Barbara Kozicki traveled to New Zealand’s North Island or was she called there? She visited the cultural centre at Rotorua to eat a Hangi meal (based as it is on a 2,000 year old Maori tradition of using super heated rocks and in-ground cooking techniques) and to buy a Poi set to further her interest in traditional Maori fire dance that she had already self-taught in Vancouver for six years. Little did she know that her month-long stay there would bring her insights and take her to a new place in her life that would change her irrevocably.

Babara Kozicki’s Maori Poi Fire Dance
Poi represents Flight of Birds/Wings Move Leaving Butterfly Patterns

While in Rotorua, she met a Maori girl who became interested in her after watching her first buy a Poi set and then start playing with her new purchase. They agreed to meet up again later at Barbara’s hostel.

Barbara told the girl that her interest in Poi stemmed from a video she’d seen four years before. The girl asked her, “What video?” So Kozicki hummed a few bars/part of the tune she’d heard on that video. The girl jumped up and said, “I know it!” Together, they looked online and found it. The girl said, “That’s my Mom, that’s my sister, there’s my Dad, my Uncle.”

The tiny hairs on Barbara’s neck stood up–she knew that somehow, four years after the fact, she had arrived at her second home. Faith and hunch had found this girl whose family had made that video which inspired Barbara to take up Maori Poi Fire dancing in the first place; it was an insane coincidence. Serendipity at work.

Maori Poi Fire Dance at Hnatyshyn Foundation gala, VSO School of Music, Vancouver BC (April 25, 2012)

Next Barbara traveled to a living village to learn how to make Poi regalia. Turns out the pupu skirt is made up of flax, cut and braided. She also had to learn how to dye it. Then she watched a performance.

Someone on stage said, “There’s a member of our audience who should be dancing with us,” pointing at Barbara. The next thing she knew, she was running up on stage where they gave her a poi set and then she was performing with their group.

The following day, Barbara went to buy an outfit but was told, with apologies, they had just one set left. Fittingly, the bodice was exactly her size; it was as if someone had measured it perfectly for her 5′8″ frame.

Barbara Kozicki, Vancouver BC

More synchronicity.

As her stay with the Maori came to an end, she met up one last time with her friend who said, “You are Maori on the inside but white on the outside because you were born in the daylight.” It was a marvelous moment for Kozicki.

…

Coming back to Canada imbued with the spirit of the Maori, Barbara wanted to perform her art but was rejected and criticized because she could not possibly be authentic. She had to struggle to find her place in the culture wars.

Hurt and discouraged, rejected in her own nation, she fought the ban eventually coming to be accepted and then one day featured on the main stage at Calgary’s Canada Day celebration. She was home, again.

…

Barbara says that, “Poi is not like Hulu. There is no right/wrong. Poi is a way to communicate music in movement.

“There is no written history of Poi either. It is said that men did Poi to exercise their wrists in preparation for for warfare. Women were forbidden Poi moves. So they did it in secret instead. But when the men saw them do it, their beauty and grace, legend says they then decided it was OK. After that, women who excelled in Poi were highly prized.

“Women became so proficient at it that it was then used to distract enemies before war so one tribe could wipe out another.

“The Maori are a very musical culture. They incorporate new music as well as traditional forms. It is a very inclusive culture which is why it is so strong in New Zealand and so enduring.

“They taught me that if you have any Maori blood in you or just their spirit in you, they will raise you up in their culture as one of their own. Interestingly, Poi is compulsory in elementary schools in New Zealand.

“Using fire in poi is a modern invention; it’s a way to make it more showy, give it more wowza! For someone to do it alone, as a soloist like I do, is very unusual. Often you will find 30 or 40 women performing together. They can even do poi sitting, aka boat poi!

“I guess I brought something original to this artform. I made Poi sexier! With wiggling hips and me dressed in evening gowns performing at really high speeds. My Maori friends like it.”

…

Barbara does some private teaching but like most accomplished individuals, she has little patience with average performers, so her pupils either have talent, focus and passion or they are toast.

She adores performing and loves to mentor others. She recently showed ten women how to turn their Poi fire dancing into supplemental incomes.

She is an actress, screenwriter and, of course, a Poi fire dancer. She is also an environmental activist with a particular interest in ocean conversation and consequently an inveterate letter writer.

One of her proudest achievements to date is a (successful) letter-writing campaign to have Loblaws pull canned shark fin from their shelves.

Kozicki won a William and Nona Heaslip award for academic achievement, leadership and community involvement totaling $15,000 per year for three years while she was at UBC and also a Hnatyshyn Foundation early career grant for the performing arts for $10,000.

…

Like many artpreneurs, Barbara wants to give back to her community and teaching, mentoring and environmental lobbying are ways for her to do that. But she is also reluctant to take money for her work as a teacher or mentor and in this I think she is wrong. Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs all believe or should believe in fair trade, value for value. Sometimes they seem to have trouble saying, ‘I’m worth it!’

One of the things I have tried to do in a career of teaching architects and other creative professionals is to explain to them that it is OK to talk the language of business. Great architects like Douglas Cardinal can do that; Michelangelo could do it. All of us need the favour of patrons to survive; people who cherish us and our work. It is often abundantly clear that creativity and design contribute hugely to creation of new economic value but, for many artpreneurs, sadly, death is a career move. They see so little of it while alive.

Don’t let that be you.

@ProfBruce

Running a successful business is a balancing act, an intricate puzzle requiring skill, determination and passion to make everything flow smoothly. However, if something happens to you, a partner, or a key stakeholder can the company continue to operate effectively?

Ryan Ricci

Chaos can result when a stakeholder dies without a succession plan in place – even if you are a start-up. If this happens you may suddenly find yourself in business with your partner’s spouse, children or parents. Or conversely, your children may be responsible for running a business they don’t fully understand.

Creating a buy/sell agreement with help from your lawyer in the event of the death of a key stakeholder is crucial for business continuity. That agreement details how the deceased partner’s ownership of the business passes to other stakeholders, protecting their heirs, surviving stakeholders and the business. Funding the agreement is equally important, and it does not have to be costly or complicated.

You and your business partner can protect one another, your families and your business for as little as $50* per month. Securing a corporate-funded life insurance policy would promptly provide tax-free funds for outright purchase of the deceased stakeholder’s share of the business. It’s a solution that’s simple, cost-effective and it avoids the introduction of new – perhaps unwanted – partners.

Take a few simple steps now to plan for your company’s growth with a funded buy/sell agreement.

Ryan Ricci, BA
Life and Health Insurance Advisor
Desjardins Financial Security Independent Network
ryan.ricci @ dfsin.ca
T: 613 829-7874 x 256 C: 613 614-0197

(*For illustration purposes only. Based on a healthy male, age 35, non-smoker, $250,000 coverage of term insurance at April 20, 2012. Rates and conditions are subject to change.)

OTTAWA (May 1, 2012) – The winners of the 2012 Exploriem Bootstrap Awards Fastest Growing company were announced at the Mayor’s Breakfast on April 27th at City Hall. From the five finalists StoneShare won first place, Renaissance Repair and Supply was awarded silver and YOUi Labs walked away with bronze.

On accepting their award StoneShare reflected on their entrepreneurial journey to date,. “We have been working so hard for so long – this award is a welcome reminder to pause, take stock, and celebrate,” said Nick Kellett, Chief Technical Officer of StoneShare.

“As an entrepreneur you have a debt of gratitude to the people who help you. Entrepreneurs pay that back through hiring people and supporting their local community. It’s an honour to be recognised in front of our community,” said Len Andersen, Chief Executive Officer of Renaissance Repair and Supply.

The Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on self-capitalized businesses. “Bringing in capital is twice as hard, but it puts you in control of your own destiny. YOUi Labs has won many awards, but bootstrapping is something that really resonates with us,” added Jason Flick, President of YOUiLabs and bronze award winner.

Ginsberg Gluzman Fage and Levitz LLP (GGFL) see their sponsorship of the awards as a way of supporting the local business community. “We are a firm of entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs so this award is a natural fit for us. Our practice is focused on helping entrepreneurs and family owned businesses achieve their goals,” said Deborah Bourchier, Managing Partner of GGFL.

Exploriem would like to thank all event and category sponsors for continuing to support local entrepreneurs. “Entrepreneurs and start-ups create more jobs and opportunities than all government incentives put together. Exploriem plays an important role in fostering start-ups and entrepreneurs,” emphasizes Larry Poirier, Chief Executive Officer of NITRO IT, Exploriem board member and Ottawa investor.

-30-

Notes to Editors (synopsis on winners follows)

Please email kennedy.alana @ gmail.com or call 613.315.4537 to obtain a quote from or an interview from Exploriem/sponsors or the winners.

About the Winners:

StoneShare

StoneShare is the preferred destination in Ottawa-Gatineau and Toronto for SharePoint specific products and services.
Founded in 2007, they are a Microsoft Gold certified partner and specialize in planning, development and implementation of SharePoint-specific business solutions. Collectively, their team provides decades of experience in Enterprise Content Management Solutions, Collaboration Solutions and Enterprise and Self-Service Social Applications.

Renaissance Repair and Supply

In today’s competitive environment, business and infrastructure costs are critical and re-used assets are an obvious option to increase return on investment. Network quality and reliability are paramount to the success of a telecom business. Renaissance Repair and Supply strives to provide quality remanufactured assets that allow increased profitability and reliability for its customers.

YOUi Labs

YOUi Labs next-generation user interface technology and services enable tablet, smart phone and personal electronics manufacturers to differentiate their products by offering a fresh and compelling user experience. The YOUi Labs platform provides industry-leading graphics performance that significantly reduces time to market and makes devices fun and easy to use.

About Exploriem

Exploriem is a registered Canadian not-for-profit organization. It provides mentorship, conducts events, creates networking opportunities and provides early stage funding and office incubator space to assist young entrepreneurs in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec.

Today Exploriem is led by its Executive Director, Professor Bruce Firestone who is perhaps best known as Founder of the Ottawa Senators. He is also Entrepreneurship Ambassador at University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, Real Estate Broker with Century 21 Explorer Realty Inc. and Author, Quantum Entity. For more information, please follow @Exploriem and @ProfBruce

About the Bootstrap Awards

The Bootstrap Awards and Adawe Trade Show is an annual event hosted by Exploriem to honour entrepreneurs in the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on businesses that use self-capitalization techniques to fund their enterprises.

For more information contact:

Alana Kennedy
Marketing & Communications
613.315.4537
kennedy.alana @ gmail.com
@AlanaKennedy

On accepting their award StoneShare reflected on their entrepreneurial journey to date,. “We have been working so hard for so long – this award is a welcome reminder to pause, take stock, and celebrate,” said Nick Kellett, Chief Technical Officer of StoneShare.

“As an entrepreneur you have a debt of gratitude to the people who help you. Entrepreneurs pay that back through hiring people and supporting their local community. It’s an honour to be recognised in front of our community,” said Len Andersen, Chief Executive Officer of Renaissance Repair and Supply.

The Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on self-capitalized businesses. “Bringing in capital is twice as hard, but it puts you in control of your own destiny. YOUi Labs has won many awards, but bootstrapping is something that really resonates with us,” added Jason Flick, President of YOUiLabs and bronze award winner.

Ginsberg Gluzman Fage and Levitz LLP (GGFL) see their sponsorship of the awards as a way of supporting the local business community. “We are a firm of entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs so this award is a natural fit for us. Our practice is focused on helping entrepreneurs and family owned businesses achieve their goals,” said Deborah Bourchier, Managing Partner of GGFL.

Exploriem would like to thank all event and category sponsors for continuing to support local entrepreneurs. “Entrepreneurs and start-ups create more jobs and opportunities than all government incentives put together. Exploriem plays an important role in fostering start-ups and entrepreneurs,” emphasizes Larry Poirier, Chief Executive Officer of NITRO IT, Exploriem board member and Ottawa investor.

-30-

Notes to Editors (synopsis on winners follows)

Please email kennedy.alana@gmail.com or call 613.315.4537 to obtain a quote from or an interview from Exploriem/sponsors or the winners.

About the Winners:

StoneShare

StoneShare is the preferred destination in Ottawa-Gatineau and Toronto for SharePoint specific products and services.

Founded in 2007, they are a Microsoft Gold certified partner and specialize in planning, development and implementation of SharePoint-specific business solutions. Collectively, their team provides decades of experience in Enterprise Content Management Solutions, Collaboration Solutions and Enterprise and Self-Service Social Applications.

Renaissance Repair and Supply

In today’s competitive environment, business and infrastructure costs are critical and re-used assets are an obvious option to increase return on investment. Network quality and reliability are paramount to the success of a telecom business. Renaissance Repair and Supply strives to provide quality remanufactured assets that allow increased profitability and reliability for its customers.

YOUi Labs

YOUi Labs next-generation user interface technology and services enable tablet, smart phone and personal electronics manufacturers to differentiate their products by offering a fresh and compelling user experience. The YOUi Labs platform provides industry-leading graphics performance that significantly reduces time to market and makes devices fun and easy to use.

About Exploriem

Exploriem is a registered Canadian not-for-profit organization. It provides mentorship, conducts events, creates networking opportunities and provides early stage funding and office incubator space to assist young entrepreneurs in Eastern Ontario and West Quebec.

Today Exploriem is led by its Executive Director, Professor Bruce Firestone who is perhaps best known as Founder of the Ottawa Senators. He is also Entrepreneurship Ambassador at University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, Real Estate Broker with Century 21 Explorer Realty Inc. and Author, Quantum Entity. For more information, please follow @Exploriem and @ProfBruce

About the Bootstrap Awards

The Bootstrap Awards and Adawe Trade Show is an annual event hosted by Exploriem to honour entrepreneurs in the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. Bootstrap Awards are unique in that they focus on businesses that use self-capitalization techniques to fund their enterprises.

For more information contact:

Alana Kennedy

Marketing & Communications

613.315.4537

kennedy.alana@gmail.com

Exploriem has been working hard on developing a membership program to help accelerate business growth within the Ottawa Start-Up community. Exploriem has reached out to many organizations in the Ottawa Area that have agreed to provide Exploriem members with discount services in an array of areas to help economic development. Below you will have a sneak peek at organizations that have already committed to partnering with Exploriem with many others in the process. Discounts from these organizations are just some of the features that will be offered through the program.  We will have different levels of membership available for Startups.

Committed Partners include:

• RBC Royal Bank – Banking services
• EyeVero – Marketing and Communications
• bluArc – Hosted Business Phone
• Ginsberg Gluzman Fage & Levitz, LLP – Accounting and Bookkeeping
• Perley-Robertson, Hill & McDougall LLP – Legal Services
• FluidSurveys – Market Research
• HazlowLaw Professional Corporation – Legal Services
• Shotgun Show™ – Video Marketing
• Stimulus Strategies Networking – Networking
• Liverpool Court Studios – Video
• Vittorio Automotive – Auto Leases/Repairs
• jaiTec Solutions Inc. – Human Resources
• Knightsbridge Foreign Exchange – Foreign Exchange
• LanguageAdvice.com – Writing and Editing
• Moncion Technical Services – Technology Consulting
• Movingboxes.ca – Moving Supplies
• MySelfStorage – Self Storage
• North Innovation Fund – Venture Capital and Private Equity
• Halpenny Insurance Brokers Ltd – Business Insurance
• Ottawa Senators Hockey Club – Sports and Entertainment
• Peitho – Sales and Marketing
• Alpha App Studios – Software and App development
• Century 21 Explorer Realty – Real Estate Services
• Fitness Anywhere – Nutrition and Fitness
• Investors Group – Financial Services

For more info on membership and/or partnering with Exploriem please contact Erika at egodwin@exploriem.org or by phone at 613.566.3436 x 215

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, April 16, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.)

When you first meet Len Anderson in his company’s bustling headquarters—a capacious Kanata office building on Leggett Drive which looks more like a warehouse once you are inside—you are struck by his sense of humour and calmness given that he is in the eye of a storm which is taking Renaissance Repair from 0 to potentially $100 million in sales in just six or seven years.

Renaissance has an irresistible value proposition—for OEMs like Alcatel, Cisco, Huawei and Ciena or telecom companies like AT&T, China Unicom, Verizon, Bell, Sprint, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telefonica, Docomo and Movil—about 80% of their networks run on legacy equipment, highly complex hardware, software and firmware that almost no one knows how to fix and repair anymore.

These companies all have huge teams of engineers and technicians but they focus almost exclusively on leading edge technology. Still they can’t afford to rip out tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of investment in their systems every time something goes wrong with their older equipment. And where can you find engineers who understand legacy equipment? Why in the city that designed it in the first place—Ottawa and Nortel engineers did that.

So Renaissance has a vast supply of engineering talent that can solve these technical issues plus an endless demand for its services, worldwide.

It sounded like an opportunity and a viable business model to Mr. Anderson when Nortel folded underneath him. He was there for nine years and five months running NT’s used equipment buyback, storage, remanufacturing, remarketing and recycling business. He was responsible for all used gear transactions globally which meant that when Nortel’s last CEO, Mike Zafirovski, cratered the business, Len was ideally situated to start out on his own.

“I got Renaissance off the ground with $20,000 from my credit card and an understanding wife,” he says smiling broadly.

(Mr. Anderson has used this line once or twice before, no doubt. His family lives to the east—in Rockland—so his trip to and from work each day in Kanata is one hour. He did not want to move them; they are settled in that community and plan to remain there so he uses his transit time for calls. We can only imagine what his cell phone bill looks like.)

During his first year in business he did what most self-capitalized entrepreneurs do—he hustled. He bought and sold (flipped) used equipment—not much different from what you see on TV when they try to flip houses at a profit. But in Len’s case, he actually had some expertise—he possessed asymmetric information that allowed him to value other people’s discards accurately. It’s a riff on buy low/sell high. By the end of year one, he was sitting on $1 million in cash.

His next step was to build a bigger pipeline—to rent and fit up a larger space. ‘How hard can that be?’ Len thought. Six months later, he had his lease and a few months after that they were operational in their new location having spent all their money and more on real estate. “It was ugly,” Mr. Anderson says. “We didn’t know anything about real estate but our Landlord certainly did. We negotiated uphill all the way. We didn’t even know how to spell ‘BDC’ when we moved in,” he adds with a laugh.

BDC is obviously Business Development Bank of Canada who came to their rescue with credit support as did Yves Tremblay, founder of Purple Angel and Cesar Cesaratto who runs their team, as well as friend, investor and confidant Larry Poirier from Nitro Microsystems.

Staff will double or triple in size this year to perhaps 60 or maybe even 90 people. Len has found that startups put so much pressure on everyone that some of his employees crumple and leave. Staff turnover has been at 50% although that is coming down as they cull the herd and learn to hire-up. They have brought in an experienced HR leader in Kim Waite who has made meaningful changes in this crucial area.

There is no doubt in Mr. Anderson’s view that the talent they need is here not in China, India or even the US, UK and Germany. Every time he learns that an OEM has declared another product line a ‘legacy’, you can hear cheering at Renaissance as well as at places like Pythian. Pythian* is another Ottawa-based success story that works with legacy products—they run database management networks for companies like CBS, Electronic Arts, Telesat, Forbes, Toyota and Nordion.

(* You can read more about Pythian, How to Establish a Sustainable Competitive Advantage, here: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2482 and Becoming an Entrepreneur by Paul Vallee here: http://www.eqjournal.org/Paul-Vallee-pythian-speech-30-march-2011.pdf.)

Mr. Anderson does yoga and kickboxing plus he cross country skis every night with a headlamp on his head—to try to unwind and relax. “You know I never expected to run my own company and sometimes wonder how I ended up doing this,” he adds, pointing with his arm to millions of dollars worth of equipment sitting on shelving or being worked on/repaired by engineers and technicians all in blue lab coats.

Asked if he is building the company to sell or hold on to, Mr. Anderson says, “We’ve already had three inquiries about that but I have a good support network and we want to see what we can do with all of this.”

Professor Bruce M. Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators; Author and Executive Director, Exploriem.org; Broker, Century 21 Explorer Realty; Entrepreneurship Ambassador, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. Follow him on Twitter: @ProfBruce

In 1953, Arthur C. Clark predicted (in his novel Childhood’s End) that by the turn of the 20th Century, long distance would cease to exist. The Browser, Email, IM, My Space, Skype and others (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ et al) came along around that time to make his prediction largely come true and then some.

There has never been a better time in my view to start a new enterprise. The tools that are available, many of them free or near free, are infinitely better than at any time in human history. I recently downloaded to my iPad 2 word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software for around $10 each. It wasn’t that long ago that this type of software cost $700 or $800 or more. I also got a fine draw program for $1.99. Many of the free apps on my iPad are essential to my daily workflow including Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox and various Google apps. It’s amazing.

But I wrote this primer on Twitter for beginners because I believe that Twitter, which is outward facing in a way that its competitors are not, brings with it a level of utility beyond other social media that benefits entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to a great degree. Imagine being able to communicate, two way, with the world for free. To influence your clients, customers, suppliers, colleagues, partners and sponsors in a way never possible before.

So I am a big believer in Twitter, despite its unfortunate name, for professionals. As I said I like it better than Facebook for those purposes because Twitter is an outward-facing service while Facebook (or Google+/LinkedIn) are gated universes. For me, FB is about friends and family. Twitter is for friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, co-workers, direct reports and fans—but remember ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ and I am not sure I want to be friends with fanatics.

Just imagine for a moment, if you are a young Twitter user and new to the service, that when you are my age (60), say 30 or 40 years from now, you could have 1,000 followers or maybe 5,000 or possibly 50,000 or even 500,000. If you change jobs, need a job, start a new enterprise, learn something cool, participate in an event, need input on a new logo, want to run a poll on a new product or service, want to share information, feel like speaking your mind, need an apartment, want to organize a meet-up, publish a book, write a new blog post, need more clients, have to find a new supplier, whatever, you can broadcast a message that will be instantly seen by everyone who follows you.

(Obviously, young people agree with me. Teens are migrating to Twitter from Facebook and where teens go, the future follows. Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit organization monitoring tech habits, showed 8 percent of teenagers using Twitter in late 2009 and the number doubling to 16 percent by July 2011. Of the teens with more than one social network account, by July 2011, 99% were using FB and 29% had adopted Twitter as well. Teens like the simplicity of Twitter as well as the fact that they can have multiple accounts and multiple (anonymous) personalities too which can be useful when organizing different social groups or, for that matter, protest groups like OWS or the Arab Spring.)

You can DM (Direct Message) your followers privately, you can mention them publicly using the @mentions feature (recently renamed @connect), you can create lists of certain groups (like I do for my former students).

You can follow people of interest to you and see what they are doing, what they are reading or watching and learn from them. You can tailor your follow list so that it includes news on subjects of interest to you—which might include current events or obscure subjects of interest only to a handful of people on the planet including you.

I also integrate Twitter into the classes I teach—every student must have a Twitter account (which is free) and follow me. That way, when I answer questions like: ‘Hey Prof, when is my essay due?’ I can tell the whole class with a single tweet instead of, say, 45 emails, using the hashtag feature (which the Twitter community apparently created). We use: #ec3396 and #MBA6298, which are course codes preceded by the ‘#’ sign (which is nicknamed a hashtag).

I’ve been using hashtags to mark things on the Internet since I hand built my first website in late 1992 or early 1993, Methuselah-aged places now.

The Hashtag Symbol on Twitter

Every tweet with #ec3396 in it will appear as a group. So students can see not only answers to mundane questions like the one above but also answers to more substantive questions. This hashtag feature allows cross-conversations to develop where it isn’t always the Prof talking to his or her students or vice versa but students helping each other and, other students seeing what is going on, jumping in.

I will have much more to say about hashtag conversations soon.

The @mentions (@connect), favorite and retweet features allow you to give props to a follower or, for that matter, anyone on the service. You can expose your followers to a new Twitter user who has something relevant to say to your group. One thing you should know is that @connect only show up in your Twitter feed and that of the person you are mentioning so that if you want to give them wider exposure you can retweet them or use another Twitter convention: put a period in front of their name so it shows up in the feeds of all your followers. So rather than use @ProfBruce (my Twitter handle), you would use .@ProfBruce.

Twitter’s intra-community communication is still a bit clunky. If you can’t remember someone’s Twitter handle, just put the @ symbol in the Tweet bar plus the first letter or two that you think starts their name and Twitter will auto-fill with suggestions. This will save you a lot of time finding names. It’s another reason why you don’t want to give yourself a Twitter name like @K00lyst_Dood87. Twitter has an absolute limit on name length (14 characters) and you’ll want to keep it short anyway since you and everyone else will only have 140 characters to work with. (This length is based on the original limit on SMS Messages.)

Twitter’s own search capability is pretty rudimentary and most folks looking for people on Twitter will actually use Google’s search bar. Just type in ‘Bruce Firestone on Twitter’ and Google will almost always perform better than Twitter search. Twitter is not particularly solid when it comes to backing up your tweets either. They kind of appear and disappear at random intervals. Every so often you can just copy your tweets to a word doc as a sort of crude back up. Then, you also own them. You never know if Twitter might one day decide to cut you off for some reason. There are services you can use like http://twistory.net/user/ProfBruce to back up your tweets but when I tried it, it only backed up a 1,000 Tweets which is not enough for someone like me.

You’ll want 2 develop a certain amt of shorthand that works 4 u and ur Twitter followers but u don’t want it 2 b completely indecipherable 4 ppl who read ur stuff either. :–)

When you respond to an @connect of your name, give the person you are responding to some clue what it is that they originally said. Huh? That’s right, people forget what they tweeted out with your name in it. If you Tweet ten or more times per day, when you see someone has responded to an @connect you did yesterday, you may not have any idea what they are referring to. Twitter is now helping with this by providing more context for Twitter conversations by adding ‘in reply to’. So if you click on that, you can see the history of this conversation. They’re getting better at what they do.

Still here’s an example from my Twitter account:

.@DaveCHale That, my friend, is crap. How u tie ur tie is not important. Never judge a book by its cover: http://bit.ly/i1h7VH

A couple of days later, maybe David writes me back: “@ProfBruce Really liked that link.”

Well, friends, two days in my life in the Twitterverse and in RL (Real Life) is a long time—I will do hundreds of things in that interval, so this response will probably draw a complete blank. A better response would be: ‘Liked ur link about not pre-judging ppl including those Microsofties from the 80s.’

(Note that Twitter has recently fixed this by adding an ‘In reply to’ feature, ed. March 2012.)

If something is really important to you, you can tweet it out at different times of the day. Not everyone is sitting at their PC or watching their smartphone waiting for you to Tweet something. I don’t like to repeat my Tweets but I will if it is meaningful and important for the community.

I did that recently to make sure as many entrepreneurs as possible got their nominations in for the Bootstrap Awards before the deadline. I even went so far as to run down my list of followers and send out as many messages as I could individually using the @connect feature, one at a time. This will definitely get their attention but don’t do it too often, otherwise, it’s a form of spam.

You can individualize the backdrop to your Twitter home page (I use a photo collage of the things I have been involved in like the founding of the modern day Ottawa Senators, the establishment of our not-for-profit, Exploriem.org, my affiliation with the Telfer School of Management and so forth). You can and should link it to a secondary site that is meaningful to you (I link it to my blog) and hopefully to the people who follow you.

Prof Bruce’s Background Image for Twitter

Faces count, especially on the Internet, so don’t use an avatar of yourself, a caricature or an animal to represent yourself. Just you be you.

Use this:

Prof Bruce’s Image on Twitter

or my summertime avatar looks like this:

Prof Bruce’s Summertime Avatar

Not this:

Brett Serjeanston’s Image on Twitter

Ever think about the first two proto-humans who met at a water hole and decided to not try to kill each other but instead to cooperate by forming a village for mutual protection and intra-tribal trading? They did it because they (correctly) interpreted, first, the signals from the other person’s face and then their body language; i.e., that they weren’t hostile. (See: Teamwork in the 10th Millennium BC,http://www.eqjournalblog.com/?p=862.)

So make sure your Twitter place is a welcoming sight.

You will want to use a URL shortener. One of the main uses of Twitter is to include links in your tweets to interesting places on the web. Most URLs are too long for Twitter with its 140 character length. So I used to use bit.ly. Before that I used to use tinyurl.com but for obvious reasons, bit.ly is better (6 characters versus 11*). It’s a free service and bit.ly basic will even keep some history for you—if you check back an hour or a few days later**, you can see how many people have clicked on your link which will give you some idea of what interests your audience and what doesn’t.

(* I hope you will NEVER have a business model that can be knocked off as easily as this. Even bit.ly’s business is threatened by Twitter’s own URL shortener, t.co which is obviously as short as these things can be. The shortest TLDs, Top Level Domains, are 2-letter country codes. T.co is now available to regular Twitter users as well as power users (that’s shorthand for large media companies who have made a deal with and pay Twitter for the privilege) so bit.ly is in tough now***.)

(** Many of these free services will only keep track of your data for a short period after which they will delete your traffic history or make it unavailable to you unless you upgrade to a paid service. So if there is something you may need longterm, save it yourself somewhere safe.)

(*** You can now type long URLs into your Twitter feed and t.co will automatically shorten it.)

Many power users of Twitter like Guy Kawasaki (with more than 500,000 followers) tweet dozens of times a day (actually more than 60 tweets per day on average by him) and Twitter is an integral part of their business. Guy runs AllTop.com, a news agglomeration site, and I would guess that links that he includes in his tweets are one of, if not the primary, generator of traffic for it. I no longer follow Guy because he tends to overwhelm my twitter feed and I am really more interested in Twitter as a 2-way communications medium than a firehose of promotions even if they are from a clever guy like Guy.

One of the things that you will want to do is use Twitter as a ’social’ media which means you will engage in conversations. Kawasaki uses it mainly as 1-way narrowcasting of (mostly interesting) content. I try to answer as many @connects as I can and all my DMs.

Like many Twitter users, I spend about 10 minutes a day on the service because I integrate it into my workday. I check out what friends, fans and followers are saying or doing from time to time, just to take a break from normal work. And when I am meeting someone or working on stuff and I trip over something that I think my friends, fans and followers would find interesting, I jot down a note to self on my iPad and add it to my Twitter feed later or use my Twitter app on my iPhone (which is much better than my FB app) to do it right away. Twitter also allows you to add photos and videos you take or make to each tweet either from your PC or tablet or using your mobile app/smartphone so you can be a very au courant news, instant source for your followers. Just ask people who are in the streets fighting for their freedom around the world how important Twitter is to their revolution—these social media which turn everyone into powerful news channels and connect people in a hard to disrupt network are the real weapons they use to fight oppression.

Kawasaki repeats each of his Tweets a few times per day. He does this because, when you have more than 500,000 followers from all points of the Globe, they aren’t all going to be on Twitter the first time he decides to tweet something out and also because he is in the business of goosing traffic numbers on AllTop.com. But for most of us, less is better: try not to bore people or have them think you have an inflated opinion of yourself.

Awhile back, I attempted to put a value on Twitter accounts. The methodology is based on an old advertising formula that uses CPMs (Cost per Thousand Pairs of Eyeballs) to value exposure multiplied by the estimated number of thousand people to see your work. CPM varies a lot: from $3.50 per thousand for bus boards to $15 or $20 for high end magazines or newspapers to as much as $60 for high quality, targeted Internet ads* and $120 for 1,000 pieces of direct mail delivered by CPC (Canada Post Corporation). I used $50 per thousand for my calcs.

(* Facebook ads are a marvel of precision in terms of targeting a geographically specific audience or a particular socio-economic group. See how Jennifer Schweers of UrbanLensPhotography.ca in Vancouver bootstrapped her wedding photography biz to success using just $500 worth of FB ads over three years. All she had to do was wait for people in that city to change their status from ‘single’ to ‘engaged’ et voila, a FB ad showed up near their wall or timeline: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2981.)

Estimating the number of people who see each tweet is quite complicated; I’ll leave it to the avid reader to look carefully at my spreadsheet and see how I did it. You can download my spreadsheet in .XLS format from: http://www.eqjournalblog.com/ValueOfYourTwitterAccount.xls.

Anyway, here are my results for three Twitter users:

Twitter User/No. Followers/Avg. Tweets per Day/Twitter Account Value (est.)

Prof Bruce 690/5.4/$1,793.41
Guy Kawasaki 256,188/60.4/$6,986,771.58
aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) 5,312,333/10.6/$8,635,196.29

Another way to look at the above is to ask the question: What would you have to pay Guy or Ashton not to tweet? I think for both it would be in the millions so maybe my estimates of value are not too far off. Now you might cleverly ask why, with a puny value of less than $2,000, I bother with Twitter. The answer is: I like it.

How you actually use a tool like Twitter is completely up to you but one thing you mustn’t do is think of it solely as a marketing program. It isn’t ‘Social Marketing’, it’s ‘Social Media’. Remember, it’s about communicating and also about learning and educating; it’s about authenticity, sharing, listening and speaking out. Twitter isn’t just about broadcasting, it’s about communicating. What it’s not is just a shill for your products or services or even your research and writings. As former student, Ryan Anderson (@RyanAnderson) told me when I first logged on to Twitter years ago, it takes a while in blogging or micro blogging to find your voice but when you do, it’s very gratifying.

(If you are new to Twitter and, as many of my students feel, you don’t think you have anything interesting to say, try this: tweet once a day for 90 days. Don’t stop, you’ll get the hang of it.)

Even though it isn’t marketing, per se, social media is part of your personal (or corporate) brand. So indirectly, it may help you sell more products and services, find a cool job, stage a successful event, what have you. But that is not its primary mission. However, if it helps to build your brand that will help you build a trust relationship within your community and, at the end of the day, people like to buy from people they like and trust, so be mindful.

When I first saw Twitter, most people were asking and answering the question: ‘What are you doing?’ Later, Twitter prompted you with the question: ‘What’s happening?’ Now they just say: ‘Compose new Tweet.’ What you don’t want to do is tweet out things like: ‘I have a hot date with my wife tonight.’ Nobody is interested in that except you and, maybe, your spouse. People I find more interesting and content on this micro-blogging service that is likely to have legs (i.e., last) is when they answer the question: ‘What are you thinking?’

As mentioned above, Twitter’s search tool is not as good as it one day will be and searching your own Twitter feed is a bit of a nightmare so you can ‘favorite’ your tweets and, hopefully, reduce the time it takes you to find, say, a useful link you tweeted out that you need right now. I also created a log of my tweets (basically, a series of word docs with all my tweets in them) and put them on our server so: a) I could search them and b) I could own them instead of Twitter. It’s all a bit clunky but no doubt it will get cleaned up in the fullness of time. If you want to find someone on Twitter, you are much better off the put ‘Jane Doe on Twitter’ in your Google search bar and let Goog do the work for you. There is no doubt that their search tool is still the best on the planet. (BTW, there is an @JaneDoe on Twitter– it’s the twitter channel for a Massachusetts-based organization against domestic violence.)

I only wish the Internet was where it is at today when I was 22 like most of my students. I love the tools that these amazing kids have created for us to use for free, like the original Netscape browser, Skype, FB, Twitter, Word Press, Google docs, Dropbox and so much more. I believe the Internet is about where electrification was at about the same stage and age (remember, the public Internet is still just a teenager only about 19 years of age). Electrification evolved over a century or so into something that changed every aspect of our lives and you cannot possibly have a modern economy without it. The Internet will evolve and reshape everything we do—it is and will continue to eat industry after industry. It will overlay reality and 50 years from now its capabilities will be unimaginable. In other words, I can hardly wait to see what it will be when it grows up, if I last long enough.

I created this Twitter primer for some of my colleagues at the University of Ottawa who have asked me if Twitter is worthwhile and how they might be able to use it too in their teaching. It may save them and me a bit of time to have them read this before I give them a fifteen minute how-to demo. It also might save them a few years of frigging around with Twitter. The interface and use of Twitter has some subtlety to it.

You can and probably will have multiple Twitter channels. My main account is @ProfBruce but recently we’ve added @BootstrapAwards, @Exploriem, @BizModelComp, @OC67, @Century21Expl and others. We can narrowcast with these other Twitter feeds and be more openly commercial with the latter without compromising the integrity of @ProfBruce. People who follow @Century21Expl are presumably folks interested in commercial real estate and so they will want to watch this feed to see if they can pick up any commercial property that suits their portfolio or budget or learn any ‘tricks of the trade’ so to speak.

We recently decided to build a new website (to be called TheLandStore.org). We also grabbed the Twitter handle that goes with it (@TheLandStore) which, these days, you also need to do. The former will include our inventory, the latter is, of course, our newsfeed. Facebook accepts Twitter’s API so when you tweet out something using, say, @TheLandStore, it’ll also appear in your newsfeed on FB and FB pages and plenty of other places too (for example, on my blog or on some of our websites). In this way, you can create timely (hopefully interesting) content for multiple sites from ONE platform.

I would not buy any URL today without getting the exact @Twitter equivalent whenever possible. I would also probably try to get the identical Facebook page vanity URL too. So if you are buying ProfBruce.com, try to get @ProfBruce and Facebook.com/ProfBruce too. You only have a few seconds to impress someone with your brand so why make it harder on everyone if you own ProfBruce.com but your twitter handle is kool_dude-1990?

You can use Twitter clients like HootSuite to manage multiple Twitter feeds plus Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm and WordPress profiles too. You can add Twitter’s mobile app or HootSuite to your iPhone or smart phone and your iPad and update your Twitter feed from anywhere. Twitter has also made it a snap to add photos (and videos) to your tweets from their iPhone app. They’ll be added to a free yfrog.com account which you can log onto using your Twitter user id and password.

Here’s a coupla tweets I put out while I was writing my novel Quantum Entity, We Are All One (Book 1 of a sci-fi trilogy to be released in June 2012*) from my home office in the summer of 2011:

The evening sky outside my office:

It’s not the secret door to Narnia. My home office from just outside:

So some tweets are professional (most are) and some are a bit more personal. It doesn’t hurt to show some of your inner self once in awhile; authenticity matters a lot to Gen Y as it does to most people, young and old.

(* You can read the Foreword of Quantum Entity here: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2932.)

There will be a tonne of services that will latch on to your Twitter id and password (and your Facebook user id and password) as long as you give your permission. This is quite safe as long as you are not on some crappy phishing site or worse.

Twitter’s API (application programming interface) is being adapted to add a social layer to many biz models today. If you can place your enterprise at the centre of a community tied together through the fan/friend/follow/follower model (Twitter is just one option among many you can choose from), it will be much harder to knock off or outsource and kill. It can create a sustainable competitive advantage for you.

People are building amazing services on top of Twitter, using their API. I recently (March 31, 2012 as I write this) used http://tweepsmap.com/ to map where my Twitter followers are from. You can sort by country, state or city. Here is the city map for my followers:

Tweetmap.com tells me: 81% of my followers are from Canada, 71% from Ontario & 59% from Ottawa. What is also cool is that my other followers come from Australia, USA, Chile, Brazil, New Zealand, Japan, France, the UK, Sweden, India, Pakistan and many other nations.

I think Facebook comments was a brilliant move to extend the FB franchise and I think Twitter should respond by embracing that as well. I have never liked anonymous comments—they can be outrageous, libelous and untrue with no repercussions for those posting these sometimes hateful and shameful things.

One thing that Twitter and FB do very well (especially FB) is verify who you are; how many people will follow you if you are a fraud? Folks’ll catch on and drop away.

There is no hard and fast rule about who you follow. Should you follow everyone who follows you? I think you should be selective because, if you have a lot of followers, it’s hard to have a real conversation with 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 or millions of followers. But I also understand the democratic urge to follow everyone back. It’s up to you.

I read on http://mashable.com/2011/12/16/sweden-twitter-acount that:
‘Sweden’s people have officially taken over the @sweden Twitter account—and with the blessing of the Swedish government. One Swedish citizen will control the handle each week, tweeting about whatever they’d like, as part of a new project called Curators of Sweden.

‘No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people. With this initiative we let them show their Sweden to the world,’ said Thomas Brühl, CEO of VisitSweden, the tourism ministry that had been updating the @sweden account since January 2009.

Curating of Sweden is based around the idea that no single voice can represent the country, so a slew of weekly guest Swedish curators will do the best job of portraying their national character.

Now this is a pretty cool idea and I can see a lot of uses for this. Say, you manage the National Gallery of Canada, why not create a Guest Twitter account and let visitors curate the collection for other Canuks?

Outside the National Gallery of Canada: Maman Sculpture*

Companies, not-for-profits, charities, NGOs, political movements could all do a riff on this.

Artful curating is really what Twitter is all about, at least for me and I suspect many people like me. I rely on folks I follow there to curate the world for me—to parse ideas and news from the firehose of information being created each day in the vast Metaverse that the Internet has become. This story came via one of them: Pete Cashmore, https://twitter.com/#!/mashable who has more than 2.7 million followers.

I can see cities setting up @Ottawa or @NewYork this way and letting visitors as well as residents curate towns and cities for each other and the world beyond. Maybe you could create @Cisco or @IBM too although I can see the obvious corporate risks that would come from bad PR generated by obnoxious tweets or offensive ones. But I think that you could formulate an application process whereby people would have to sign up in advance for a chance to be a guest Twitter Master for @IBM or @NewYork and then you’d vet them and screen out weirdos (maybe) or shut them down if they are.

Perhaps it only works in Sweden because they are all nice, non-crazy people. But I would give it a go.

Prof Bruce

(* The giant spider called Maman was created by French-Born artist Louise Bourgeois, who passed away in New York on the 31st of May, 2010, age 98.)

It’s all part of building your personal brand which is incredibly important to entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs. Marketing (i.e., writing/creating your CV) creates a personal brand (for you) which creates trust (in you) which creates an opportunity to sell (yourself, your ideas, products, services, art, time, what have you) in a separate sales process because people like to buy from people they like and trust which is what marketing and branding does, right?

It is quite sufficient if you are POTUS, say, to just have the seal of the President of the United States of America with your full name underneath. That’s it, that’s all. For everyone else, a bit more is needed.

Recently, Murray McGregor (@MurrayMcGregor), editor of my new novel, Quantum Entity, We Are All One (Book 1 of a trilogy coming out in June 2012), challenged me and the world to reduce their CVs to 140 characters, the size of one tweet.

I took up the challenge. Here is mine:

@ProfBruce: entrepreneur/Sens founder/Exploriem.org ed/real estate guru & broker/novelist/peerless husband/5kids+1grandson/EQJournal.org.

See if you can do better!

@ProfBruce

ps. I also created a one page CV ‘About the Author’ for the book. It’s quite sparse but seems to cover enough bases. You can use it as a sample for your own resumé writing. Here it is:

Bruce M. Firestone, B. Eng. (Civil), M.Eng-Sci., PhD.

Bruce M. Firestone is best known as a professor, entrepreneur and founder of NHL hockey team, the Ottawa Senators and their home Scotiabank Place.

In May of 2006, Dr. Firestone joined the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management at as its first Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He has previously taught or studied at McGill University (Bachelor of Civil Engineering), Laval University, Harvard University, University of Western Ontario, University of New South Wales (Master of Engineering-Science, Traffic and Transportation), Australian National University (PhD in Urban Economics) and Carleton University.

Firestone is Executive Director of Exploriem.org, a Canadian registered Not-For-Profit corporation focused on educating and mentoring entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs in Canada and around the world.

Firestone has launched or helped launch more than 168 startups in fields including tech, real estate, design, art and services. He advises clients on business modeling, self-financing, smart marketing, differentiated value, harnessing the Internet, urban design and real estate development as well as issues related to entrepreneurial companies and organizations including not-for-profits and charities.

Prof Bruce has been an operations research engineer, real estate developer, hockey executive, professor of architecture, engineering, business and entrepreneurship, real estate and mortgage broker, writer and now novelist. He is a peerless husband and father of five great kids and one fine grandson.

You can follow him @ProfBruce and read his blog at www.EQJournal.org.

pps. I wrote a bit more on the subject of CV writing. It is at: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=3411.

The sky is falling, the sky is… Many observers of Ottawa’s tech scene seem to think it’s the end of Silicon Valley North but try telling that to David Ross, 90% owner of Ross Video. The other 10% is owned by family and an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan).

“Tech unemployment in Ottawa is something like 2.2%,” athletic-looking, 40-something, father of two teenage girls Mr. Ross says. “So it’s hard to hire in Ottawa—it takes longer. But we are building one of the best companies in the world so they want to come here. I mean, we grew revenues by 47% last year and invest 23% of sales in R&D, where else can you go where they do that?” David is a Waterloo-trained computer engineer.

Ross Video has a 100,000 square foot plant in Iroquois, Ontario where they manufacture many of the company’s products. The real estate is owned by them as well. Their R&D campus on Auriga Drive in the south end of Ottawa is rented accommodation as is their newly acquired Kanata location—they bought the old Norpak company and are using its premises for part of an overall workforce that has now grown to over 400 employees. They had just 25 in 1991. They use Norpak technology to embed information into broadcast streams so advertisers know what people are watching. Nielsen uses their system to produce its TV ratings.

Last year they hired about 100 people and expect to add a similar number this year (they signed up 40 new staff in their Q1 2012 alone). They do all their manufacturing in-house and currently have about 160 engineers on staff.

Prof Bruce interview with David Ross:

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/BDSbfoTBKyQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

David won’t disclose sales but given that many of their products are expensive devices like robotic cameras, it’s a reasonable guess that they are north of $100 million. That division, now called Ross Robotics is based in Belgium; they recently bought a company there which together with one they purchased in Melbourne, Australia (which does video routing—like an old telephone switch only for video) gives the business a broad international reach. Another company purchased in the Netherlands in 2009 forms the foundation for Ross Europe. David wants to be more like Apple than Wal-Mart—sell high end gear that works seamlessly with a great brand to a diverse group of customers in many geographic markets instead of every day low prices.

If you watched the Grammys this year or the Academy Awards, all the titles you see on screen are produced by Ross Video products, software and services. ABC recently bought 3,000 of their fiber cards to move video and audio between their buildings in New York. Ross Video has mastered the art and science of fiber transmission partly thanks to some ex-JDSU engineers who work there. All this is to say that despite some competition from Japan (mainly Sony) and some from Brits as well, Ross Video gear finds its way into pretty much every nook and cranny of the broadcast industry. Companies like JVC (and 29 others) act as resellers for Ross Video technology—they use Ross Video gear as part of their systems—slapping their own label on it.

In just three days at the 2011 National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, Ross Video sold 63 Carbonite switchers at a list price of $40k each. That’s like a car dealer selling 63 cars on a long weekend. They showed it as a prototype, discussed delivery dates then shipped over a month early. They’ve now sold over 500 of these switchers.

Their video servers are like home PVRs on steroids and are for professional use by broadcasters, universities and stadiums. as well as. They are widely used by major touring acts and were also used for broadcasting the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Their equipment is on the ISS (International Space Station) too where it is used to convert video from analogue to digital so it can be transmitted from the space station to terrestrial satellite receivers.

More down to Earth, they make automated production control systems that allow one person with a mouse to produce a live newscast that used to take a room of people to do. 200 TV stations have gone to air with it including ABC’s Word News Tonight with Diane Sawyer and Good Morning America.

Mr. Ross is majority owner, President and CEO, Chairman of the Board. He was CTO too but gave that up in 2011. Ross Video was started by his Dad, John, in 1974 with $3,500 which he raised by selling his plane. They have never taken a dime of Angel or VC money. Through recession and currency fluctuations, they have had 21 consecutive, internally funded years of growth.

David does not want to be like RIM which basically has one product—the Blackberry. “It’s too easy to knock off,” he says. “We sell high complexity, low volume stuff with a lot of customer support and service. It’s not something that the Chinese can easily do, at least not yet, so we’re safe for now. With our robotic cameras you can get shots that were never possible before. Our cameras know where they are and where they are pointed at to an accuracy of one part in a million. We can insert virtual reality into moving images in real time with our equipment. Try that with a human-held camera!” he adds with a boyish enthusiasm for all things Buck Rogers’ish.

Next up is So You Think You Can Dance and there are other fields to conquer. Closer to home, they are redoing Scotiabank Place’s infrastructure so that the Senators will be able to drive their new digital high def screen to the max. “You haven’t seen anything yet, Sens fans,” David says.

Probably his biggest challenge came when they went from 50 employees and one building to more than one location. “Hey, when you are a small company with one plant, the CEO can control pretty much everything by wandering around. But when you get to two buildings and 80 people things start to go wrong.”

So one day, in about 20 minutes, a frustrated David wrote down the opposite of everything they were doing which became the basis for their code of ethics and conduct. It is the foundation for their corporate culture and, after that, things improved. Why I ask? “That code allowed people to self correct. Instead of needing to hear from me or their manager, all they had to do was refer to the code. Is this consistent with our code or not? If not, don’t do it. Our organization completely changed—it became one with even higher quality products and stronger ethics.”

@ProfBruce

Professor Bruce M. Firestone is entrepreneurship ambassador for the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management,; founder of the Ottawa Senators; executive director of Exploriem.org and a broker at Century 21 Explorer Realty. Follow him on Twitter @ProfBruce