As we enter full swing into the holiday season and head towards the end of 2020, it is a time to take stock of everything that's happened this year. It's been a lot. In talking about businesses and organizations building resilience, we had to catch with our friend Alexya Heelis, Executive Director of the United Way serving Saint John, Kings and Charlotte. 

Alexya shares with us how the pandemic has affected their efforts, how they've seen organizations and people shift and grow to focus on what matters most. She gives us some great ideas on how we can all contribute to our communities and non-profits. 

We talk about leadership a lot in the entrepreneurship space. We talk about gaining knowledge, knowing your audience and building your presence to support your business growth. But how do you make everyone around you in any setting feel welcome? How do you build the skills to be a good host? Our guest, Laura Calder, has some ideas to share. 

Entrepreneurs come from all different backgrounds. Some start with degrees in marketing and business, some start with degrees in other fields but with a natural curiosity and drive to innovate. Our guest today, Dr Ivan Zak has worked his way to fall in both camps. 

Everyone has been affected by COVID-19 in one way or another, but certain businesses and industries are feeling the impact significantly. How are entrepreneurs who run businesses in these highly impacted sectors making it through these challenging times?

Enter our guest John Simon, owner of Kefi Travel and Canadvac Travel Services, both companies based right here in the Maritimes but who rely on people being able to travel out of and into Canada. John shares with Dave and Greg the experience of acquiring another travel company at the start of the pandemic. He details how he has kept his focus moving forward, and his no-quit attitude approach that is helping him to adapt and pivot as the pandemic continues to impact the travel industry.

We want to thank again our friends OpportunitiesNB who have been working with us to be able to highlight these great businesses stories of resilience during challenging times.

We are thrilled to be launching a new partnership series with a special hour-long episode today. In working with a few sponsors like Opportunities NB, we will be focusing our next few episodes on featuring New Brunswick business leaders and entrepreneurs to talk about resilience. Right now, during uncertain health, lifestyle, and economic times building resilient strategies in your business and life is key to not just surviving but thriving.

Today, our guest and fellow podcaster is our good friend Matt George of Unsettled Podcast. We hear about Matt’s journey this year tackling a challenging health situation, making a significant career choice pivot to become a full-time entrepreneur and dealing with the unexpected growth of the new business while balancing health and wellbeing. Not to mention all of this happening on the backdrop of a global pandemic. Matt also uses the opportunity to flip the script and interview Greg and Dave in his podcast style to learn about their life moments that taught them resiliency and life lessons.

The last few months of COVID-19 has seen much of the world working from home. There have been multiple reports of small falls in emissions that while a breath of fresh air, is not big enough changes to impact climate change overall. Once we move back to a new normal, how we do make sure we are more conscious of the impact the ways we travel to work has on our environment? How should employers manage the impact created by their workforce? Well, there’s an app for that, and it’s called Luum. 

Kelly Hostetler, Director of Marketing, joins Greg and Dave to tell us all about how Luum is using technology to help shift the mindsets and behaviours as we all commute to work. Luum has a series of integrations like tracking when employees use a parking garage, tracking calories burned for biking to work and also giving a company an overall picture of the environmental impact their workforce is having. Luum is the type of software that could potentially change how we all think about our commutes. 

Do you sit down every year with your senior team and make a strategic plan? Maybe you have big plans of how you are going to grow, add more initiatives and keep building towards your next big goal. It’s great, you’re energized and excited, but as the year goes on, you find yourself slowly over time getting pulled into daily, practical tasks that need to get done. Soon, you can’t even remember your strategic goals, let alone know how you’ll achieve them. The new year hits and you repeat the same cycle again and again. Are you feeling stuck? Well, our guest today can help you Get Out Of The Weeds. 

Vince Marsh has 15 years of experience helping leaders of senior teams become capable of handling any problem in a strategic way that keeps them from getting pulled too much into the weeds. He speaks to us about the common issues he has seen senior teams run into, what some solutions can be to those and share his experience in writing his book, Get Out of The Weeds. This episode is a great listen for anyone who is struggling with carving out strategic time for themselves or their leadership team. 

Have you built your business from referrals? Are you relying on a few major customers, but find it tricky to sell your product/services to other companies? Have you hired a 6-figure salesperson who through no fault of their own, couldn’t bring you in the sales you expected? Well, maybe it’s time for you to listen to, read a book written by or engage the services of our guest, Dan Englander. 

Dan’s company, Sales Schema, helps agencies grow by doing outreach, appointment setting, outbound lead generation and support. You can be the best practitioner of your craft, but still feel kind of gross about pushing sales. But Dan talks to Dave and Greg about how sales don’t have to be a hard sale situation. In Dan’s words, “You’re selling, you’re teaching, or you’re learning every day with your market.” Listen in to hear some sales leadership tidbits sure to help your perspective on closing your next deal. 

Do feel like you’re an outlaw, rebel or misfit in your structured corporate career? Does innovation excite you? Do you thrive on projects that are driven by passion, that carry risks and need hard work to get the rewards? If you said yes to those questions, you might be a startup superstar just waiting to happen. 

Dave and Greg were excited to learn from Steve Kahan’s decades of experience in helping startups move from early-stage to going public or being sold. While listening to his tips about what he looks for when starting to work with a company and advice he’d give young people to find the right startup career to jump into, it becomes apparent, very quickly how he helped grow 7 startups to result in over $3 billion in value. His new book that is already a best-seller on Amazon (and audiobook!) “Be A Startup Superstar” is on our must-read list. If you are an entrepreneur at any stage of your career, this episode is chock full of the information you can use. 

Featuring entrepreneurs who are making positive impacts in the world is not just the central theme of The Boiling Point Podcast, but for both Dave and Greg, it’s a personal passion. We feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from our guest Shauna Cole, who we consider a friend, colleague and community leader. 

With her recent Linkedin post “I Once Heard A Hiring Manager Say The N-Word” and her involvement in the Black Lives Matter march in Saint John, NB, Shauna Cole has made her voice heard, and it’s time we all listen. Shauna shares with us her experiences and the tipping point for her to make that post, change her career path and choose to help others find their best career fit with her consulting work and youtube channel, Career Interrupted. 

Dr Bill Howatt takes the guest seat in this week’s episode as Dave and Greg learn more about the release of his new book, Stop Hiding and Start Living: How to Say F-it to Fear and Develop Mental Fitness. This book which is a different style for our prolific author guest and sometimes co-host takes a look at Dr Bill’s personal life as a backdrop to talking about how to develop mental fitness to deal with life stressors. 

Our Shifting The Employee Experience series has allowed us to speak with some amazing guests who are all working to make mental health and mental wellbeing a widely talked about topic. We feel very fortunate to have been joined by Sheldon Kennedy, former NHL player and long time advocate of Respect in the Workplace and Respect in Sport.  

Through Respect Group, he works to bring educational programs to workplaces, in sports and schools. These programs give people a baseline understanding and make it possible to build a climate of openness, so people are empowered to not only self-advocate about their mental wellbeing but to check in with others. Sheldon’s perspective that it’s not about being perfect, but being available to listen and give feedback from an honest, caring place helps to highlight how we can all play a role in making our workplaces, schools and sports teams safer for everyone. 

If we don’t talk about issues that affect us all as human beings, we don’t solve them. Mark Henick joined us for this episode to share his story and perspective on mental health in the workplace, but his experience and the conversation we had goes so much further than the workplace. 

Mark’s insights of encouraging everyone to start with the individual person instead of trying to push people into silos of “normal” and his lifelong perseverance to encourage people to no longer to stay quiet about their experiences with mental health, which can include thoughts or attempts of suicide, is a lesson to us all that the most important thing we can do when it comes to mental health is to talk to each other and listen to each other with no preconceptions or judgements. 

Have you ever struggled with maintaining relationships at work that go beyond just professional interactions? Do you feel like you only focus on work tasks and not building personal relationships? Well, it might be time to re-evaluate the benefits that having solid relationships at work gives you.  And yeah, there’s now an app for that.

We’re excited to be joined by Shamini Dhana once more, and this time it’s to announce the official launch of the circular memory jacket! Through Greg becoming a model and showing off his circular memory jacket, Shamini shares the experience of working with people to preserve their memories and our environment with this zero-waste focused product. We learn about Dhana Inc’s efforts during COVID-19, plans for the circular memory jacket and other products they hope to launch soon. 

Today more than ever, employees are looking to their leaders for help on how to navigate COVID-19, working from home, juggling work-life balance and keeping up on their actual jobs. But as leaders, how do we do that effectively?

Stuart MacLean builds on Dr Bill Howatt’s article around authentic leadership by highlighting his philosophy he’s learned over his career path of always asking yourself who have you helped be successful today? The group talks about the importance of a leader caring about the individuals working around them regardless of job function and they an honest chat about showing your vulnerability as a leader and being open to honest, direct feedback.  

During this time of COVID-19, we keep hearing about getting back to our “new normal”, but Sean Ryan joins us today to discuss how as businesses we should be planning for our “next normal” instead. Dave, Greg and Sean all discuss how current circumstances are making them evaluate the ways they do business and how they realize some changes may make their business offerings stronger in the long term.  

Current events with the stress and psychological impact that COVID-19 is having on workplaces is showing us that now more than ever, we need to build and maintain a positive work environment. Dave is joined once more by Dr Bill Howatt, and today we’ve decided to make this discussion a Dr Bill squared event with our guest Dr Bill Morrison.  Dr Bill Morrison discusses critical steps and behaviours we need to monitor in our workplaces to keep us aware and moving forward with our workplace psychological safety. For anyone that is struggling to highlight positive behaviours and embed these acts as second nature in your workplace culture, this episode and the resources mentioned can start you on the path of improving the overall well being in your workplace. 

Today we have one of our favourite and frequent guests join us, Kelly VanBuskirk to have an honest discussion about some of the challenges facing both employees and employers during COVID-19. Greg, Dave and Kelly drill in on how while businesses need to stay compliant with government regulations, consumers can help by having a little bit of grace and understanding.

There’s no handbook out there of how to get through the COVID-19 crisis as a business leader, but if we all work together and share the lessons we’re learning, we’ll undoubtedly be better off. David Savoie, CEO and President of Acadian Construction, joins Dave and Greg today to share some of the practical steps he and his employees have been taking during this time of crisis. An excellent discussion that doesn’t just focus on maintaining your business, but some tips on how to incorporate work/life balance in your planning and critical reminders about appreciating all the good moments still happening around us. 

With the COVID-19 crisis, it's become clear that we can only succeed if we work together. We wanted to take an episode to talk about the psychological benefit you get when you give back to your community and help others. To help us learn what's happening right now Bill and Dave are joined by Alexya Heelis of the United Way Saint John, Kings and Charlotte. Alexya tells us all about the efforts happening on the ground and how businesses and employees are taking on leadership roles with their donations.

Today we share a special episode to help businesses dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Our friend Matt Symes of Symplicity Designs joins us to talk through his expertise area in getting businesses through a crisis. Matt shares how to Forecast, Plan and Act to make sure you can push your business through this timeframe and come out the other side. Besides sharing fantastic information in this episode, Matt and Symplicity Designs are also offering daily webinars and other resources for free for all small and micro-businesses. If you are struggling right now, have a listen and check out what Symplicity Designs is offering our business community. 

We had no idea how timely our Shifting The Employee Experience mini-series on the podcast would be right now to the current events of the world. We’ve taken a step outside of it this week to take advantage of Dr Bill’s knowledge, be very vulnerable about what we are all experiencing and talk through how we can cope with our current work and overall life experiences during COVID-19. 

In this episode, we talk about an area that Canada is leading the way globally in its establishment of The National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. Sapna Mahajan, a national leader on the topic, joins us to share her insight. Using Bill’s The Chronicle Herald article “Without good workforce mental health, employers have nothing” the group discusses the progressive step forward Canada is taking by creating the standard and how business leaders can start to build it into their culture. 

This episode, we tackle an important topic when it comes to Shifting the Employee Experience, bullying in the workplace. Using his article “For A Respectful Workplace, Deal With Bullies” as a catalyst for the conversation, Dr Bill Howatt gives us his input on why employers and employees alike need to seriously acknowledge the mental injuries that happen from bullying in the workplace. Kelly VanBuskirk, a lawyer who specializes in Labour & Employment law, helps to enhance our conversation by providing views from a legal perspective, but also sharing the impact he has seen first hand on those who have experienced bullying in the workplace.

Today we are beyond excited to announce a special mini-series we will produce in partnership with UNB College of Extended Learning and Workplace Safety and Prevention Services. Greg Hemmings will be taking a break from hosting duties to run our soundboard (and get some quality time with the new addition to his family) while Dave Veale will be co-hosting with our guest host and friend Dr Bill Howatt.

In today’s announcement episode, you’ll learn about why we feel the topic of Shifting the Employee Experience is such a meaningful discussion area to explore. You’ll get to know Dr. Bill’s background and his motivation for getting involved in our podcasting world and learn all about our incredible partners who are sponsoring this mini-series.

Any parent out there will tell you that when their baby isn’t sleeping, they will pay anything to anyone to make their precious bundle of joy catch a few hours of ZZZs. It’s not about the money, but about the well being of their child and themselves. Enter our guest, Stephanie Parker, the founder of Sleeping Baby, who through her own experiences with a sleepless child, was able to create a product and business that is helping other parents.

Stephanie’s story reminds us once again that entrepreneurship isn’t just about making money. It’s about creating a lifestyle that works for you, has the impact you want to have in life and building communities that you support and who support you.

Great marketing needs a mixture of chaos and planning, but how do you know where that line exists? Our guest, Katie Bowden of Duke Creative Collective, is an idea person who can sit in a brainstorming session and come up with her “Crazy Katie Ideas” that will grab anyone’s eye, but she shares with us how building the strategy for clients is the most creative part that they do at Duke. The discussion in this episode could help to open the eyes of entrepreneurs and business owners who are struggling to understand how important the “Why” is to your marketing efforts. 

What kind of business model can you use that not only grows your business and ensures high-quality service to your clients but also sees every employee being well paid and successful? Need some help? Listen to the perspective that Erik Klein and Daniel Comeau bring to us from their experience growing and nurturing their company Town Health Solutions.

Who do you want to work with? What is your version of success? Are you afraid of going after your niche audience because it might mean always maintaining a smaller business instead of the overnight, high dollar exits entrepreneurs are supposed to chase? Selene Vakharia of SMRT Women shares her journey of building a business in Whitehorse, Yukon and lessons she’s learned in her work creating a community of female entrepreneurs. 

Have you ever needed just the right tool to do one DIY project at your home or business, but the price tag for the tool makes it not feasible? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to walk in somewhere and check out a tool like you do a library book? Well, in Saint John, NB Brent Harris has joined the growing sharing economy movement and is providing people with just that opportunity. 

Tech startups innovate many different aspects of life, but is there any aspect more important than the survival of our planet? We hear from Grant Canary and Matthew Aghai of DroneSeed about their journey of adding another tool to the toolbox of tree planters, foresters and public land managers to combat climate change by using drone technology to plant trees after disturbances like forest fires. 

Not only do we get a lesson in how this technology can work hand in hand with current methods, but we also hear from their experience of what it takes to work and hire people in an industry that is tackling a global issue which can at times be daunting. We hear about how it takes grit to push through the hard challenges. We also learn about how initiatives like #teamtrees and being featured on popular youtube channels and the discovery channel is helping them share their goals.