Celebrating youth entrepreneurship at Sprout Up Toronto

We continued with our Global Entrepreneurship Week events on Wednesday evening with a special youth entrepreneurship edition of Sprout Up Toronto. Held at The Pilot, we saw a mix of new attendees and old friends in the almost 200-person crowd. Like our Montreal, we debuted our new connection namebadges, which suggested in-person and online connections to each entrepreneur – if you didn’t get a chance to meet your connection make sure to search for them on Sprouter and introduce yourself. The night’s agenda included three student entrepreneurs presenting their startups, and guest speaker Matthew Corrin of Freshii talking about his experiences growing his healthy restaurant chain. See below for a summary of the presentations:

NeverBored Studios – Jimmy Ho told the crowd about NeverBored Studios, a Waterloo-based startup run by students and recent grads. NeverBored develops games for the iPhone and iPod touch – and although he couldn’t divulge all the details of their upcoming products, he showed off some of the games they have in the iTunes store right now. Watch a video of Jimmy’s presentation below:

Elephant Tale - Past Sprout Up attendee and social entrepreneur Susheela Ramachandran talked about her startup, Elephant Tale. Elephant Tale aims to help foster socially and politically engaged individuals that are naturally inclined to use their intellect and purchasing decisions to create positive change at both local and global levels. The main project is the creation and implementation of lesson plans that cover part of the Grade 10 Civics curriculum, and encourage students to explore global issues. Susheela also talked about the challenge of balancing her passion for Elephant Tale with being a full-time political science student. You can connect with Susheela on Sprouter here.

BuildMyLanyard - Chris Carmichael gave a charismatic presentation about his experiences as a born entrepreneur – from selling ice cream at his cottage, to getting his first contract shoveling snow, to having an epiphany after reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, to his time as the “Ink Man” at the University of Laurier, where he is currently in his third year. Chris’ latest venture is BuildMyLanyard.com, where he sells wholesale lanyards for conferences and events (he recently equipped the TEDxToronto conference).

Guest speaker Matthew Corrin spoke about his journey from PR person at Oscar de la Renta to Founder/CEO of Freshii restaurants, which prides itself on fresh food, custom built, fast. He told 5 stories that fit in with 5 themes of business for any entrepreneur or startup – see below for a synopsis:

1. Hard work – Matthew talked about one challenging morning when two of his employees were injured while preparing food for the day – instead of giving up, he prepared all the food himself and opened despite the chaos. The lesson is that most things in business aren’t rocket science – it’s just hard work. If you can continue to execute instead of just talking every day, you’ll most likely get it done. In his opinion the difference between failure and success as an entrepreneur is execution.
2. Culture – Matthew talked about how the senior management team at Freshii created a negative culture, which led to high staff turnover and declining service. Once he realized there was a problem he axed the team and placed the value on hiring super-achievers (simply good managers need not apply). Now they have no attrition, and leverage the exceptional experiences their customers have. Build a killer culture, not a culture that kills your business.
3. Numbers rule – The worst feeling in the world, according to Matthew, is seeing your financials at the end of a month and realizing you missed all your targets. He then vowed to never be surprised by numbers again, and now keeps a close eye on them. It’s important to know your dashboard and run your business based on it – be accountable to the numbers.
4. Buzz – Buzz creates more buzz, like a perpetual motion machine. If you focus on 4 pieces of buzz a year it can give you additional momentum. Matthew gives the example of the buzz that resulted from their Lettuce Size Me campaign (a Bay St. executive on an all-Freshii diet for a month) – it resulted in a story in MacLean’s, which led to an appearance on Canada AM, which led to an article in The Globe and Mail. Free buzz is very valuable to any business, especially in startup mode.
5. Luck – Matthew says luck can sometimes play a big role in the success of a company. He talked about the first Freshii location, and how it wasn’t his ideal location, but turned out to be the catalyst to their success – it was luck that it was located in the Financial District of Toronto and got the attention of the banks, and luck that it turned out as well as it did.

We’ll be posting video of Matthew’s presentation in a separate post, so stay tuned.

Freshii's Matthew Corrin speaking at Sprout Up Toronto

Check out photos from the event in our Flickr set, and you can see live updates from the event on Sprouter on the #SproutUpTO event page, and on Twitter here. We’ll be taking a break in December and returning with our Sprout Up Toronto event in January. We’re holding our Sprout Up London on December 8th to launch GaryVee’s new book Crush It! so pass along the event details to any entrepreneurs you know in the UK.