Scaling Impact: My Next Adventure
Channeling My Past Into Purpose at Student Life Network
In 2018, I’ll be joining Student Life Network as its new Managing Director.
If you’ve been following my entrepreneurial journey thus far, I can appreciate that this might be a somewhat unexpected thing to read. Trust me — it was a somewhat unexpected thing to write. But putting my eventful past (an adventure from confusion to clarity) into perspective helped me to reveal the inevitability of this decision.
Destiny, I’ve learned, can be as poetic as it can be perplexing.
Student Life Network is rapidly evolving into Canada’s most comprehensive resource hub dedicated to helping and empowering millions of students across the country. Students are coming to Student Life Network to help them navigate their way from high school through postsecondary and all way to their future careers.
An example of the type of co-branded content created by Student Life Network.
Alongside a talented team of researchers, designers, developers, and marketers, I’ll be building the missing curriculum in today’s student journey. And I couldn’t be more excited. However, deciding to redirect my energy from expanding my own companies — Splash Effect and SkillsCamp, respectively, was anything but easy.
Nonetheless, I remain confident that this next adventure will enable me to do my life’s work on an unprecedented scale. It will help me to close the loop on a problem that I set out to solve many, many years ago.
To completely understand my motivations for this move, as well as what this move means for the future (including how you can be a part of it), we’ll first have to revisit a few inflection points from my life.
The Great Journey
June 15th, 2013: Vancouver, British Columbia
Kareem and I sat in pensive silence. Posted up on leather-cushioned wooden barstool chairs in the cavernous and clamorous dining room of Joe Fortes Seafood and Chop House, we apprehensively awaited the CEO of a leading higher education marketing agency who had asked us to lunch and was running a few minutes late. The three of us had converged in this misty city for PSEWEB — Canada’s preeminent University & College digital marketing conference. Just an hour earlier, Kareem and I had delivered a tag-team presentation on our pioneering collaborative work at Ryerson University — a seamless digital handoff between social media accounts that span different touch-points along the student journey. At the end of this presentation, we slipped in an announcement to the community: we had started a higher education marketing agency of our own, Splash Effect.
And we were open for business.
Our first professional business cards, printed more than a year after registering.
When the CEO finally arrived at our table, he powered through pleasantries and swiftly laid his cards on the table for all to see. He made a bold offer for Kareem and me to jump ship and to work for him — an outcome we quietly suspected but relegated to the bottom of potential reasons for this abrupt lunch request. To acquire us in our gestation seemed absurd at the time. It was a very generous proposition that could’ve dramatically changed our lives overnight. As two scrappy young hustlers looking up at the world and trying to find our place in it, this opportunity offered a sweet shortcut. In one fell swoop, the CEO could quell an upstart and maintain market share, while Kareem and I could experience a successful exit and all the financial and reputational benefits that come with cashing out. But the tradeoff was to build someone else’s dream rather than our own. The tradeoff was to abandon the process in favour of the outcome. The tradeoff was to forego entrepreneurship’s insightful & humbling lows in exchange for an acquisition’s intoxicating & immediate highs.
To paraphrase writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Kareem and I weren’t thinking about building a ship — we were “yearning for the endless immensity of the sea.” We had started Splash Effect for reasons that transcended wealth creation and the gratification to be gained from a successful exit. Kareem and I set sail to solve a problem on our terms and to see how far we could go with it.
The journey was our destination. And considering that our journey had barely begun, we respectfully declined the opportunity on the table and got back to work.
In hindsight, it was one of the best decisions we ever made.
Meet Monty, our mascot. The term “Splash Effect’ and our nautical theme became more meaningful years into our existence. In the beginning, it was just a convenient afterthought.
Started From JOR-06
May 31st, 2012: Toronto, Ontario
Splash Effect was the ninth choice in a list of names that Kareem and I brainstormed for the company that we were about to create. As freelance consultants, we had just won a massive client, and they needed to issue a cheque to a registered business with a name and HST number. For a good laugh, I sometimes revisit the Evernote document where we captured the results of our naming exercise. It’s filled with peculiar rationales, such as a shared love of hip-hop and mixed martial arts. Some of the alternatives to Splash Effect on that list are so stereotypical that they’re downright cringe-worthy: consider that we were a coin-toss away from being called “Silver Sky Social” or “Blue Spark Media”. This document serves us as a reminder of the importance of trying to solve a problem first and then building a business second.
Kareem preparing to settle a debate with a Venti cup in the Project Rhino office, our first co-working home.
Working at the ever-ascending Ryerson University as the country’s first post-secondary Digital Community Facilitators afforded us the perfect sandbox to build a robust social media-driven student community. The institution had wisely recognised that to become a world-class competitor, it needed to address three distinct challenges:
Students are growing up in an increasingly digital world in which their behaviour and expectations are consistently evolving to require better, faster and more personalised experiences.
The digital world is increasingly fragmented, and influence is increasingly decentralised, making it difficult for any one organisation to invest a student in their brand, let alone capture their mindshare.
President Sheldon Levy’s Master Plan had created a culture of growth and innovation at Ryerson University that had put pressure on the institution’s organisations to execute and iterate rapidly to meet students’ evolving needs.
Our leaders at the institution believed that Kareem and I were the right people to solve the aforementioned three-pronged problem. And they let us get our hands dirty. Our work on RU Student Life empowered us to write a blueprint for online student engagement and become subject matter experts. The value of our work was clear to see — we were directly influencing recruitment & retention numbers, and the brand was winning industry awards across the country. Soon, we were approached by other educational institutions to replicate what we had done at Ryerson University. And that, in a nutshell, is how Splash Effect came to be.
I can’t overstate this importance of this point: we didn’t set out to build a business — we focused on becoming very good at solving a specific problem. And over several Chipotle-fuelled white-boarding sessions in the musty basement of Jorgensen Hall, in room JOR-06, we built a company around this problem.
The name was a convenient afterthought.
Over the next four years, Splash Effect would entertain several promising opportunities to change the course of the company through either mergers or acquisitions, beginning with the one propositioned during PSEWEB in 2013. A few negotiations even came down brass tacks and paperwork. At turnkey moments like those, Kareem and I always revisited why we started this company in the first place. For him, it was primarily the thrill of entrepreneurship and the resulting wealth creation. For me, it was mainly legacy and the impact that our work could have for students. These dual motivations have helped us weather many a storm by guiding our decision-making.
Our first Splash Saloon event, hosted at our office space on Front & Spadina.
After years of tinkering with our business model, Splash Effect is sailing smoothly as a boutique digital marketing agency (its most fun, productive, and profitable iteration) and has helped more than 50+ clients that do good, to do better. Our clients include all of our alma maters: Ryerson University, University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Ted Rogers School of Management, and Seneca College. We’ve worked with notable brands such as City of Toronto, Restaurants Canada, Canadian Olympic Foundation, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Foundation, and more. The experience put the wind in our sails to create a concurrent venture, SkillsCamp, a soft skills training company. Just shy of a year old, SkillsCamp’s impressive client roster includes Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Ontario Library Association, Royal Bank of Canada, Goodman School of Business, and Canadian Security Intelligence Services.
We Ain’t Gotta Dream No More, Man
September 22nd, 2017: Toronto, Ontario
Reid Hoffman, the Co-Founder of LinkedIn, famously remarked that an entrepreneur is “someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an aeroplane on the way down.” His words accurately describe how the past few years of my life have felt. The rush, the terror, the resolve, the achievement. Repeat. As stressful as it was at times, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
From co-working spaces, we eventually moved into a private office.
On September 22nd of 2017, nearly five years since starting Splash Effect, Kareem and I sat once again in pensive silence, this time in the dim, deserted upper floor of the Copacabana Brazilian Steakhouse overlooking Adelaide Street. It was a moment reminiscent of Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell reflecting on their tumultuous journey in HBO’s The Wire. Two now older & wiser hustlers situated in a world that we once dreamed of, much more comfortable, but equally weary of the relentless pursuit of our end goal. We found ourselves in the throes of one of the most difficult yet rewarding years of the company, the year that breaks 99% of new businesses: the fifth year. And here we were, with a team of ten professionals, an office in the heart of Downtown Toronto, an overflowing plate of competing & converging deadlines, and incoming lucrative projects. While we might’ve had more downs than ups, the value of the ups drastically outweighed the cost of the downs.
Soon, we needed more space. We eventually moved into a beautiful space within 49 Spadina Avenue.
Had we never embarked on the journey which we were on, I don’t believe we could’ve ever truly appreciated the gradual transition from after-hours burrito bowls in the basement of JOR-06 all the way to company-expensed steak dinners wherever the wind took us.
That evening felt like the perfect time to take a few steps back and take stock of everything that had transpired in the past half-decade.
“Did we do it?” I asked. “Did we build the company that we set out to build?”
“We did,” Kareem replied. “This is honestly as far as I saw.”
I agreed. We did it. Kareem and I set about on a journey to solve a particular problem, and then built a company around it. A company that didn’t fail in its first year. A company that didn’t fail in its fifth year. A company that remains profitable, generating impact, and is enabling the livelihoods of all the people aboard.
We did it.
But there remained one fundamental difference in the Splash Effect we set out to build, and what we have today: to scale, we had to branch out of the education sector. In our early days, all of our clients were colleges & universities. Today, they account for under a quarter of our billings. We’ve since diversified our reach to include non-profit, government, and wellness into our client mix.
Designers, developers, marketers, strategists. The crew, minus a few.
Genuinely appreciating accomplishment is difficult for someone who thrives in underdog scenarios. In the days that followed my reflection with Kareem, I allowed myself to bask in the feeling of achieving a significant life goal: building a self-sustaining business. With Splash Effect self-sufficient, and SkillsCamp’s growth on auto-pilot, I had the headspace earlier this year to ask myself a question that I hadn’t asked myself in a long, long time. A guiding question that has always preceded a quantum leap in my life:
What next?
My answer surprised me.
What Is The Most Resilient Parasite?
August 26th, 1987: Queens, New York
Tristan Walker and I were born on opposite ends of New York City, and have led somewhat parallel lives. The coloured sons of financially struggling parents, we’ve both worked tirelessly to improve our odds of success and make space for ourselves in worlds that didn’t adequately represent us growing up. When he started his internship at Twitter, I started my internship at Sony Music Entertainment. When he went down the path of startup technology, I went down the path of higher education marketing. He worked at FourSquare and Andreessen Horowitz. I worked at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Ryerson University. In 2013, the eery congruence of our career paths would continue as we converged in tandem upon entrepreneurship as our next adventure. On the same month and in the same year that he created Walker & Co., I created Splash Effect. Tristan is three years older than I am, much wiser, and much more accomplished. He is someone who is actively extending the runway of what’s possible for me as a person with similar intersectional identities.
Walker’s process is one that I emulate, and I hang on to his every word during interviews. But that also gives him the power to shake up my worldview thoroughly.
My childhood home in Astoria, Queens.
Walker and I have never formally met, but I’m sure he’d agree with this sentiment: my entrepreneurial journey afforded me experiences, perspectives, and wisdom that unfortunately can’t be learned in a classroom setting. As entrepreneurs in this golden age of entrepreneurship, we lived out our dreams — we built teams, worked with marquis clients, won awards, earned wealth, and learned invaluable lessons. Along the great journey, I received the privilege of becoming a professional speaker, author, and mentor. I was able to channel my subject matter expertise into thought leadership and meet with thousands of people around the world to share my tools, resources, and best practices.
Earlier this summer, I discovered a quote from Tristan Walker during an interview that bore itself deep into my soul:
You need to pursue the idea for which you are the best person in the world to solve that problem.
Upon hearing it, I immediately asked myself two questions:
1. What problem am I the best person in the world to solve?
2. Am I currently solving this problem?
It reminded me of the reason that I started Splash Effect in the first place; the reason I decided to join Student Life Network as their Managing Director; the idea that defines my purpose.
There exists a particular idea for which I am the best person in the world to solve that problem.
The Disengaged Student
December 11th, 1960: Mumbai, India
Slumdog Millionaire’s opening scene makes my father both nostalgic and uncomfortable. You know the one I’m talking about — grubby urchins running playfully through the slums of Dharavi, Mumbai. For Mustafa Khan, this slice of cinema plays out like a documentary. Born into hopeless poverty, the type of destitution that breaks the average person, my father skipped his childhood altogether (save for a few vivid moments like the one captured by director Danny Boyle). Unable to afford an education and therefore needing to undertake precarious and menial labour to scrape together a living for his family, my father’s opportunities for socio-economic mobility were foreclosed. But if my Year One project taught me anything, it’s that crushing adversity can sometimes unlock superhuman resilience. Pressure, as you know, is what creates diamonds. Motivated by his misfortune, my father was able to cultivate enough determination and resourcefulness to escape his circumstances and move with my mother to the land of opportunity, the United States of America.
Mustafa Khan, the man I got my work ethic from.
From as early as I could remember, I had courtside seats to the immigrant hustle. I watched my mother and father forge a prosperous life for my sister and me through sheer hard work, sacrifice, determination, and ingenuity. We moved from one immigrant haven and priority neighbourhood to another, and gradually into more affluent suburbs. A true rags-to-riches story, built on a foundation of early mornings, relentless effort, careful saving, and selfless giving. Lulled by the fruits of his labour, I wasn’t prepared for how my father’s triumph would influence my future. At the tender young age of 17, my high-school guidance counsellor compelled me to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so I went to my father with OCAD as an option, since that same counsellor suggested that I should become a comic book artist. He chuckled and then proceeded to remind me that he didn’t traverse the Atlantic Ocean for me to experience the same socio-economic pains that he felt growing up. His dream for me was to become either a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. The immigrant vocational trinity, if you will. Looking back, he didn’t have the foresight to trust my inclinations. And I didn’t have the conviction to challenge him. The resulting tension created the stress that I needed to experience the very pain points that would allow me to discover my real purpose.
I never imagined someday doing a TEDx talk at my alma mater.
As a first-generation student in the burgeoning internet age, I relied on Macleans Magazine and the Ontario Universities Fair to influence my decision to enrol at the University of Toronto Scarborough reluctantly. In hindsight, I put more effort into choosing video games than I did in choosing my post-secondary path. Whereas I would read reviews and play demos for my video games, the first time I visited the UTSC campus was on my first day of classes (I skipped Orientation altogether). And thus, I endured a three-year temporary defeat of my spirit. I dragged my feet through week after week of a monotonous undergraduate experience that I just couldn’t emotionally invest myself in. Bus after bus, class after class, paper after paper. I was merely going through the motions. And the smile of a young teenager with creative potential began to fade. My debt increased proportionally to my insecurity. If I was learning valuable skills, they weren’t adequately articulated. And the conversation about what awaited me after graduation simply wasn’t happening in my classrooms.
Like thousands upon thousands of students across the country, I was falling through the cracks of the system.
I felt alone, and at times, hopeless. If there was an opportunity cost incurred, I didn’t know how I was going to recoup it. My fate was that of a disengaged student — one that showed up late, and left early. One that sat at the back of the classroom with headphones in my ears and a hood cloaked over my head, not paying attention to what was happening at the front of the room. All I did, day-in and day-out, was work on my freelance creative multimedia projects. The dying embers of a once glowing fire.
I had accepted that the institution wasn’t going to help me get a job. And because of my misplaced fear of not getting a degree, I persisted. And I grew resentful of the walls that had entrapped me. All of my best friends were blocks away in the shiny new management building, immersed in business studies and working in facilitated co-op placements, accumulating market-valued vocational skills. And here I was, entombed in the dingiest corners of the older brutalist buildings doing close readings of Plato’s The Republic.
I burned through some of the most precious years of my life, with little to show for it.
But on the cusp of graduation, in my final year, I stumbled upon a poster that spoke directly to my insecurities. I’ll never forget it — it was an immaculately designed, 11x17 poster with careful colouration choices, beautiful use of typography and white-space, and a clear call-to-action. It was irresistible art against a disorienting cork board of tattered, awful amateur advertisements. This poster compelled me to stop for a fraction of a second longer than I usually would’ve. It led me to attend a leadership development workshop where I would meet my eventual friend & mentor Drew Dudley, who gave me the inspiration to forge my future.
My first public speaking experience happened to be Drew Dudley’s farewell speech.
In this session, Drew Dudley said: “You don’t just go to post-secondary to get a degree. You go to post-secondary to grow into a complete student, and a complete person; you go to post-secondary to experience holistic growth: personal growth, professional growth, and academic growth.”
That was the right message, for the right student, at the right moment.
It was simultaneously a new perspective on the purpose of my undergraduate experience, as well as the validation that I needed to take ownership of my future.
With a battery in my back, I immediately switched programs and proceeded to make up for lost time by building a parallel curriculum within the University of Toronto Scarborough. I pieced together coffee meetings, internships, meet-ups, conferences, workshops, online tutorials, just-in-time learning, networking events, volunteer work, travel, and more.
In this way, the curriculum of my program became a template, rather than doctrine.
I have since committed myself to re-creating through my digital marketing work that serendipitous moment of delivering the right message at the right moment to the right student.
This story brings us to the answer to Tristan Walker’s first question:
What problem am I the best person in the world to solve?
My intertwined lived experiences, and professional experiences have merged to make me the best person in the world to solve the problem of using digital marketing to help students navigate the journey from high school through postsecondary to all the way to their future careers by receiving the right message at the right moment.
Generation Jobless
August 15th, 2014: Toronto, Ontario
“I was walking my dog in the park, thinking about graduation — just that whole notion of a big crowd of people all faced with the same situation, all these graduates going out in the world now, at the same time, and I was thinking, ‘What other kinds of big crowds do you see getting together all with the same purpose?’ Penguins. And they’re adrift, just like these kids.” —Mark Ulriksen, Artist (The New Yorker, May 2012)
The Magnet pitch was a turning point for Splash Effect. The new kid on the block, we were surprised to be invited to pitch for a massive marketing services contract tendered by a consortium of Ontario colleges & universities. Four Scarborough kids — Kareem, Janakan, John, and myself — nervously walked into a pitch briefing room filled with our competitors. Upon our entrance, I overheard one agency owner (they know who they are) refer to us as “posse” — a moment I’ll never forget because of how unwelcome it made me feel. But the feelings of alienation quickly gave way to validation once we settled in and took stock of who we were up against: agencies that had years of experience over us with extraordinary client rosters. It was a sign that we were doing something right. And what we lacked in years to show, we made up for with a very nuanced understanding of the pain points along the student continuum that needed to be resolved. For all of us on the team had lived them. We were all once disengaged students who inventively augmented our curriculums. And while Splash Effect didn’t win the contract, we were informed that we were a promising runner-up. After we licked our wounds, we appreciated what had happened, and what that experience meant. It meant that our belief in solving a problem rather than creating an agency for the sake of creating one was paying off.
Weeks after losing the Magnet pitch, celebrating our first year of business.
My student odyssey reveals a troubling problem that can be summed up in two words: generation jobless. It’s this idea that students are graduating burdened with debt, with insufficient valuable skills, and with slim career prospects. What’s promised to many students in glossy brochures is a far cry from what they receive once they walk off the convocation stage. And in a tumultuous world being increasingly characterised by overwhelming competition, dehumanising alienation, growing social pressures, rapid technological innovation, pervasive loneliness, and economic volatility, this problem is only going to become more intense.
Don’t take my word for it, read/watch these overviews:
Millenials are Screwed by Huffington Post http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/
Generation Jobless by CBC http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/episodes/generation-jobless
Though Canada’s post-secondary enrolment rates are among the highest in the world, youth unemployment only recently hit a 40-year low. Canadians hand as much money toward education as any country, as a percentage of GDP, but we continue to experience high youth unemployment and the need to import skilled workers. My odyssey exposes a misallocation of education dollars. It validates students’ changing behaviours & expectations. And when you zoom out and get a sense of just how many students are falling through the cracks, there can be no doubt that the existing education systems are not adequately meeting the challenges of the complex modern world.
According to the report titled Unequal City: The Hidden Divide Among Toronto Children and Youth, my hometown remains the child poverty capital of Canada with more than one in four kids living in low-income families. And families of people of colour — are more than twice as likely to be living in poverty as those from non-racialized families, or 23.3 percent compared to 11.4 percent, says the report.
Every day, another Hamza is falling through the cracks.
This story brings us Tristan Walker’s second question:
Am I currently solving the problem that I am the best person in the world to solve?
From my final year at the University of Toronto till date, every professional opportunity I’ve pursued has been an attempt at solving a problem that I’m all too familiar with: getting the right message, to the right person, at the right moment.
Boys who created their own curriculum and reinforced my purpose in life.
For the entirety of my professional life, with increasing intention, I’ve been trying to solve this problem from many different angles. Armed with the insight I gained from my internship at Sony Music Entertainment, I knew that the future I would see would be a mostly digital one. I watched an entire industry implode as a result of not being attuned to the changing behaviours and expectations of its end users. At the University of Toronto Scarborough, I helped to transform the way that Student Affairs was connecting with students. I then went on to work at a tech startup, where I cut my teeth as a marketing professional and clarified my desire to work in the education sector. From there, in under two years, I helped establish Ryerson University — Canada’s leader in innovative, career-focused education — as a national leader in online student engagement. And in my final two years at Ryerson University, I led a creative team to enhance the marketing & communications of an entire division. And as you’re well aware by now, I started my own companies, which do so much more than try to solve this problem. We’ve helped countless institutions and brands improve their marketing & communication.
But with our forces combined, we’re still not moving the needle on generation jobless far enough. To indeed solve this problem, I think that the solution must be more simple, more immediate, more social, more integrated, and most of all: more personalised.
It has to be a scaled version of the transformative, just-in-time experiences that I stitched together in my final year of university: coffee meetings, internships, meet-ups, conferences, workshops, online tutorials, just-in-time learning, networking events, volunteer work, travel, and more.
Services & speaking engagements alone are going to be insufficient to move the needle on this problem. There needs to exist a product that lives where students are (and where they will be).
Enter Student Life Network
September 21st, 2017: Toronto, Ontario
The day before Kareem and I acknowledged that we had met our personal goals with Splash Effect, Stephen Sills and I sat on the patio of the newly opened Maverick Brewery on Bathurst Street. It was an uncharacteristically balmy afternoon for that time of the year, and we found ourselves relocating to the inside of the establishment to be in the shade. Sills (as his friends call him) and I had learned about each other years earlier through a mutual friend and mentor, none other than a recurring character in my story — Drew Dudley who inspired me to turn my life around. Sills and I met for the first time when Splash Effect partnered with Adobe’s Behance to host 99U: Local in 2014. A fellow productivity nerd and avid reader of the publication, Stephen was familiar with my work. And I was familiar with his — he was the co-founder of Student Life Network, a company with a clear set of outputs (content & contests), but with then fuzzy outcomes. I knew what Sills was doing for the company, but I didn’t quite understand what the company was doing for students.
A glimpse of 99U: Local Toronto, where I first met Stephen Sills.
I must admit that the first time I met Sills, I was taken aback by his passion. He’s a frenetic man who talks a mile a minute. And with me being an active listener and slow thinker, our early conversations were very lop-sided. Nevertheless, there was a mutual respect and admiration that kept us locked in orbit, with a single individual purpose: helping students succeed.
We’d often skip the small talk and jump right into how we’re trying to solve for the end user: the student. We were both young men who fell through the cracks of the system and then fashioned our curriculums to salvage our substandard experiences. There was alignment in our purpose. In time, we attempted a few arms-length collaborations. Blog posts, keynotes, guest lectures, and even a collaborative mini-conference (where Sills stayed back for several hours after the event to personally coach students one-by-one through career-related challenges).
On the sunny afternoon of September 21st, Stephen excitedly whipped out his laptop and dove right into a presentation on the future of Student Life Network.
“Here’s where we’re going, buddy,” he began.
And I sat and watched in awe, as he walked me through a bold vision to solve the very problem that I had committed to addressing myself years earlier. In a predictable and repeatable way. Student Life Network had earned the attention and loyalty of 1.6 million students across Canada, and counting. They had solved the problem of width. Now they needed to solve the problem of depth. How do we engage these students? How do we provide them with consistent value? How do we inform, empower, and inspire them?
Our conversation grew loud and energetic, and we filled the air around us in Maverick Brewery with big ideas. I could see the trajectory that Student Life Network was on to achieve market leadership within the student resource space. And I felt the pull of its gravity.
Pablo Picasso famously said, “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” I’ve been fortunate to find my gift early on: communication via digital marketing and creative multimedia. And all of my previous endeavours were attempts at giving that gift away. What I saw here with Stephen’s vision was a real chance to give away my gift at an unprecedented scale, and in doing so, take a real shot at solving the problem of generation jobless.
Stephen Sills, the co-founder of Student Life Network.
In the coming weeks, I would think about what it would take to solve this problem. I concluded that the most impactful way would be to lean into the changing behaviours & expectations of the students and reach them directly. We’d have to get onto their phones, into their inboxes, on their timelines, in their direct messages, and every other touchpoint where they currently are (and will inevitably be). And because Student Life Network is a startup, it has the advantages of speed and agility.
I’ve been on the client side. I’ve been on the agency side. I’ve been on the speaker side. I’ve been on the author side. By the time October rolled around, I had decided to take a leap of faith and try my hand at the product side.
Channeling my past into my purpose, I’ve decided to narrow my usually broad focus onto just one thing, and one thing only: Student Life Network. An aptly named culmination of all of the work that I’ve performed in multiple capacities: student, student leader, student union employee, student services leader, student affairs leader, education-serving marketing & communications agency co-founder, and education-serving soft-skills training company co-founder.
What’s Next?
December 27th, 2017: Toronto, Ontario
The separation anxiety is real — not a day has gone by where I haven’t second-guessed my decision to step back from Splash Effect and join Student Life Network. Splash Effect is a company that I’ve poured my soul into, where I did some of my life’s best work. But the paradox of building a sustainable business is that achieving success often requires removing yourself from the company’s operations and entrusting it to more smarter and capable people. In other words, making yourself obsolete (as counter-productive as that sounds). Splash Effect is no longer an extension of me. Truthfully, it hasn’t been for a long time. It’s so much more — it’s the sum total of five years of different people and processes, all refined down into a tried & tested set of operations. And regarding serving my ultimate purpose, well — it hasn’t been a company dedicated to distinctly solving the problem of generation jobless for a while. It serves much more than education — it’s helping government, non-profit, and wellness and industries. And it still exists, and it’s still open for business. Under the leadership of my fellow co-founder Kareem, the agency is being much more selective with its clients, focusing on working with a hand-picked few to ensure more excellent results. In the memorable words of Jerry Maguire: “The answer was fewer clients. Less money. More attention.”
Wavy Wednesday atop Mascot Brewery. These are the moments that I’ll cherish the most.
So why not get acquired before making this move, you ask? It was on the table, and both Kareem and I seriously considered it. But Splash Effect still serves an underserved niche in the market. We’ve got contracts that span well into 2018. We need to exist, as we always have, in the slipstream of larger agencies who can’t serve the clients that we do. While I still own part of Splash Effect and SkillsCamp, I will maintain a strategic advisor role for both moving forward. These companies will continue under the leadership of Kareem Rahaman and Bailey Parnell, respectively.
With them over there, and me over at here Student Life Network, we’re going to take on the problem of generation jobless head-on. I’ve just about wrapped up a low-key first 100 days at Student Life Network, familiarising myself with its people and processes. And I’m excited about the impact that we’ll create here.
Let’s Work
2018 & Beyond: From Canada to the World.
Student Life Network has built a robust campaign engine, and can onboard hundreds of thousands of students every year. They work with leading brands such as CIBC, Uber, Amazon, Air Miles, and more to help students navigate their way from high school to postsecondary to their future careers.
This is the type of magic that I hope to scale through my work at Student Life Network.
As their new Managing Director, I will be working with the leadership team to scale this company, empower my team, and students across Canada graduate with less debt, more skills, and more opportunities. We’re going to do this by creating an evolving, personalised resource network that gives the right students the right message at the right moment.
If it’s the last thing that I do, I will move the needle on the problem of generation jobless.
Here at Student Life Network, we’re gaining a broader and deeper understanding the needs of students across Canada. Through a combination of social listening, data science, and plain ol’ talking to students, we’re making attunement a key priority.
Why? Because we genuinely care about students’ hearts, minds and wallets. It’s Stephen’s life’s work. It’s my life’s work. And that spirit is felt through the entire company.
So if you work with a brand that wants to connect with students, I want to hear from you. If you want to help students succeed, I want to hear from you. If you want to close the gap on generation jobless, I want to hear from you.
And if you’re a student who feels like an underdog, I want to hear from you. Once upon a time, I was where you are. And today, I have the opportunity to help you in an impactful, scalable way.
Let’s get to work.
