In this YouTube video, Evan Carmichael expresses heartfelt gratitude to TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications company, for providing his first brand partnership that transformed his business model. He recounts how, prior to TELUS, he earned revenue by selling advertising on his popular website, but TELUS approached him to create entrepreneurial blog content, offering payment and a backlink. The initial post’s success led to a three‑year relationship and opened the door to a new venture: partnering with brands to reach entrepreneurs. Evan contrasts TELUS’s supportive, entrepreneur‑focused approach with many larger brands that treat influencers as mere sales channels, often offering generic pitches that alienate audiences. He praises TELUS’s philosophy of genuinely caring for entrepreneurs and highlights Tasha Caruso, his primary contact, as a champion within the company. Evan concludes by urging viewers to take a moment to thank someone who has impacted their lives, encouraging comments, likes, and subscriptions.
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Hey, it's Evan, and I believe that it's important to thank the people in your life who've had a positive impact and take time out of your busy week to every now and then just appreciate them and say thank you. You know, I really— I'm really appreciative of all the help you've given me. And so today is the first time that I'm going to be thanking a company instead of an individual person, and the company that I wanted to thank is TELUS. Telus is a big telco here in Canada, and I'm grateful to Telus for a couple reasons. The first is they helped open up a whole new business for me. So before I met Telus, my business was selling advertising. I had a popular website, people came to the site, and I sold advertising against that. And Telus came to me and said, "Hey Evan, we'd like to hire you to create some content for our blog." and you can write about, you know, whatever you want, 300-500 words, and something that helps entrepreneurs, and you can link back to your site. I said, hey, this is a great deal, you know, I have to write a little bit of content, I love helping out entrepreneurs anyway, and I get a link back to my site, and I get paid to do it, why not? It's great. And that first post did so well and had, you know, tens of thousands of views, and it started a maybe 3-year relationship where I was adding content on a regular basis for them, and it helped open up a new business for me, which is partnering with brands. So now I do actually do a lot of work helping brands who are trying to reach entrepreneurs. A lot of the big brands don't have a solid understanding of how to reach entrepreneurs and get their message out, so I help them with that. And TELUS was my first client that made me realize, hey, this is an opportunity. Since then, over the years, I've worked with Google and Dell and American Express and Microsoft and banks and huge companies, but TELUS was the first one. They reached out to me and saw something in me, I guess, and it was a great run while it lasted. The other thing that it helped me realize was that a lot of big brands We don't like brands. We don't like dealing with big companies a lot. You know, the service isn't great. We're getting ripped off a lot. You don't get a personal connection with people. And a lot of the brands who approached me before, they just didn't get it. A lot of big brands still don't get it. You know, they come to me and say, "Evan, hey, we're trying to launch this new product and we want you to pitch it to your audience. We want you to say how great it is on our launch day. Here's the day and we'll pay you 'X amount of dollars.' And they just don't get it, right? Like, that's not the way to sell to entrepreneurs. When I make a video, when I create content, when I'm sharing stuff, it's because I like it. I actually use it and I can talk about it. And I share it because I want to share it, because I think it's going to help entrepreneurs. If I got on and just started pitching everybody's product, I'd lose my audience really, really quickly. And it's still how a lot of brands think for some reason. Telles helped show me that they act— you know, there are brands that actually care about entrepreneurs. Telles actually cares about entrepreneurs, and they let me write whatever content I wanted, something I thought would be helpful and valuable, and they were trying to build relationships with entrepreneurs and be seen as the friend of entrepreneurs. And since then, I found other brands who have that same philosophy, and we've worked really, really well together, got some great results together, and but TELUS was the first one. And so I'm just really super appreciative of the fact that they gave me that first opportunity and they showed me that some brands do care about entrepreneurs and are willing to invest in the relationship and why we should care about them as well. And in particular, Tasha Caruso was amazing, a great point of contact, a big champion of entrepreneurs. And also really entrepreneurial within a big company. So it was really fun and interesting to see. So that's who I want to thank today. Thank you guys so much for the opportunities. And for those of you watching, I hope you take time out of your day today to go thank somebody. Just let them know that you appreciate them. Let them know, you know, that they're important to you, that they made a difference somehow. It'll make you feel good. It'll and it'll make them feel good too. So believe. Those of you watching the video, thumbs up below. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment underneath. If there's somebody who's had an impact on your life, I'd love to hear the story in the comments. And if you want to see more videos like this, click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
