Jananas

I saw this button taped to the cash register at a local used book & music store. It totally made me laugh, because we get e-mails from Rotman about Richard Florida on a fairly regular basis, which is strange because none of us have ever seen him. In my head I think of him a little bit like Polkaroo, in that he’s never around when we are. Hopefully that changes when I’m taking his Creative Regional Strategies course in second semester. And hopefully I won’t feel the same way as the person who made this button and the people who support them! Regardless, it made me smile.

Cam Heaps, from Steamwhistle, came in to talk to our Entrepreneurship class yesterday evening. As I told my professor afterwards, its the first time since I started school that I’ve actually cared about what a speaker had to say to us. It was nice to hear a company talk about their business practices (growth policies, product and marketing focus & development, care about their customers and employees) and without dropping buzzwords, show that they are focusing on sustainable and reasonable growth. More importantly, they seem to be doing so in an ethical manner. This is something that I very rarely see done, although I’ve heard more than one company tell me how good they are at it.

I’ve always said that I want to work for a company that I believe in. I want to believe in what they are doing and what their product is (hey, your best brand advocates should be your own employees). More importantly though, I want to work for a company that has good businesses practices: a company that treats their employees well, their customers well, that isn’t focused soley on revenue growth at the expense of long term viability. So Cam, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to talk to us. You’ve showed me that it is possible to be a successful, growing company and still have ethics and backbone. (As an aside, there is a future blog post in here somewhere about lost business as a result of continued poor business practices and public backlashes. Instead of writing it, I’m going to go enjoy the sunshine and knit.)

So Steamwhistle, your motto is “Do one thing, and do it really, really well”. You’re doing a damn good job!

I just purchased my early bird tickets to attend StartupNorth’s Conference for Canadian Startups. It’ll mean missing my entrepreneurship class, but I think that this is a tad more relevant than what they are trying to teach us out of a textbook (literally in this case).

Speaking of start ups, I completed my second Akoha mission yesterday. I have a bunch of coffee and drink dates set up. I haven’t ‘put the cards into play’ yet, mostly because I’m waiting to give the cards to my friends in person. I also have another mini-project or two to get to this weekend that will be sent out next week as surprise gifts. I’m still really excited by the idea.

I sent a surprise package off to a friend today to complete my first mission (giving someone a surprise gift). I have plans in the work for next week to complete more!

Kardinal Offishall might get a little mad about this everyday rudeboy tea cozey that I made for my friend Jozef, at his request. This isn’t the greatest picture, mostly because my kettle is not a perfect substitute for his teapot… But, well, you get the picture (which is that I do things because they’re funny)! Hey folks at akoha, can this be a mission??