers use. In December of 2008, Map Share recorded its five millionth map improvement. “To put this five million milestone in perspective: a one-hour trip made anywhere in North America or Europe will be influenced by 20 to 30 Map Share updates,” president Jocelyn Vigreux said.

Why it worked: Map Share has a simple interface that pays it forward – if everyone fixes problems, everyone gets a better map.

The Goldcorp Challenge

Goldcorp was a struggling Toronto based gold mining company beset by labour trouble, high costs due to mining inefficiencies and anxious shareholders, until CEO Rob McEwen did something no other mining company had ever done. McEwen published the geological data of Goldcorp’s 22,260 hectare Red Lake Gold Mine on the web and ran a contest with $575,000 in prize money to participants who submitted the best speculation about where to look for gold. The challenge spread throughout the geological community and more than 1,000 people participated. Contestants identified 110 possible targets and more than 80 per cent led to gold for both the company and contestants. Since the challenge started, Goldcorp has found eight million ounces of gold – an excellent return on its $575,000 investment.

Why it worked: This hefty cash prize captured the imagination of thousands of online prospectors. If we were talking about, say, molybdenum instead of gold, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Dell – IdeaStorm

Dell asked customers how to improve its products and service via Ideastorm.com. The Linux community responded with a loud, organized cry for computers without Windows. Dell listened and now it has a foothold in a small but growing market. The company has sold computers with Linux for the past two years, and while Dell hasn’t released exact numbers, “If the program wasn’t successful, we wouldn’t be able to continue it,” its Linux expert Matt Domsch told Computerworld.

Why it worked: The company listened and followed through on the ideas its customers presented. Ideastorm website also has an area that keeps tabs on the progress of its crowdsourced suggestions.

Netflix Prize

This movie rental company wanted to improve the predictive software that recommends movies to customers based on their preferences so it turned to the masses with a challenge: design a program that is 10 per cent better than Netflix’s in-house software and earn $1 million. Over three years, thousands of teams tried to solve the problem. The final winner saw multiple team mergers and the prize came down to one submission being in 20 minutes earlier than the other. Netflix immediately announced a second contest.

Why it worked: The prize of US$1 million brought out the software developers, but the leaderboard and vibrant online community built around the challenge kept their interest.

iStockPhoto

Stock photography was an expensive, time-consuming way to purchase photos until upstart iStockPhoto came along. With the proliferation of high-speed networks capable of handling larger files and easy-to-use digital cameras, iStock jumped in with a $1 price point and thousands of photographers eager to contribute and make money from what was often just a hobby. iStockphoto was eventually sold to Getty Images in February 2006 for US$50 million in cash.

Why it worked: It invented the microstock industry, fostering a loyal and active community through forums, emails and face-to-face events. Startup Review suggests its success is thanks to “the financial livelihood of a segment of [its] users. One reason that iStockphoto has such an active community is that their power users have personal, financial ties to the overall success of the company.”

What did I miss? Tell me your best examples of businesses using the power of crowdsourcing in the comments. U

Eric Poulin had never attempted a back flip until he tucked into a giant terrain park jump at the Lake Louise ski area. Some of his first attempts were not pretty and the falls should have hurt, maybe even broken a bone. Instead he said, “Falling felt great.”

Board Member: Aaron Coret (bottom left, in ballcap) of Katal Innovations

Poulin is an adrenaline junkie with a high tolerance for pain, but his confidence is more than an athlete’s brash ignorance of the risks of the sport. Lining the landing zone – the place where Poulin’s body should have collided with enough force to paralyze him – was a five-foot-thick air pad designed to cushion the worst terrain park wipe-outs. “It’s like landing in deep [snow],” Poulin says. “When you fall the pad absorbs all the force you give it.”

Known simply as the Landing Pad, Poulin’s cushion was designed with intimate knowledge. Aaron Coret, one of the designers of the pad, is in a wheelchair today from a bad crash in Blackcomb’s terrain park. As he lay in a hospital bed, Coret came up with an idea for a product that would help other people avoid the dangers of the sport. Along with Stephen Slen, his business partner and a fellow engineering student at the University of British Columbia, Coret’s nightmare evolved into a school project and now into Katal Innovations, the company the duo started in 2007 to sell the Landing Pad around the world.

The 15-by-27-metre pad is anchored below the lip of a terrain park jump and runs to the end of the runout zone. An air compressor fills two chambers to a combined width of 1.5 metres. Miss a jump and the pad softens the landing; land properly and it feels like landing on snow. Coret and Slen hope Landing Pad will help prevent accidents like the one that cost Coret his passion, but they have two other objectives: to create a safer way for top level skiers and boarders to learn new tricks. If they succeed, Landing Pad could open terrain parks up to a whole new group of riders. “The terrain park is a fantastic place, but it can also be a scary place,” says Coret, who looks at the Landing Pad as a way to give back to the sport he still loves. “I want to bring people into the freestyle, who are afraid of going in the terrain park or half pipe because they’re afraid of getting hurt. I want to create a new safety standard.”

With the help of an angel investor, Katal was able to build its first prototypes. After a few private test sessions on the Blackcomb Glacier in summer 2008, Katal rolled out its latest incarnation in May 2009 at Lake Louise’s terrain park. On what is traditionally one of the slowest weekends of the year, more than 365 people showed up to give it a try.

Bolstered by that success, the duo is now busy balancing fourth year engineering courses and launching a company. A private investor has come forth with a much-needed injection of capital. (The specifics haven’t been finalized and Coret declined to provide details.) Factories have been sourced and they’re working now on finessing the business model and pricing.

“We realized that if all we did was sell Landing Pads we won’t be able to support ourselves in a few years. We need a continual income,” Coret explains. The plan is to lease to resorts three sizes of pads – the original size, a smaller “beginner” version and an off-snow model – on a yearly basis, providing a service and warranty to go along with the product. For Katal this plan ensures they don’t sell themselves out of work and that they retain some control over how the pad is advertised and used.

This control is about more than monitoring their image – it may help limit their liability. Katal Innovations will train ski resort staff to properly set up and manage the system, help create guidelines for use and develop signage and instruction for the public. Coret’s wants the Landing Pad to become an industry standard that will work with terrain park signage. In exchange, he says, ski hills get a new product to offer their customers, a safe program that should reduce injuries, first aid costs and liability, along with additional revenue by charging a service fee to use Landing Pad.

Now all they need to do is make some sales. Ski resorts and camps all over the world, from New Zealand’s Snowpark to Lake Louise, have already perked up and Katal is taking the Landing Pad on the road this winter to resorts across North America. Coret and Slen will measure lift ticket sales to use in their sales pitch and create a grassroots interest among riders. “Ski hills rely on snow to draw crowds,” says Coret, adjusting his straight brimmed ball cap, just off centre. “But weather patterns are changing. In a bad season they need something else to create the draw. We think this is it.” U

Only a few blocks from what is said to be the windiest corner in Canada – Winnipeg’s Portage Avenue and Main Street – I’m trying to read a map that keeps flapping in my face. Lucky for me, Jason Marshall, a bike courier with a thorough knowledge of the city streets, glides up and asks if I need directions. “I do it whenever I see someone with a map,” he says. Marshall, who boasts he’s the seventh cousin of Louis Riel, recently started a courier company called the Messenger.

VITALS: Jason Marshall, 35, bicycle courier, Winnipeg

How long have you been couriering in Winnipeg?
Six years. About a year ago, I went independent. There’s only about 30 messengers in Winnipeg. It’s tough. Probably 20 of those jobs are below minimum wage. To be a successful courier, you need to work five or six years for another company, move up the ladder, get to know the streets, the clients. When I landed a few big clients, I started my own company.

Now I love my job. I used to be tied to a radio, listening for jobs, but now I’m on call for myself and 100 per cent of the money I make goes to me.

How much ground do you cover in a day?
Anywhere from 30 to 70 kilometres, which is about 15 calls. Here in Winnipeg, we ride city-wide, unlike Toronto and Calgary where many couriers just work the downtown. It takes about an hour to get to the outskirts of Winnipeg. Sometimes I get a call from a downtown client and I’m trapped out there. But I’m never late. I wouldn’t be in business if I were.

Has the recession hurt the courier business?
Winnipeg is booming right now. There’s a new museum going up [the Canadian Museum of Human Rights] and tons of other construction. Everyone needs couriers to deliver documents, architecture plans, that kind of thing.

What’s the worst part of the job?
It can get hairy here in the winter. You wake up, there’s three feet of snow and a blizzard outside. You have to be ready. I wear three pairs of long underwear and shirts, two toques, Gore-Tex underwear and socks. People always ask which season is busiest and it’s definitely the winter. But I love it – winter challenges you physically and makes you do more every day. 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.