Jananas

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!

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