You Get What You Ask For
What I Learned From the Stumble from College to Start-Up
A condensed eulogy to my university self.
Recently I had the great honour of being asked to sit on a panel for the Young Women in Business organization at my Alma Mater, UBC. This is surprising as I didn’t think they’d let me back in there. Equally surprising was the note I received a week prior informing me that it was not, in fact, a panel, but a keynote speech. The panic and anxiety immediately struck but I hoped that, like so many other times in my life, the most meaningful experiences turn out to be the ones I was unprepared for.
Over the course of the evening my sarcastic sensibilities were deeply moved by the intelligent class of women who are entering into the business world with open hearts, curiosity, and an enviable eagerness I don’t see enough in the work world. These women are the future and we’re lucky for that.
I was reminded what it feels like to be emerging from those hot gates of scholarship and structure and into the frying pan of the professional world. It hurts. You’re afraid. But you’re so much readier and deserving of success than you think you are.
Here’s a condensed (thank goodness) version of the speech I did my best to deliver:
I started writing this speech Sunday night in New York. It was kind of a surreal moment for me because I never thought I would be able to live in Vancouver and work remotely somewhere as mythical as New York City. I sitting on my friend’s couch who lives there. Actually, she’s a model and she has friends named Veronica and Heidi and Molly and Giovanna. This all seems equally mythical. She has a dog named Lucia who she lovingly calls Louis. She lives life on her own terms and she purchased her apartment about a year ago in cold hard cash.
The concept of someone who is my age buying their home in the Lower Eastside and taking power over her own wealth, taking the helm of her career, and making a real life in New York City, seemed like an impossible idea to me even a few years ago. A few years ago, my perspective had not yet caught up with my purpose.
I was born in Toronto and by the age of eighteen, my family had relocated so many times, my life experience was similar to that of an American Army brat. Town to town, school to school, friend group to friend group. You would think this would suck a little bit for me. When you’re eighteen, you want solidarity. You crave security in an impossibly chaotic and unfair world. You want someone to show you a straight path. You want the boy you have a crush on to tell you you’re beautiful and that he’ll use his fake ID to buy you peach coolers. You want to pass Calculus.
This life path would eventually lead to me attending four different universities in five years, don’t worry though, I did graduate from UBC.
I didn’t realize when I was growing up and moving around so much, that I had begun to adopt the chameleon-like tendencies of someone who is always on the move. Someone who is already ready for change, even if it makes me uncomfortable. My saving grace during these years and still to this day, is the fact that even though I couldn’t always see the end of the tunnel, I stayed open, positive, and kind.
I was lucky to have good friends. I learned from a young age that a large part of our success and fulfilment is directly related to the tribe of people, and specifically women, that you surround yourself with.
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Life, especially now in the digital age, is a chaotic hailstorm. What it means to be a woman in 2019 and a woman in business is a rapidly developing concept in a wind tunnel. It’s not easy to define and I don’t think it’s supposed to be. But one thing is certain; you still have to try as hard as ever to carve out and solidify your place at the table. You have to reach like hell for what you want and ignore, to the best of your ability, the limits that others try to project on you. You have to put yourself unapologetically in the way of the life you want to live, in the direct path of the opportunity you need most.
One of the things I love most about my job is the ability it grants me to work all over the world. This kind of lifestyle and business really suits me, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I was going to UBC.
In 2014, I found myself graduating from UBC, after several cities, life changes and chapters of my life had unfolded, still not fully aware that my fulfilment was my own responsibility. That the wandering I had done did not necessarily mean that I was lost. That curiosity would become my greatest virtue. I didn’t realize that the rollercoaster of graduation, grandma flying in, restaurant reservations, robes that smelled like mildew and old men were not the end. I didn’t know then at our most bittersweet moments, at junctures as visceral and terrifying as leaving university, we are really just at the door of our next beginning.
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To take the leap from school to the professional world, I had to quiet my inner voice of insecurity. The one that said: “What am I even doing? Do you have the faintest outline of a plan? Is it a good one? Should you have taken more French classes?” It wasn’t easy, but I knew if I could quiet that voice and follow my gut, I would not be steered wrong. It’s normal to feel like the next you make could be potentially catastrophic, but I would soon learn that I was absolutely allowed to change my mind.
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Do you know what they teach you in an English Lit degree? It’s not all Jane Austen all the time. They teach you how to write, how to read, and how to communicate. In business school I expect they teach you all of these skills plus math, and so good for on you guys because that’s a really good move. That will come in handy during tax season after you all start your wildly successful businesses.
What they don’t teach you directly in school is how important it is to be a good human being. How vital forging your own connections, relationships, and referrals will be to each and every one of your careers in business.
It doesn’t matter whether you were born and raised in Vancouver. Whether you’re extremely well-networked in the right places. In my first decade as an entrepreneur this is what I found to be true; the things that matter are your unique kind of intelligence, your ambition, and your commitment to trying again after failure. Most crucially above all of these though, is how you treat others along your path to success.
Often the doorway appears because you were open and kind while others were closed off and narrow-minded.
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As a business owner, I deeply believe in relationships, in women helping women, and specifically the importance of mentorship. So much so that and R+A has created a mentorship program of our own, called MentHerShip. This is a casual, quarterly event where we get real and raw about the pleasures and pitfalls of business and life.
Through MentHerShip we’re able to support One Girl Can, which is a charity that helps send young women in Africa to school. To round out my very relaxed schedule, I’m working on a series of personal essays through a non-fiction writing program based in Brooklyn, New York. This all may sound neat right not but like everyone else, I had a not so-perfect-beginning in my career. And some days I barely feel like I’m holding it together.
In my senior year, my favourite English prof pulled me aside in office hours and gave me a book titled, and I’m not kidding, Grammar for Dummies. This is not revisionist history. I took this book from my English prof and did my best to make lemonade with it. I kept writing and abusing the Oxford Comma.
I, probably like many of you, only had a vague idea of the kind of life I’d like to lead post-university. I knew I wanted to do something different and make a decent income. I knew I was driven by giving back in some way, but I had no tangible idea around how to get there. The key would be to risk and make a move and to get outside of my comfort zone. For me, this first pivotal move was applying for an internship in an industry I had zero knowledge and experience in.
So I emailed my very slim, one-page resume into cyber space. The industry I was applying to was new and exciting and largely unchartered. It was risky and non-standard, largely untapped. It was 2014. And this industry was called social media.
A lot can change in one year, but mountains can move in five. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I showed up to a Gastown loft based solely on an Instagram post (which probably literally had 12 “likes” max), stating they needed someone who was literate to fill an unpaid admin role.
I had no clear direction and was happy to jump on that opportunity. I stumbled and struggled through a lot of those initial months, making zero money and fielding weekly phone calls from my parents asking how I could possibly be pursuing a career doing “The Twitter” for other people. I didn’t know or have any of these answers, but I kept trying and asking questions and volunteering to do tasks other people didn’t want to do with a smile.
It paid off. In less than two years I had worked my way up and was eventually offered the opportunity to buy this company out from who was, in retrospect, my first female mentor. My boss.
I did what any twenty-three-year-old would do, I panicked. I had no idea to run a business, and though I didn’t want my fear to hold me back from something really great, it simply didn’t feel right in my gut. I said no. It hurt like hell. Not only did I feel like I let my mentor down, I also found myself without a job and no clear direction as to where to go next. The irony that a few years later I would start my own company with a similar business model and employ so many of the lessons in that failure was lost on me then.
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I met my co-founder at a charity event a year later. We were both serving a cheeseboard to people who were more successful than us. We immediately bonded over servitude and within three months of her initial suggestion, we launched Roots + Ardor with two clients and a lot of anxiety.
In the beginning of a business, you’re basically fuelled by necessity and fumes. The first year was a complete blackout blur of pitching clients, begging people to work with us, and trying to prove our worth. It was also a lot of fun. We laughed and learned fundamental things about what to do and not to do in business.
We’ve been in this for almost four years now and while we’ve had success, built an incredible team and make our own hours, it has not been easy. Tax season is stressful. Figuring out how to scale a service business, how to ensure your employees have proper health insurance, and how to stay sane and balanced are all daily stresses. But for me, it was too important to call my own shots.
My day-to-day is always different. Some days we have back-to-back shoots all over greater Vancouver, we’ve spent some weekends in the Okanagan shooting harvest season for a winery or in Squamish shooting a couple canoeing for a condo development. Some days we just grind it out at the office, answering emails and fielding client calls. Some days we cry and some days we yell and some days we dance.
There are days when Hannah and I wonder why we did this. Why everything is so hard. And there are days when it’s so easy, it feels like we could have never been anywhere else. Every day there is a fire to put out, and every day there is a reason to celebrate.
So what have I learned?
Your first job, I am 99% sure, will not be your last. Be grateful for this.
It’s just as important to learn when you don’t like as it is to learn what you do.
Be ready to pivot. Be ready for your initial idea about where you want to work, and who you want to be, to collapse and be rebuilt. By you. By hand.
If you’re thinking of starting a business. Get a bookkeeper. Get an accountant. In your first year. And debit slips are not real receipts. Receipts have two parts.
The things that keep you up at night on Tuesday, you will not remember by Thursday morning.
Very few personal insecurities or emotional slights are actually worth fighting over.
You’re allowed to reinvent yourself over and over again. You’re allowed to change your mind and most importantly, you’re allowed to say no. Saying no might actually set you free.
Men are great, but women are important. Take care of the women you love, the ones who are in your corner, and when you have the opportunity to help someone or connect, do it. Their success is not your competition, it’s your inspiration.
Go find mentors. Not just one, but multiple mentors who don’t necessarily look like you or work in the same industry or are the same age. Diverse mentorship can elevate your thinking so exponentially you will wake up and wonder what you ever did without them.
People in your professional universe may try to belittle you. To make you feel “less than” They may comment in business meetings on something irrelevant, like your hair, or your shirt. Don’t pay any attention to this bullshit. You are so much bigger than this.
Give back if you can. Even your time. This is where you’ll find the greatest kickback in your life.
You don’t receive anything that you don’t ask for. Like a raise, time off, a new role, respect. Your voice is your biggest asset.
To round this out and leave you with something I didn’t come up with which is kind of cheating, I’d like to share something one of my mentors recently shared with me by Elizabeth Gilbert. In case you don’t know who she is, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love, which is basically the over-thirty-something crowd’s bible. She wrote:
“There are huge swaths of women who never got the memo that their lives belong to them. There’s this instinct that they need a permission slip from the principal’s office for anything. You are allowed to ask yourself some really important questions about your life.
You are allowed to take accountability ad ownership for your own journey. You’re allowed to ask what serves you. I know you’ve been trained to serve everyone. But you’re allowed to turn that on yourself and honor your own life that you were given.
Here’s the question. What have I come here to do with my life? That’s the question that begins every single quest. What have I come here to do with my life? There’s no one who hasn’t had that question come to them. That’s the call. Now, you can choose to ignore that question or you can pursue it. And the pursuit is the beginning of the journey.”
That’s all from me. So much for “condensed.”
- Sam
