Merging Passions Creates New Ideas
Dec 4th, 2007 by Kevin
Growing up in a small town in southern Ontario Canada, I didn’t get much opportunity to travel. As my university degree neared completion, I saved my money and took a course with NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School). I was in Baja Mexico for a month. What a life changing experience! I almost didn’t come back to the job I had already secured with a large consulting company prior to going. Spending almost a month on practically deserted coastline with miles of open beach living simply changed the way I looked at the world from then on.
Of course I did come back after that trip, and I did start my career. While there I began to travel almost full time for work. This lifestyle also allowed for many pleasure trips due to a great accumulation of airmiles, and friends spread far and wide. Such a change from my childhood…. consulting work allowed me to experience many different parts of the world very early in my career for many years.
After more than a decade in corporate America in some large very well known companies, learning the skills required to grow and success in this type of environment, I began to get the entrepreneurial itch. In reality it had been their since the start manifesting itself as conversations over lunch about the ‘next big thing’ with friends, but the allure of salary and great job perks was hard pass up. However, it would turn out that this experience would serve me well when I started down the entrepreneurial path.
I started out going down the sole proprietor route, through a number of independent contracts and consulting positions. While this kept my family secure, I began to bootstrap my first startup idea. Most startup don’t fail due to a bad idea, but from other reasons - timing, commitment of the team etc. and such was the problem with my first, but a great learning experience it was. I took this failure as a badge of honor and something to learn from. I quickly followed this by taking a position with another early stage startup which I now still currently work at. It is filled with a group of smart passionate people, that I am glad to work with every day. Check us out at www.balihoo.com.
Anyone that has the entrepreneurial bug knows though that the way to keep your thinking fresh is to always be exploring new ideas. It doesn’t dilute your current area of focus (In my case Balihoo). In fact, it can help greatly to expand your mind through intersectional innovation. To do this it is important to surround yourself with like minded individuals.
One of these folks is my great friends Chris (who is also a spectacular entrepreneur). Earlier this year Chris met a gentleman named Wes, who he thought I should meet. Chris felt that we would hit it off. Wes and I did meet and quickly became friends through shared business philosophies and entrepreneurial interests. One of Wes’s interests is real estate. I wanted to learn more about this, so I actually bought two rental properties off him to better learn the real estate business! It may sound strange, but you can talk all day about something, however the best way to learn is by doing. Wes has become a great mentor for me to grow my entrepreneurial interests down new and different pathways.
My resume is filled with technology experience, and financial service industry experience and of course most of my innovative thinking followed down these paths. Wes’s background is very different from mine both personally and professionally and through discussions we suddenly started exploring, and developing new ideas that intersected between our two diverse histories and fields of expertise.
During this time, one of the things that Wes was beginning to explore was around some personal investment opportunities in Central America. We talked extensively about our passion for travel, the real estate opportunities that we had seen during our travels and how this might be combined with a business that could thrive off of our combined business experience and entrepreneurial backgrounds.
In one of our brainstorming conversations, Wes talked about his vision of a man nearing retirement thinking back to his younger days as a surfer and carefree days on the beach. I suggested we could name a company ‘Coastal Dreams’…..
