Purpose + Profit: Social Entrepreneur Shares Startup Secrets

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Script:

An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down. Hooey. Yeah, he is absolutely bang on.

You cannot do it by yourself. You need a whole team around you.

If you're in Ontario, I would highly recommend, you know, reaching out to your local community futures development corporations or CFDCs, because they have quite a bit of support that might be able to help you.

Today on Weirdos in the Workplace, I want to talk a little bit about becoming an entrepreneur. And I really don't mean becoming a business owner and I don't mean becoming a solopreneur or a independent consultant. I do mean becoming an entrepreneur and growing a business. business. Growing a business, I have learned, is very, very different when it comes to entrepreneurship versus growing a business incrementally and slowly over time. Entrepreneurship is, at least from my experience so far, much more intentional, much more strategic, and much more growth oriented.

I think until last October, I wouldn't have even really called myself an entrepreneur. I would have called myself a business owner. And then before that, of course, I was an employee in my previous role. And before that, I would have been self-employed. I would have called it being self-employed, which again, is not the same thing as being an entrepreneur. I think entrepreneurial people take significantly more risks. So that's something that I'm still kind of getting used to. And then my husband who is much more risk averse than I am is starting to get used to this idea that, you know, this is going to be a significant time, money and energy investment for both of us, since he's one of the co-founders for the train to hell project. But let me tell you the story a little bit. 

So back in October, 2023, so we're looking at what was like eight months ago now, about eight months ago, because we're now into June, early June 2024. My, my team member, Sarah, who is a friend of mine since grade five, my first friend, if you've listened to some of the podcasts before, I've mentioned her a few times, my first real friend, Sarah, who is now my team member, who is now my co-founder. She has a partner named Tim who is, he's in a wheelchair. He's now quadriplegic. He had MS, was diagnosed with MS, muscular sclerosis, when he was about 33, 32, 33 years old. And so Tim's case progressed quite quickly. Within about four years, he's in a wheelchair and now he is currently paraplegic. So I've been hearing stories about how Tim and Sarah, you know, try to get around the world and how challenging that is. I've been hearing these stories for quite a long time because they've been together for, I believe, around seven years now, something like that. And it's, you know, it's a struggle for me to hear it because I want good things for them and I'm their friend. It's obviously a huge struggle for them. And one of the major issues was that, you know, even though she's good at doing the research and asking around, a lot of employees at retail locations, if they want to go out for, you know, lunch, or if they just want to go to the store, unless it's a large store, like a big box store, the employees usually don't know.

They don't, they're not informed. They don't have the education. They don't have the training to understand, you know, what is, if their location is actually accessible, you know, how they can accommodate different types of people. So it's a really big challenge for them. And it's a challenge that is, you know, common across many, many, many disability categories. Basically anyone who has a challenge moving around the world in any way. And now we know that, you