Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – Canadore College – My 10 Year Detour

I started working at Canadore College on contract in the summer of 1987, a lifetime ago.  I followed my girlfriend (wife to be) Gina back home as she got a job at Thorne Riddell which after many mergers eventually became KPMG. At Canadore I conducted a study on the bilingual (English/French) programs the College offered but I also stuffed envelopes, a lot of envelopes. Before email the only way you communicated was by mail or telephone. Everything that went out to students was put into an envelope.  I remember being in a room stuffing envelopes for days on end.  I was paired with another part time worker Brenda. I have never been one to take breaks except to eat lunch.  (I didn’t even drink coffee until I was in my late fifties).  I am sure I drove poor Brenda crazy. I never thought about trying to find my dream job after university, I just needed a job. I think most jobs can be dream jobs once you work at it and have found a level of mastery. I find the deeper you go the more interesting it gets.

From there I applied to become a liaison officer. On my first interview I did well on both the interview and presentation.  I was called back for a second interview, and it was between me and another person (who would later become the President of Canadore).  Now I did not practice my presentation as I thought I knew it, but I came across as flat in the second interview. I did not get the job.  I learned two things; never assume you have practiced enough but even more important I should have changed the topic.  I did my presentation about Canadore College which is a somewhat boring topic for those that work there, especially if they have to sit through it twice. When I applied for another full-time liaison officer position, I did the presentation on chlorofluorocarbons and the effects they were having on the ozone layer. I picked something the audience knew little about and educated them with an entertaining presentation. I got the job.

What a great first job – Liaison Officer.  I was basically a salesperson for the College.  I travelled to the province attending high schools’ College Information Sessions. I got a lot of speeding tickets racing around the province with a map sitting on my lap.  I had to even go to the speeder group therapy session put on by the Ministry of Transportation for those with excess demerit points.  It was a useless session, and I thought to myself while at it, the job of the individual putting on this session is the worst job that I can imagine.  But the instructor thought he was delivering us from evil and delivered it with all the vigor one could for a monotone preacher.  This job helped me develop my spidey sense of direction from all this road travel, which helped me get out of many jams including getting from downtown Rome to Venice without a GPS or map.

I got to know all the 300+ staff that worked at the College, as liaison officers are the bridge between potential students and registered students. I did a lot of tours and always had to connect the incoming students with a professor. Over time you get to meet most of the professors and because you are touring the entire school you get to meet all the administrators and support staff. At the beginning this was a great place to work.  I had a great boss which I learned a lot from, she also let us run with ideas and she was pivotal to the College’s first fundraising campaign to raise money for scholarships. Canadore College has the smallest catchment area in the province in terms of population, so we needed to pull students from other regions.  We developed and executed a great marketing plan to do this as our survival depended upon it.

The College had a fun vibe during the late 80’s and early 90’s.  We used to dress up for Halloween, which we took seriously.  One year I was Martin  Short’s character Ed Grimley, and my good friend Mitch was Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) Mitch carried around a vacuum cleaner and coffee grinds and he would demonstrate how good his vacuum was and I was Ed Grimley cheering him on.  We spent most of the day entertaining both students and staff. Other years I was PeeWee Herman complete with the bike with cards in the spokes (I rode around the halls), Father Guido Saducci, where I walked into classrooms and did a bit of stand up and finally I was Where’s Waldo – I hid all over the college. If you find yourself working in a place that is fun like this enjoy it.  I also think these activities create a shared bonding experience that pulled the organization together.  If you want to know how good an organization’s culture is, ask what percentage of the staff attend the Christmas party.

Then two things happened. The College’s founding President retired and then not much later the College had to make budget cuts of about 20%.  Canadore went through a revolving door of Presidents after the retirement of the founder.  Each new President used Canadore as a steppingstone to somewhere else (except for maybe the crazy one).  For institutions like Canadore that are located in a small community such as North Bay you really need to develop internal talent and promote from within, otherwise you end up with the revolving door scenario.  External hires usually leave before the ramifications of their decisions are felt. While a local internal person has to live with the ramifications of those decisions and face their colleagues and friends in the community. A good example of this was one of the external Presidents drew down on the reserve fund of the college draining it to zero.  This meant no layoffs in the short run while they were in the position, but it restricted the College’s ability to maneuver in the long run. It is always better to reset the organization once by making the correct reductions to position it for future potential growth.  This lack of succession planning happens in public institutions all the time and it can take years to fix – leadership is important. This does not occur nearly as much in private sector as the top and bottom lines are an easy measure of success or failure.  If you don’t deliver you are out. If you find yourself working in an institution that continually has to make cuts, do yourself a favour and leave unless you have the ability to make the changes required.

The budget cuts also had a large effect on the College compounded with the fact that the reserve funds were gone. Money was tight for years and this can have a devastating effect – you feel like you can only eat baloney sandwiches for lunch every day as that is all you can afford. The place stagnated for years after this. And dressing up for Halloween became a thing of the past. Just before the cuts, they sent me to Asia to recruit international students.  I recruited 11 students from a few trade shows.  I think the tuition fee was around $10,000 per student back then and we were making about twice as much money on international students versus domestic.  As part of the cuts, they eliminated international recruitment as they could not justify spending money on international students when they were cutting domestic programs. I was scratching my head as I thought international students were the solution to their funding issues. Canadore did not get its mojo back until they revitalized and grew this international program in recent years under their recently retired President. Love it or hate it but the funding for colleges and universities needs to come from somewhere.  The government has frozen tuition fees since 2019-20.  Salaries and other expenses continue to rise.  Now with the reduction in international students again the Colleges in the province are scrambling.  I have always said if you can only have one government provided service it would be education as all our wealth as a nation comes from it. It is good to see that they recently announced more resources for colleges.

I was promoted to the CIO, acting Chief Marketing Officer and Registrar about 10 years into my service.  I did not love our new leadership (President #5), and I had just finished my MBA (which the College did not pay anything for as they did not see the value in it).  Funny enough, I also asked to take some computer courses when they gave me the job as CIO as I felt my background was not strong in that area and it would be useful to broaden my knowledge.  I had only taken two programming courses in university, but everything had changed in this area in the last 10 years or so. The college said no.  I have always given little credence to words – actions to me speak volumes.  In this case the two were not jiving.  I asked for a raise given the 3 areas I was managing. They gave me one, but it wasn’t much of a raise, so I figured it was time to leave. Funny thing is when I did leave, they hired three people to replace me and probably paid each of them more than I was making.  Sometimes change, even though it can be seen as positive (promotion) can be difficult if you did not choose it. Change only works if the candidate chooses it, I left Canadore in the summer of 1999, no regrets, (…well maybe the secure pension).

I was very entrepreneurial at the college.  I helped find the money and revigorated the Canadore College alumni program which did not really exist at the time.  We published the first Canadore Chronicle alumni magazine and raised funds for the college. I helped revigorated frosh week, making it longer and focusing it on bonding students to the school and each other.  I still remember a full gymnasium of freshmen singing the song “Singing in the Rain” with their knees together, elbows together, bum out and tongue out – give it a go when no one is looking. We were very aggressive in terms of marketing, but my favourite part of the year was when we conducted area receptions.  This is where we would invite all the students that applied from a certain geographical region, i.e. Sudbury, and invited the potential students and parents out for an information evening.  We pulled out all the stops. This is where I honed my ability to speak in front of the crowd. Every institution needs entrepreneurial people that question the norms and help drive an institution in a new direction. This is difficult, especially in public institutions as management views change as a risk to be avoided.

I tried going back a number of years later as a board member.  At my first meeting they were making cuts to programs that I remembered as solid programs back in my day. One of the programs that was cut had the wife of a good friend of mine teaching in. I realized that sometimes you can’t go back so I served out my term and resigned from the board, they did not really need me.

I had three job offers after I left Canadore.  International Recruiter for Ryerson University, Document Management Salesperson and a controller with a local engineering company. My wife convinced me to take a job as a controller at a local engineering firm.  I never really liked accounting, but she suggested what I would learn would fill in the missing part of my business repertoire – I think she knew I was destined to be self-employed or maybe she wanted to stay in North Bay.  I lasted one year before I left to start three new businesses.  But what I learned certainly came in handy. If you are weak at something don’t shy away from it, do more of it.

So, onto something new, the wheel of life keeps spinning which brings us to the song of the week. Wheel by Jesse Welles. Who says there are not any more protest songs – listen to Join Ice also by Jesse Welles. Sometimes it is not what you do but how you do it (you need to listen to the protest song to understand the meaning of this last sentence).