You Can Do That Here

Home. There are endless metaphors to describe the places we we choose to  eat, live and sleep. Buying or building a home is typically the biggest expense we’ll ever face in our lives, and living in a healthy, happy home is one of the most critical pieces to our overall health and well being. Knowing all of that, it’s perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for the way we build our homes to even begin to change, and start adopting new design principles and technologies to help us build better. Sure, if you asked just about any person who was thinking of building or buying a home that they would love to have an efficient home that didn’t cost that much to heat and run, that is healthy, and full of sunlight, and that has a small environmental footprint. In actual practice however, when it comes to actually building or buying that new house, the general rule of thumb still seems to be to default to the cheapest, lowest cost option. The end result is a housing stock across BC an across the country that is dom

Trails. They represent connections from one place to another, connections between humans and nature, and very much so  a connection to place. They represent connections between people and fun, excitement, relaxation, whatever your pleasure. They often also represent connections between people, collectively sharing the trail together.  Yes to truly get to know an area’s geography and natural self, there is often no better way to do so then to get out on its trails and explore. Step 1, finding said trail, can often be the most difficult part of any adventure, especially if you are new to an area or visiting on vacation. Some trails, and trail builders don’t want them to be found, others are built and promoted as real tourist draws. Either way, finding the trailhead can often require seeking out that critical local intel. In the Columbia Valley with their gorgeous trail network straddling the Purcell’s and the western slope of the Canadian Rockies, they would love you to come find their trails. Not that long ago

The Knowledge worker. The high income earner, not tied to any specific geographic location, moving from project to project be it working remotely with a big company, or launching their own startup. The latte sipping, culture consuming, shopping, volunteering, all around great citizen. Every city would love to have more of them. But if you’re not a natural hub like Silicon Valley, New York, Toronto or a Vancouver, how do you get them? The old adage the Kootenays have leaned on for survival and growth on some level has always been the fact that, if you could choose to live anywhere on earth, why wouldn’t you choose to live in The Kootenays? With the levelling of the playing field in many ways due to the influx of fiber and truly high speed, reliable internet through the region, that dream of being able to live and work wherever you want has come true. Increasingly the migration of folks, largely in the tech and knowledge based world has begun. What would it take however to turn Nelson, The Kootenays, or any sma

Imagine… if you’re from the Kootenays, or any small town for that matter, having the responsibility to fill the positions of every person in town. To populate the city, from the doctors to the teachers, shop keepers to the bartenders, literally thousands of people to hopefully live and work together harmoniously. If it sounds like a huge task, imagine now doing all of that, but on a city that also floats. With new cruise ships being built and launched every year, and each one of them requiring thousands of staff, filling those positions can be a huge job. And if you’re a world traveller at heart, the notion of getting paid to travel the high seas is pretty appealing. Navigating your way from, say, the university campus to working the Mediterranean is also a foreign path for most. If you happened to have grown up on a ship, worked most of your career on a ship, and spent much of that time and more in HR and recruitment for said ships, you’ve probably learned a whole lot about both in the process. Amanda Hathor

Community. Websters describes it as a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. One of the beautiful things about being connected to and part of a community is that it tends to reward those who put energy and effort into to improving the community. Help out a friend, and they tend to want to help you out when you’re in need. Get in with a bunch of folks that all share similar passions, love similar things and pretty soon helping each other out becomes great fun, and everyone rises together to a better place. Think of what the perfect customer looks like…. It probably sounds pretty similar I bet? Now think, just what would that perfect customer look like for your product or service? It’s probably someone that wants to help you out and wants to support you, all because you’re part of the same community. Knowing that, the secret to success starts to appear relatively easy at least at a base level and it all comes down to something we’ve all been taught as k

More and more research is showing that the volume and diversity of bacteria in our guts can be one of the biggest determinates of our overall health, wellbeing, and ultimately, our happiness. Leeza Zerwick of Castlegar, BC, discovered one delicious way to help boost our good bacteria levels while at one-year old’s birthday party. Over the course of the following year she’s taken that initial inspiration from birthday to business. 6 weeks after he launch we got together to hear her story, and find out that she’s got big dreams. Discover a delicious and nutritious drink, watch it improve your own health, turn it into a DIY brewing kit product and retail health drink and sell out your inventory at launch while pursuing major potential, with an endless passion and drive to create Happy Guts the world over? You can do that here.

Plastic. It’s everywhere. Everywhere we want and need it, and everywhere we don’t. From the Pacific Garbage Patch to the nano-plastics that now inhabit our own bodies, the wonder product of the middle 20th century has grown to be a plague on humanity. The downside? It’s also really handy useful stuff, and if we shut off all plastic production tomorrow, we’d be in a pretty difficult spot. So how we solve the problem? We’ve been coming it at it through demand management, trying to promote less use, re-use, recycling and the like. As we all know of course trying to plug the pipe at the end never truly works. Moving to a supply management where rather than using less plastic we aim to use better plastic would seem to be a better route. Plastic that is both more advanced than what we have now, and that was truly biodegradable and non-garbage-patch-building sounds like part of the solution. Darrel Fry of Rossland, BC and his company Advanced Bio Carbon 3D is trying to do just that. In fact, it’s their second go at

Eternal life. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine if we could just eat the right things and do the right activities and keep our self well enough that we could live forever. Would you do it? I bet most people would at least be interested in giving it a passing try. I mean on some level we’re all trying to eat right, lose a few pounds, put on some muscle, get those washboard abs and killer bi-ceps. Where most of us fail, knowingly or not, is simply not having the knowledge behind what to eat, what to do, and having the focus and tools to stick with it. Aaron Davidson of Revelstoke, has long been a bit of a fanatical health nut with that very goal of living forever driving him forward. Back in 2005, putting his computer science masters degree to work he set out building an app as a hobby to track his nutrition and activity to an extremely detailed level. What he didn’t know was that the competition at the time was about to land half a billion in investment. Fast forward 6 years and Aaron has clearly seen the

San Francisco, Vancouver, Rossland... It sounds more like a fundraising bumper sticker than a natural career path progression. That is.... unless you change the values and goals you're seeking out. Sure you'll find a much greater concentration of talent, experience, customers and money in the larger centers, particularly in the tech sector... but, thanks to the fruits of the tech industry, living and working anywhere has fully become a reality for many.  Darin and Summer Recchi made the leap just over a year ago. They had both worked their way up through the tech industry and were succeeding in all of the traditional work and business metrics. What they lacked was time. Making the geographical and lifestyle move from bigger centers to Rossland, BC turned traffic time into family time, and allowed them to enjoy life on a new level while maintaining their tech careers.

Curiosity, inquisitiveness, wonder. A desire to deconstruct, reconstruct, design, create and understand. All of these are traits closely associated with the true innovators through history. Whether it be inventors, entrepreneurs or world leaders. Or perhaps that 5-year-old that just needs his imagination and an environment to explore to create anything out of nothing. When it really comes down to it those qualities are everything required to both ask questions, discover problems, and then create solutions. And if you can identify problems, and come up with solutions, well you’re going places kid and you may just be that next great inventor, entrepreneur or world leader. All of that only happens of course if we’re able to instill and foster those qualities in our kids. Farrell Segall, now of the West Kootenay and originally from South Africa was inspired as a kid by his father’s tinkering and followed in his footsteps. After his father’s passing at a young age he put those problem solving skills to work, first

Community. Whether it’s the five, ten or ten million people that live physically near you or the several hundred or thousands of online friends we connect with digitally, community ultimately comes down to one simple thing: The gathering of people together in a common space. For much if not all of human kind it has been the gathering of people in a common space that has pushed and pulled our civilization forward. To that end, the ability and place to gather is indeed critical to the lifeblood of our communities and our culture. One troubling trend, perhaps best epitomized most recently as the onset of VR has been the encroachment of technology on our time and ability to gather, and thus posing a threat to our community as a whole. Sure VR, just as radio, television, cable, the internet, Netflix and all manner of instant access content has posed a threat to the gathering of people in the past could be a threat, or it could be the next cool thing in the world of theater and cinema. Eleanor Stacey literally and

Stacked Films is the story of a couple of Kootenay Kids who grew up loving action adventure sports films. One (Steve Hall) left town to get into filmmaking. The other (Tyler Hadikan) got into the action as a semi-pro snowmobiler and ended up spending more time behind the lense than the handlebars. Fast forward a few years and they came back together in The Castlegar area, combined forces and launched Stacked Films. Their acceleration since from single hand held camera to 10’s of thousands of dollars in gear, rapidly growing big time clients, stature and experiences can only be described as a dream come true in just year one. Connect with an old friend, combine forces, launch a new film company and in less than a year have a long list of clients, shooting the very action sports films you loved as a kid, be in high demand for commercials and events and have your sights set on cashing a $10 million dollar cheque in four more years? You Can Do That Here!

Why? Why do you do the things you do? What drives your business, career and entrepreneurial choices? How do you decide to take this job or that, start this business or that, chase one idea or another? The concept of a career has changed, morphed and shifted over the years, but for the most part it’s been all about a progression of jobs in a similar field, linking together common skills and growing them over time, and moving up the hierarchy of your industry. An idea we’ve been floating on the You Can Do That Here podcast a number of times is a different way of looking at what a career truly is. Perhaps more so rather than a progression of jobs, a career is instead the motivation or the reason why we choose to do what we do. Perhaps we choose jobs for security, perhaps we choose it to solve particularly problems, or achieve certain goals. Almost every entrepreneur will tell you they are in it to make the world a better place. What we loved about Andrea Bell of Trend Prive Magazine in Nelson BC’s story was her

The Exit. So much of our attention, time and learning, especially in the podcast world is dedicated to start-ups, big ideas, new concepts, product launches and growth. Those are the sexiest times in a businesses life and of course if you don’t have a great launch, everything else is really pointless. But let’s think about the other end of the spectrum, that day, if/when it comes that you decide to sell your business and move on. Interestingly enough much of the excitement around the launch of a company, if not overly clear, is built on the potential for what it could be sold for some day. Yes, much of the money to be made from your venture comes in the sale of the company or your stake in it. While there is a vast resource of knowledge and information on how to successfully start, there is much less out here on how to exit. Seeing a gap in the market, and having experienced successes and failures in selling his own businesses in the past, Scott Duke of Revelstoke set out to fill that information gap, and beco

What are those beliefs and values that you hold dear in your life? Those things that draw a line in the sand on and say “Nope I’m not going there because I believe this and that.”  Perhaps you’re an environmentalist or simply hold nature near and dear to your heart. Maybe it’s religion, family, sports, activities or anything really.  Now look at your work, be that your job, your business or volunteer efforts. Does your work line up with those values? Is your business helping drive yourself and the world closer to those? If not… why not? One of the best ways to increase our own personal happiness, relative wealth, performance and overall satisfaction, is matching up the long hour and hard work we put into our businesses with the beliefs and values we hold dear. Yes, having that strong moral compass provides the why behind the who, what, when and where that we spend our time on, and can be a major accelerator towards the goals we strive to achieve. Steven Cretney of The Forest Communication and Design has let h

Adventure. Webster’s defines it as a verb meaning “To engage in hazardous and exciting activity, especially the exploration of unknown territory.” By that definition the world of entrepreneurship is nothing more than one big adventure. We start with an idea and a plan and then leap into often unknown waters, attempt to navigate around the obstacles, rocks and rapids in our path. Often we spill but we get back up and continue onward, and If we manage to make most of the decisions right along the way we’re rewarded with an awesome time and a lucrative exit out of the river of business The more you think of it, the very nature of tackling a white-water river trip is very much the same as running growing and selling a business. Chris and Andrea Ryman, met through their mutual love of the water and adventures in paddling that led tem to the Kootenays. 11 years later they’ve bought, grown and sold a business, and have been instrumental in growing the paddling community along the way as they look forward to the next

Rik Logtenberg, along with his co-founders launched a game-changing start-up in the events space just over half a decade ago. As the CEO of Time.ly he oversaw a large, rapidly growing team and was in the position of having to constantly make decisions, many of which directly affected the success or failure of his company. Having been a technical guy from the start as a software developer, he had been longing to get back into the coding and development seat and at least temporarily out of the CEO chair. Combining that desire, with his technical expertise and a co-worker who had a similar idea, they teamed up to create the product they wished they had had while with Time.ly.  The end result? A soon to be released full version of a better, cheaper, simpler decision making support software he hopes will change the world for the better.  Launch and run one of the top three event listing/ calendar apps in the world, recognize your passion and step out of the CEO chair, and back into a developers chair, build a bett

What is it you truly love? What are you currently doing as your main hobby? It’s been said over and over that the best way to succeed in business is by doing something you love, by getting deeply into your passion and turning that into your business. Let’s face it, entrepreneurship is far more than a full time job. There’s the classic joke about giving up the 9 to 5 40-hour work week so you can chase your dream and put in 100 hours a week. It sounds silly, why would anyone take that deal? Well it all comes down to the simple principle that if you’re loving what you do, then you never truly work a day in your life. And just like that your 100-hour work week just vanished into spending lots of time on the thing you love. For Josh Secord and his partners at Torchlight brewing, there was a lightbulb moment of sorts while enjoying a fresh growler of craft beer at a North End Halifax nano-brewery. Chatting with the owners over a little lubrication, the thought to take their new found love of craft beer back home to

Bad news… We’ve all been there before when something out of our control happens that dramatically changes the courses of our moment, day, year or lives. It can often be devastating, and have a lasting impact on our lives. As we’ve all heard from many people in many ways, in life it’s not about what happens to us, but rather how we react to it. Entrepreneurship at it’s very core is often born by or fuelled by bad news. It could be the bad news that the product or service you wanted or needed wasn’t available, and so you created it yourself. It could be the likely many bad news, mistakes and failures along the way that drive you to improvement and success. In the end, as in life, so too is entrepreneurship all about not what happens to you but how you react to it. In that sense, as in many others, David Agnew of Crawford Bay BC is very much an entrepreneur at it’s core. For most of his life he enjoyed a busy and successful business career in the oil and gas industry. In a matter of three days that all changed a

Rob van der Laan grew up in The Netherlands, and in addition to wanting to be a rock star as a kid, he had a love of nature. In the largely wilderness free lands of Nether, that connection to nature grew into a love and practice of a new trade. Plying his wares as a horticulturist around The Hague was good, but he dreamed of bigger, more rugged wilderness, which ultimately brought him to Nelson, BC and helped launch his business Kootenay Precision Earthworks. Grow up with a love of nature, pursue that while travelling and working abroad before discovering a gem of a community in a beautiful environment deep in the West Kootenays, emigrate to a new country, learn the rules of the road, find a unique niche where you can pursue your passion for the land and horticulture, purchase a unique piece of equipment and successfully launch a new business? You Can Do That Here!