You Can Do That Here

Home. There are endless metaphors to describe the places we we choose to  eat, live and sleep. Buying or building a home is typically the biggest expense we’ll ever face in our lives, and living in a healthy, happy home is one of the most critical pieces to our overall health and well being. Knowing all of that, it’s perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for the way we build our homes to even begin to change, and start adopting new design principles and technologies to help us build better.

Sure, if you asked just about any person who was thinking of building or buying a home that they would love to have an efficient home that didn’t cost that much to heat and run, that is healthy, and full of sunlight, and that has a small environmental footprint. In actual practice however, when it comes to actually building or buying that new house, the general rule of thumb still seems to be to default to the cheapest, lowest cost option.

The end result is a housing stock across BC an across the country that is dominated by inefficient homes.

The design philosophies and technologies to make it happen have been around for decades. Greg Hoffart of Revelstoke grew up watching and learning all about it. With a progressive builder as a neighbour he was indoctrinated into the world of high performance homes from an early age.

Over the last several years, he’s now on a personal mission to create a better housing supply, and has launched his own business Tree Construction to make it happen.

Learn from a master builder at a young age, get into the building industry and spend years witnessing less than efficient home building, getting frustrated going out on your own and launching a new company with a goal of changing the face of home design? You Can Do That Here!

Check out Tree’s homes here

Trails. They represent connections from one place to another, connections between humans and nature, and very much so  a connection to place.

They represent connections between people and fun, excitement, relaxation, whatever your pleasure. They often also represent connections between people, collectively sharing the trail together.  Yes to truly get to know an area’s geography and natural self, there is often no better way to do so then to get out on its trails and explore.

Step 1, finding said trail, can often be the most difficult part of any adventure, especially if you are new to an area or visiting on vacation. Some trails, and trail builders don’t want them to be found, others are built and promoted as real tourist draws. Either way, finding the trailhead can often require seeking out that critical local intel.

In the Columbia Valley with their gorgeous trail network straddling the Purcell’s and the western slope of the Canadian Rockies, they would love you to come find their trails. Not that long ago though, you either had the locally written seminal trail book, or you were lost.

Several years ago, a dedicated group of volunteers set out to change that in a big way. And then an applied mathematician originally from the Washington DC area with former ties to the CIA came along and built things a step further launching the Columbia Valley Trails app.

Volunteer your skills to help promote the valley and trails you love, while putting your skills to the test, turning data into a mobile atlas of Trails? You Can Do That Here.

The Knowledge worker. The high income earner, not tied to any specific geographic location, moving from project to project be it working remotely with a big company, or launching their own startup. The latte sipping, culture consuming, shopping, volunteering, all around great citizen. Every city would love to have more of them. But if you’re not a natural hub like Silicon Valley, New York, Toronto or a Vancouver, how do you get them?

The old adage the Kootenays have leaned on for survival and growth on some level has always been the fact that, if you could choose to live anywhere on earth, why wouldn’t you choose to live in The Kootenays?

With the levelling of the playing field in many ways due to the influx of fiber and truly high speed, reliable internet through the region, that dream of being able to live and work wherever you want has come true. Increasingly the migration of folks, largely in the tech and knowledge based world has begun.

What would it take however to turn Nelson, The Kootenays, or any small city or town for that matter into a Knowledge worker’s paradise?

Our obvious trump card is our spectacular natural environment, and one of a kind culture and lifestyle. Where you go from there has been a trial and error process.

Dominic Bortolussi, of Toronto and current part time resident of Nelson, moving towards becoming a full time resident, knows all about trial and error. A knowledge worker himself he’s become focussed in on the startup world, and recently presented on the idea of Nelson itself as a startup.

Take a novel, entrepreneurial approach with a Startup mindset to solve the problem of How do we turn Nelson into a Knowledge Worker’s Paradise? You Can Do That Here

Imagine… if you’re from the Kootenays, or any small town for that matter, having the responsibility to fill the positions of every person in town. To populate the city, from the doctors to the teachers, shop keepers to the bartenders, literally thousands of people to hopefully live and work together harmoniously.

If it sounds like a huge task, imagine now doing all of that, but on a city that also floats. With new cruise ships being built and launched every year, and each one of them requiring thousands of staff, filling those positions can be a huge job.

And if you’re a world traveller at heart, the notion of getting paid to travel the high seas is pretty appealing. Navigating your way from, say, the university campus to working the Mediterranean is also a foreign path for most.

If you happened to have grown up on a ship, worked most of your career on a ship, and spent much of that time and more in HR and recruitment for said ships, you’ve probably learned a whole lot about both in the process.

Amanda Hathorn-Geary, is perhaps one of the few people in the world with that knowledge base, experience and skill set. Having settled in Revelstoke, a long haul from the ocean, she set out to put that knowledge to work for her while she raised her son.

Turn your knowledge and experience from a life at sea, into a residual income business, while living in the mountains, so you can live the life you dream of? You Can Do That Here!

Community. Websters describes it as a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

One of the beautiful things about being connected to and part of a community is that it tends to reward those who put energy and effort into to improving the community. Help out a friend, and they tend to want to help you out when you’re in need. Get in with a bunch of folks that all share similar passions, love similar things and pretty soon helping each other out becomes great fun, and everyone rises together to a better place.

Think of what the perfect customer looks like…. It probably sounds pretty similar I bet? Now think, just what would that perfect customer look like for your product or service? It’s probably someone that wants to help you out and wants to support you, all because you’re part of the same community. Knowing that, the secret to success starts to appear relatively easy at least at a base level and it all comes down to something we’ve all been taught as kids. The golden rule. Help out others and they will be happy to help you out back.

Ryan Arnaud and Petri Raito of The Rossland Beer Company get this in a big way, and it’s been the number one factor to their success…. Along with great tasting beer of course.

They moved to Rossland because they loved the community, its people, beauty, values and shares passionate love of life. This is the kind if place they always wanted to live and so they felt a deep urge to give back and support the community. 3 years after we last talked to then way back in episode 10, as they were first opening, they’ve worked that magic formula to success. If you need any more proof of their strategy’s efficacy. Their recent 400% expansion in capacity should be proof enough.

Move to a new community, start a business you love, give back to your customers and community, and in term feel the love, grow and expand your Brewery in a small market all with an eye to keeping things local? You can do that here!

More and more research is showing that the volume and diversity of bacteria in our guts can be one of the biggest determinates of our overall health, wellbeing, and ultimately, our happiness.

Leeza Zerwick of Castlegar, BC, discovered one delicious way to help boost our good bacteria levels while at one-year old’s birthday party.

Over the course of the following year she’s taken that initial inspiration from birthday to business.

6 weeks after he launch we got together to hear her story, and find out that she’s got big dreams.

Discover a delicious and nutritious drink, watch it improve your own health, turn it into a DIY brewing kit product and retail health drink and sell out your inventory at launch while pursuing major potential, with an endless passion and drive to create Happy Guts the world over? You can do that here.

Plastic. It’s everywhere. Everywhere we want and need it, and everywhere we don’t. From the Pacific Garbage Patch to the nano-plastics that now inhabit our own bodies, the wonder product of the middle 20th century has grown to be a plague on humanity.

The downside? It’s also really handy useful stuff, and if we shut off all plastic production tomorrow, we’d be in a pretty difficult spot.

So how we solve the problem? We’ve been coming it at it through demand management, trying to promote less use, re-use, recycling and the like. As we all know of course trying to plug the pipe at the end never truly works. Moving to a supply management where rather than using less plastic we aim to use better plastic would seem to be a better route.

Plastic that is both more advanced than what we have now, and that was truly biodegradable and non-garbage-patch-building sounds like part of the solution.

Darrel Fry of Rossland, BC and his company Advanced Bio Carbon 3D is trying to do just that. In fact, it’s their second go at it. 10 years ago, the market wasn’t ready. In this episode we dive in and find out how and why he’s looking at going bigger by going smaller, and helping solve man’s most pressing challenges in the process.

Create a better plastic by working with nature, turn it into a better product for the market, and create better environmental and business solutions in the process? You Can Do That Here.                                          

Eternal life. Imagine the possibilities.
Imagine if we could just eat the right things and do the right activities and keep our self well enough that we could live forever. Would you do it?
I bet most people would at least be interested in giving it a passing try. I mean on some level we’re all trying to eat right, lose a few pounds, put on some muscle, get those washboard abs and killer bi-ceps.

Where most of us fail, knowingly or not, is simply not having the knowledge behind what to eat, what to do, and having the focus and tools to stick with it.

Aaron Davidson of Revelstoke, has long been a bit of a fanatical health nut with that very goal of living forever driving him forward. Back in 2005, putting his computer science masters degree to work he set out building an app as a hobby to track his nutrition and activity to an extremely detailed level. What he didn’t know was that the competition at the time was about to land half a billion in investment.

Fast forward 6 years and Aaron has clearly seen the market opportunity and has been building out his app in a race to catch-up to the industry and surpass it with a better product.

Another 6 years on and he’s got over a million users and a rapidly expanding team all aiming to help us live forever.

Turn your hobby into a business, make yourself and the world a healthier place, while living the dream life in Revelstoke and making a few bucks in the process? You Can Do That Here.

San Francisco, Vancouver, Rossland... It sounds more like a fundraising bumper sticker than a natural career path progression.

That is.... unless you change the values and goals you're seeking out. Sure you'll find a much greater concentration of talent, experience, customers and money in the larger centers, particularly in the tech sector... but, thanks to the fruits of the tech industry, living and working anywhere has fully become a reality for many. 

Darin and Summer Recchi made the leap just over a year ago. They had both worked their way up through the tech industry and were succeeding in all of the traditional work and business metrics. What they lacked was time.

Making the geographical and lifestyle move from bigger centers to Rossland, BC turned traffic time into family time, and allowed them to enjoy life on a new level while maintaining their tech careers.

Curiosity, inquisitiveness, wonder.

A desire to deconstruct, reconstruct, design, create and understand.

All of these are traits closely associated with the true innovators through history. Whether it be inventors, entrepreneurs or world leaders. Or perhaps that 5-year-old that just needs his imagination and an environment to explore to create anything out of nothing.

When it really comes down to it those qualities are everything required to both ask questions, discover problems, and then create solutions. And if you can identify problems, and come up with solutions, well you’re going places kid and you may just be that next great inventor, entrepreneur or world leader.

All of that only happens of course if we’re able to instill and foster those qualities in our kids.

Farrell Segall, now of the West Kootenay and originally from South Africa was inspired as a kid by his father’s tinkering and followed in his footsteps. After his father’s passing at a young age he put those problem solving skills to work, first for himself and his family, later as a career inventor and most recently giving back.

Seeing a world where kids are rarely exposed to tools, making things, and increasingly less demand on their imagination and creativity, his most recent endeavour the Makermobile provides that same inspiration his father did for him to kids and adults all over.

Grow up in South Africa with a love for solving problems, face adversity and put it to work for you, move to another country and start a new career as an inventor and innovation / design consultant and invent a host of everyday useful products many of us know and have interacted with often, and then turn your attention to inspiring the next generation of makers with a cool new lab on wheels? You Can Do That Here!