Sylvia Rayner - Managing Director of And-Co

Welcome back, everyone. This is Founder Journeys season two. Today we're going to have Sylvia Raynor on and we're going to jump into hypnotherapy, being in the zone, business decisions in your unconscious mind, the new realities of a hybrid work environment. But we're also going to take a serious look at her journey as an entrepreneur. Being a single mother, but most importantly, surviving breast cancer, finding that work life balance and really balancing physical health and mental health.

3, 2, 1.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Founder Journeys. Today we've got another good friend of mine, Sylvia Rayner. Sylvia is a entrepreneur and even though she hasn't founded a lot of the companies like she's been very, very early with some of the companies that we're going to talk about. So you can call her a pseudo founder and help mold and shape the companies into what they are, but she is an entrepreneur. She's got a lot of other accolades under her belt and endeavors. And we're going to talk about some really interesting subjects today. But first off, Sylvia, welcome to Founder Journeys. Let's kick it off with you telling us a little about and co and the industry that you're in right now and about yourself.

Thanks, Rife. It's good to be here. Good to see you as always. Yes. So currently my role is managing director of ANN Co and which is really a team of one. It's a brand, it's a, it's a subsidiary company of a real estate company called RPEG Group of Holdings. And basically we're building an exclusive private office collective in Coal harbor which also has a restaurant and a wellness studio. So it's sort of this, it's a departure from the CO working concept. It's a little bit more elevated, a little more sophisticated and it's also kind of this all in one concept. So the idea is, you know, you could drive your Tesla over the bridge, park it in the EV charging station downstairs, go to the gym, have a private personal training session, grab a smoothie, go upstairs, have your meetings and like all the offices are glass. Like you can see. I'm actually on the fifth floor right now, so you can see the views. This is actually to the Georgia street view, but we've got these all around.

We do have an international audience. So Coal harbor is a area of downtown Vancouver, kind of a higher end area. And there's some pretty notable neighbors in your building and around you. I think Apple's got their office fairly close. Facebook is just up the street. Salesforce got building a brand new Office as well, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah. So yeah. Right, for people that don't know Vancouver, this, this area is right on the seawall. So we're right by the water and the harbor and then we've also got Stanley park just over here. I mean I can actually see the entrance to Stanley park from the office. And Stanley park is this beautiful huge old growth forest park literally away from you.

And it is one of the crown jewels of Canada. It's rated around the world as one of the top. That seawall is rated tops around the world and definitely a very desirable space. And so it makes sense to kind of have a higher end. I wouldn't say elite, but it's definitely accessible to a lot of people. But you're catering to more than just here, have a desk, it's have a place to actually build a lifestyle for yourself.

Exactly. Build a lifestyle, build a true community. We do cater more to established firms. So while I love the co working model for the startup community because you really want lots of energy, lots of activity and people like throwing around ideas over the foosball table or going to the kitchen, this is going to be a little bit quieter. So their private offices, there's no hot desking, there's no dedicated desks. So we expect that. I mean we've got five member companies now and we'll be filling with similar companies as we finish construction. But the types of firms that will be here will be boutique firms that are, that are intentionally small or like a Vancouver HQ of an international firm, for example, that knows that they want a footprint here, an executive office that they can fly people into, but they don't need this, you know, an entire commercial floor plate anymore. They need an eight person office and they want to be able to attend cultural events. We have this incredible event space built in and it's all connected by an interconnected stairway. So. So I wish I could give you a tour, but essentially from any office floor you can walk down the stairs, go into the forum and then down another set of stairs, through this sort of communal kitchen and right through a patio and into the seawall. And so it's intentionally open and it's intentionally interconnected and it's just creating those kind of collision points for people, but also having places to tuck away and just get everybody to get their work done right. So it's not a distracting environment.

And we're jumping ahead here cause I still want to talk about you and your journey, but how have you adapted to life after Covid? Because the work from home strategy. Like, I see your offering being very interesting for a lot of corporations because they don't need as big of a footprint anymore, and they're going to look at new ways to expand and grow their operations. And so how are you adapting to that? Is there. It's kind of defined. Okay, this is a strategy that we're going to go with, or no, let's try to be more nimble and adjust as we go along.

Well, yeah, weirdly, the interconnected stairway, for example, was planned pre Covid, but that's become a really great feature with COVID because if anybody's working in a downtown office tower, they know the trials and tribulations of waiting for an elevator that goes. Goes up to 44 floors and can only take two people at a time. So we've got two floors of offices off the main floor, but they can all. They're all accessible by this open stairway. So that leaves the elevators free to use for those in a wheelchair or who need to take the elevator. But generally speaking, most of the people walking around won't need to use it. So that's great. But yeah, so it's a funny twist. It's like there are certain companies and verticals that have benefited from COVID And I mean, well, I hate to put it that way because Covid has been terrible for everyone. But in terms of our offering qualms.

About it, like, certain companies have thrived and tech more so than hospitality. Hospitality has just been decimated and will take some time to come back. Anywhere where you require density for revenues and turnover, they're challenged. But other companies where remote work and teleconferencing and things like that are accessible, they've done fairly well through this, and some have actually done better than others like online shopping and things like that. So it's just a reality. Some people prosper, some suffer, and the death toll is just insane. And there's all these other things that have come about because of it. But you do have to acknowledge that some companies and some businesses and some industries have changed and some change for the better.

Yeah. And I think that timing for this is. Is ideal because we know that, that there are a lot of companies that have real. That never thought that they'd have distributed teams that, you know, there are certain industries that said they'd never have people working from home or they never conceived of working from home. Tech's different because the work from home thing and remote work has been happening for a long time. But you look at law firms, accounting firms, and More traditional verticals. And they, you know, they often have been, they've been quite stuck on like on paper and on having people in the office. Well now they've been forced to have people work from home. And now, and now people have been working from home and they've realized what we're seeing is that most companies and most workers want a hybrid model. So they want to have so workers, very few workers want to have five days in the office any longer. Based on like the gantner research and so on. Like what we're seeing in polls, most people want to work from home at least one to two days per week. And some of them want to work from home three to four days per week. So companies are struggling to make sure that they can ensure that they have a safe place for people to come back to work and also that they're not overpaying for commercial real estate. Most companies don't need that big, they really don't need a whole floor plate for themselves anymore. They may need one executive office for a collaborative team that need to meet and talk all the time or they may need a small office where, you know, workers are scheduled to come in one to two to three days per week and it's different people on each day. And then. And so I think where we. And the other thing is there's a big holding pattern. Like we've seen a ton of commercial sublease activity in Vancouver. So all this stuff flooding the market but no deals. And it's because everybody's waiting to see what's next. And they don't want to sign a long term lease right now. So our terms are 12 months. So I see that we can answer to one. We're way ahead of the COVID stuff. I've done certification with Yellow Cross but we're also doing well certification for the building right now and the well health and safety standard. So those are big time programs to ensure that we're totally on top of not just Covid, but creating a building that is human centric and helps to encourage human health. We know that's going to be big for everybody and their teams. We know that being able to have, for instance be able to eat, workout and work all in the same building is also going to be very attractive for people because I mean things may, even by the time that you air this, things may have changed. But even if everybody's vaccinated, there's still this lingering concern, well, this might not be the last time we see a pandemic. So we're all Very. We're just. This is something that's changed the way we think about our safety and our health and our well being. And I think that anybody coming back to the office just wants to make sure that they feel totally safe. And so we're, as the situation develops, we're also adapting or making sure that we're just ahead of everything. So, like another example of that is we turned one of our meeting rooms into a content creation room. I can't remember if I've told you about this yet, but yeah, so it's like a mini content studio with chroma key green screen with a good camcorder, with some lapel mics. And then we've also got cameras all over the space, including on our forum area. So somebody like. So companies that need to create their own content or connect via livestream with an audience, whether that's their market or whether that's their employees, they have the means to do that also from here so that we can just keep them connected through technology better than they could anywhere else.

Yeah, we kind of talked quite a bit about the company and the industry and you talked about how tech companies and Foosball tables play a certain role. But your offering right now is not towards that. It's more higher end, but for the audience's knowledge. You are very familiar with the Foosball concept because you helped co found or not co found, but start a coding school coding bootcamp at Launch Academy. And so we shared an office for quite a few years and you saw firsthand how the foosball table plays into culture. But before we get into that journey, let's talk about where your journey started, because you've got an interesting start to your entrepreneurial life.

Yeah, well, the very first part I don't think you even know about, which is that I came out to Vancouver from Toronto, well, actually via Ottawa, to finish off a diploma in print media. And I did a work placement at Raincoat Books. And then I started. And then I love Vancouver, so I stayed and I worked at a small print shop in Kits. And then I thought, oh, I should open my own print shop. But I wanted to do it in Squamish. And again, for your international listeners, Squamish is considered the outdoor recreation capital of Canada. It's just north of Vancouver, basically between Vancouver and Whistler, which is an incredible ski resort and mountain biking now in the summer. And so I wanted to live in Squamish. So I started looking at commercial real estate in Squamish. And I saw a Business for sale for $5,000, which was a picture framing shop. And I wasn't a picture framer, but training was provided. This is a Craigslist ad, by the way. Training was provided. And so I hopped on a bus. I didn't even have a vehicle here at the time. I hopped on a Greyhound bus. I went up to Squamish and I met a guy called Peter Emmerich, who was. I guess he was in his 60s at that point. And he built the building that the picture framing shop was in, and he'd been running it in Squamish for 30 years. And so I walked away from that meeting with Peter and I think I got. I was going on so random. I was going on a flight somewhere at the time, and I think I called him from the airport. You know, it was like several hours after I left our meeting. And I said, yeah, I'll take it. And I bought this picture framing shop. So that was actually my first entrepreneurial adventure. And that lasted for about two and a half years. And then I sold the shop.

Hopefully more than $5,000.

Yeah, for more than $5,000. And then I went on to other things. And one of those things, probably what you were thinking of, is that I opened up a hypnotherapy practice in a. In a clinic that specialized in working with athletes. So there was a. It was a health clinic with RMTs, physios, chiros and kinesiologists. And I was the resident hypnotherapist.

And typical hypnotherapist story, but you were in new exciting ways with helping professional athletes, high performance individuals just level up their skill sets, like maybe quickly touch on that and then we can talk about how you transition from that into the tech world.

Yeah. So I chose. When I was learning how to be a hypnotist, there are schools for hypnotherapy, believe it or not. I just realized that sports hypnosis just wasn't something that was really happening. And I couldn't figure out why, because I won't go into too much detail, but there's certain things that make people a good candidate for hypnosis. And it kind of has to do with how they relate to the world. And being coachable and being able to accept suggestions and being able to accept authority is part of what being a good hypnotic subject. Not. It's not just. I don't want to get too much into this because people have so many preconceived ideas about hypnosis. And. And I. It would take a long time to like, do all the myth busting. But let me just say that I had a. I had a hunch that athletes would make a great population to work with and that we could really do some cool stuff. And also, I didn't. I was just at a point in my life where I didn't really. I was quite young. I'd had some challenging experiences in my own life, and I didn't really want to be working with some of the other areas that hip, like most hypnotherapists were working on, which is trauma and mental health. Honestly, I just wasn't really up for it myself. And I knew that with sports, you know, the, the, the achievement or like the changes would be measurable. Like we'd really be able to. I mean, somebody's either they're faster or they're not. They're stronger or they're not. They're going to training more or they're not. And so that really appealed and it turned out to be, yeah, really quite interesting. But. Oh, go ahead.

Like, like Elite validation right here. HBO's got a series out about Tiger Woods. It's two episode series. Tiger woods father was in the. In the military as a Navy seal. One of his colleagues joined Earl woods and Tiger woods playing golf on a golf course. And they built a relationship. And he's kind of like a pseudo father to him, but he was a psychologist for the military, and so he helped Tiger understand hypnosis. And so when you talk about athletes being in the zone, especially with Tiger woods, people have seen him tune out the crowd and just do amazing things. That's him actually hypnotizing himself and putting himself in that zone where he can just focus and take his game to that next level. And it's documented. He admits it, and it's in hbo. So it's gotta be true, right?

Yeah. Flow and trance are really interconnected. Even if you watch, you know, when Felix Baumgartner was it, Felix Baumgartner jumped from space. Remember the jump from space, the big red bull thing? Okay. So if you watch that documentary, I think it's about 45 minutes long. You can find it on YouTube. There's a point where he starts to panic about his suit. He starts to get this weird, like claustrophobia and anxiety just about being in his suit as he gets closer and closer to the jump. And then you can see that they bring in a specialist to work with him. And I'm sure that they're working on him with hypnotherapy. Because just by the cadence and like, I have to go back and like find the clip for you, but it's probably more common than you think. And a lot of people that are successful are probably using mental imagery and trance and those things just unconsciously. So really like those things factor into everybody's everyday life. Some people use them better than others and a hypnotherapist is an expert in them and good at guiding people to using them in, in more productive ways.

Just basically used in business in any way.

Oh yeah, well, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you think about it.

So like for entrepreneurs, not as a business, but for entrepreneurs, for executives.

Yeah. So a perfect example is presentations and public speaking anytime that you have. Okay, so there's a few different areas. Fears and phobias are huge. They're pretty, they're really quite easy to treat with hypnosis. There's really good protocols that exist for, for doing that. So any kind of fear, anxiety or apprehension around anything can, can really be combated with all kinds of mental imagery and mental rehearsal with or without hypnosis. And then the other thing is in, well, where I saw a lot of benefit and where I worked with people a lot was in establishing better habits, right. Better behaviors. So when you want to make a change. So you know, if you want to be successful at your work, especially if you're in a hyper aggressive, like hyper competitive startup scene, then you have to be an efficiency monster or you, you should be, especially if you don't want to burn out. And so that means like often, you know, you want to have really good habits in the morning, you want to be able to get up at a certain time, you want to eat well, you want to be on track, you don't want to procrastinate, you want to stay focused. Like all of those things are things that can be helped with, with meditation, mental rehearsal and hypnosis. So it's taking now and where I can kind of differentiate between, well, wanting, you know, just willpower, for example, or somebody just deciding that they want to make changes in those areas. How many times has everyone here listening, you know, had some kind of habit like hitting the snooze button where they've told themselves, the day before tomorrow, I'm not going to hit the snooze button. And then what happens? You wake up, turns into 30 more minutes, right? Because we're actually, we are quite programmed. We are programmed by our habits. Right. As automatons. But what works really, really well for changing that is mental imagery and knowing how to use it properly and using it in a state where you're accessing your unconscious mind. Because that's actually where all the behavioral automatic stuff happens. It's not in your conscious, you know, prefrontal cortex activity where your. Your executive function is actually deciding, I'm going to do this behavior happens on an unconscious level. We just think. What we often do is we behave and then we come up with a rationalization for why we behave that way. But for most people, that's like a black box. They don't actually understand why they're doing stuff or how come they can't stop.

They're already preconditioned to it or premeditated that they're going to do that action.

Right? Yeah. And they just. And they. And they can't stop. And then they get upset that they can't stop and they don't know what to do. So that's where working with the unconscious is really rewarding. And it's really exciting because you can break barriers for people. I'm just like thinking more in that entrepreneur space. I would just say I do think that public speaking, confidence and pitching and that type of thing is probably the thing with high performing or people who wish to be high performers in the business space would mostly come for help. But there's. Any behavioral change is something that you can deal with with hypnotherapy.

That's awesome. We could talk about this for hours. But I want to get back to you and your journey because you've got a really interesting journey as well. How, like, how did you make the jump to tech and coding in particular?

Okay, well, yeah, that was for very. That was very practical. That was a very. And there's a lot of decisions I think that I made that really just came out of necessity. So I had built up a private practice in Squamish as a hypnotherapist. And it was. And it's a small town, so, you know, word of mouth is. Makes it really easy to keep having clients. And then you keep, you know, you keep your clients because it's a small community. You're good at what you do. You know, you just have a. You just have consistent work. I worked with the coaches and the gyms, and so there's so many athletes there.

Yeah, sorry. Having Whistler like a stone's throw away, your word of mouth is actually going to high performance athletes because they're right there.

And even. Even just sort of your average, everyday person in Squamish is more like There's a lot of weekend warriors there. So there are people that may be doctors, dentists, office workers in the city that, that commute and they. But they still do the test of metal, which is like a bike race every year or cross country bike race every year, and they want to beat their time. So, you know, even your average person is potentially looking for assistance with their sports performance. So there's perfect location. Then my daughter got to be school age and I wasn't with her dad and he had moved to Vancouver and so we were sharing time with her and we had to decide where to put her into school and we agreed to put her in school in Vancouver. So I tried to stay on the North Shore for a while and do the back and forth thing, but it just wasn't feasible. I needed to be part of her school community. I needed to be close to where her school was. So made the choice to move to Vancouver. But I was. And I got like, I found a clinic that I liked in Vancouver, but it was like I knew I was going to have to totally rebuild everything all over again because I had some people that were willing to drive down and come and see me from Squamish, but that's quite a commute and it wasn't really realistic to, you know. And like virtual services also wasn't really a thing at that point. Like, I did do some Skype sessions, but I definitely felt like I needed to be working with people in person at the time. I actually don't feel that way anymore, but at the time I did. So I just felt. I just felt kind of stuck. I just thought, I just don't know if I have the steam to like pull myself out. I was doing meetups, you know, But I just. Vancouver is a different market and I just, I felt burnt out and I didn't want to have to just, yeah, do that whole build it from the ground up thing again.

Starting over is hard, everybody.

Yeah, it's so hard, especially when you've already done it and done it so well and then nobody knows who you are. It's just like, oh man. Like now I have to explain. And I didn't like re explaining things over and over again. Maybe that's like just a personal failing of getting bored at that. And I don't like promoting myself actually. Like, it's one of the things that I never liked doing. So that. That also poses some issues. So what I did was I thought, okay, I just need to get a job, so I'm going to look, I'm going to be in the, I know I'm going to be in the city. I'm going to be in the city for at least the next 10 years while I'm, my, my daughter is going through school. Right. And so what's a job that I could do in the city that's going to give me a good income and be stable and provide for growth during 10 years in Vancouver? And I came up with two answers and one was a business analyst and the second was a software developer. And I thought, well, I like both of those things or I think I do. So I did one UBC course in business analysis and I loved it actually, and I did super well. But it was going to take me two years to get a certificate or diploma and then, you know, do my, my project manager's professional certification or whatever. Like it was, it was a two year commitment really, and a bunch of money as well. So. And that two years would be, you know, pretty much full time school. And again, like. And I'm a single mom. Yeah. Right. So. And then, and then I found, I don't know how I stumbled on. It was, I think, how did I find it even? Yeah, I was, I guess I was looking for code schools and I found an ad for Lighthouse Labs or I stumbled on a posting for Lighthouse Labs. I don't even remember how they were trying to get students at that time.

Posting to join Lighthouse Lab as a coder or an employment advertisement.

No, this was to be in a student at Lighthouse Labs. Okay. So I filled out the student application and then I went in to meet with at the time, the admissions people for the founders, which is Jeremy and Karam. And they had other founders, but those were the two that were running that part of the process in Vancouver at the time. And just for the audience, just for.

The audience, Lighthouse Labs is a coding bootcamp started at Launch Academy. So they're one of our big success stories. And so I know them very intimately because we saw them as four entrepreneurs that came from Toronto with an idea to disrupt coding education. And I got to witness them grow from four desks to one of Canada's top coding boot camps with offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal. And Sylvia was a key part of that. And so jumping back, that's why I asked, was that first touch point a job offer or was it actually you going in to learn how to code?

No, no, I wanted to be a student, so I wanted to be a bootcamp. So they, so they didn't have any employees at that time. They had one part time admin, like, who was on a contract. I think she was working for you at the same time as well. And then they had, they had their mentors and they had run a couple of cohorts, small cohorts, as they had launched. So I think they were probably going into Cohort 3. And I went in and they were, they were like, and they will admit this themselves, they were kind of disorganized at the time. And so they had posted a job and they thought I was there for the job interview. They just got it wrong. They just, I don't know, they just took one look at me and assumed job interview. I don't know what that means. Maybe it was the way I was dressed that day, but they ended up bringing me into a room and I was like, no, no, no, I'm here to be a student. I want to learn how to code. But we got along so well. Like, it was just an instant connection. We had such a great conversation. We were having fun. And it just kept coming back that based on the experience, because they gathered a lot of information at that time, they really wanted to make sure people were suited to boot camp. So in talking about like my career and previous schooling and things like that, and just like how my brain worked, you know, they kind of. I could tell they were just looking at it and they're like, oh, you'd actually be really good to work here. Like, you know, And I was like, huh. I was like, okay. So I actually went to my car again. I was like, my gut decisions, I feel like we'll probably touch on this later. But your gut, you know, you can trust your nervous system. Like gut decisions, if you really feel it, I think are always right. So I had such a good feeling walking out of there and I went to my car and I was like, huh, how can I make this work? And I sent them an email and I just said, okay, I know that you're trying to hire somebody right now, and I also want to do the bootcamp. So here's, here's, here's my suggestion. How about I work for you for the summer as like a co op basically, and we see how it goes. And I'm like, I'm not sure if I have the skills that you need or like what it is that you're actually looking for, really, because it's classic startup. Like, they had kind of a job description, but they also didn't know what they didn't know. And I said, I think we. It would be a good Fit. So why don't I work for you for the summer and if it works out, I'll stay on full time and if it doesn't work out, I'll just do boot camp in September. And they were like, okay. And so that's what happened. I started and then I just, we, we stayed. I stayed and I, after, I was like, I was the office administrator or office manager, I think. And on day four, I believe Jeremy, who was one of the co founders, the CEO, had to travel somewhere. So he said, could you just, could you just do the admissions for me while I'm gone? And then I think by the time he got back, my job title had been changed by me to Director of admissions and Operations. And then I went on to be the first gm. And yeah, we just, it just went boom, boom, boom. Like we just grew so fast and it was quite, quite wild. And lots of work, but lots of fun and great work experience and I'm still great friends with them today.

And again, having a front row seat to watching this, I truly understand how you were very instrumental for their growth and structure and allowing them to become the entity that they are today. But that's just one stop in the journey. And so you worked at another co working space that you helped build the whole strategy and get it off the ground. And now with and Co, you've kind of been very good at picking the type of founders that you want to work with and the businesses that you want to help build and grow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I just, yeah. Trusting your gut and. Well, I should, I mean, with company, which is the other co working company that I work for, I should say, like, I mean it was all, it was all totally up and running by the time I came on. But I did come on at a time where they were experimenting with their model and, and they were trying to decide if they wanted to pivot towards actually some education as well. So in that case I was approached. The last couple opportunities I've had actually have found me. So in that case, I'd met Darrell Bosa through an event with Lighthouse and we hit it off extremely well and he was interested in the work that I was doing. So taking the hypnotherapy side and what I'd learned about skills training and metacognition and applying that to the entrepreneur space had become a bit of an obsession with me. So I was trying to develop programming where I could teach entrepreneurs metacognitive skills so that they could perform better at work. So basically training the brains of Entrepreneurs just like athletes, just like I had with these pro athletes. And I guess that got Darrell really interested, and. And so he made me an offer. And it took a really long time to. For us to decide because I love Lighthouse, so it was, like, actually really, really hard to make the decision to leave because they were still scaling. So I did end up leaving, but I gave them, like, nine months notice. I think it was to make sure that. I'm not kidding. Like, it was. It was either six or nine months, like, and I. And I was even checking in with them during the whole process to, like, I just wanted to make sure that I left them in a good, solid position. Yeah. And that. But that I could also go on to this new opportunity, which was chief operating officer of a different kind of startup. And so. Yeah, so. So that. So that one. Yeah, kind of found me. And then similar to that with our PEG group, I. Well, I ended up at BOSA doing learning and development, and then that was a contract. So that wrapped up. And then I was kind of on my own again. And I was trying to decide, do I reboot my coaching practice? Do I do more of that? I hooked up with a clinic here. Again, same kind of thing. It's like, it feels a little uncertain given that, like, now I'm a mom of two and I'm the main breadwinner in the family. And, like, there's, you know, I just. I have a much greater need for stability and security than I think I used to. And then I got approached by somebody who knew me from my work at BOSA and said, do you want a job? And I said, maybe it would really depend what it is, because I like working for myself. There's lots of advantages. And they said, well, let me introduce you to Drew. And I met up with Drew, who's the president of rpeg, and he told me about this and co concept, and I've seen where the co working model has struggled. And, you know, there's a part of me that thought, oh, maybe I wouldn't work for another co working space because it's, you know, it's really hard to make it a really sustainable and profitable business. It's a pre Covid model. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

This whole dynamic to it.

Yeah, well, actually, at the time that I met Drew, it was just starting, so that added a whole other element. But anyway. But when he told me the vision and when I saw the actual building, I could see that there was something a little bit different happening here. And so I said, yeah, I'll Take this on. I love the idea, too, of really being here at the start. Like, literally, I'm in a construction site right now, watching the walls come up, and that's a pretty cool place to be. But, yeah, in terms of finding people or, like, them finding me, um, I. I have never gone wrong by trusting my gut when it comes to working with people. And I think that is sort of a feature of, like, maybe what drives me in general. I'm. I definitely. Like, I need to be in line with my values or I. I just start to feel sick. Like, I just can't. I can't. I've. I have had. I have had an experience of working for somebody that I thought was, you know, like, quite immoral. And. And, like, I had to quit. Like, I just couldn't. It just made. Yeah, I just felt sick all the time. It didn't take me long to figure out that there was some stuff that was going on that I just didn't feel good about. So it's very important for me to work with people that I feel really aligned with and that I can trust and also, like, ideally, that I can learn from and that I hope or that we can learn together. But I definitely seem to be attracted to these early stage things where there's something to build and a vision that needs to be realized. And so when somebody offers me an opportunity like that, it's pretty hard to say no.

Hard to say no. Well, for the people listening in, it probably sounds like, okay, you've had an interesting journey, a lot of opportunities kind of landed on your plate. But reality is, like, you were a single mother of one, now you're a mother of two. But you've also had some serious health issues.

And again, I know you, and you.

Never really missed a beat. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? What you had to go through and how you adapted and where you think maybe some of the hypnosis and things that you've experienced in the past will help you. Help you through that.

But also some of the missteps that.

You might have taken that you look back, it's like, okay, that was stupid.

I shouldn't have done that.

Yeah. So tricky. So what you're probably mostly referring to is that I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and that was in January of 2019. And that was a lesson in and of itself because I knew something was wrong.

You're young, healthy, active.

I remember working with you in the office, and you were really, like, a.

Lot of energy and.

Never would have thought that you'd be someone that have to face us at such a young age.

Yeah, it was a total surprise. It's not in my family. I have no, like, there's no like logical reason, no risk factors really that anybody could point to that would suggest that I would have breast cancer. And so I definitely wasn't. It wasn't on my radar at all. I'd never, I never thought about it. It's not, like I said, it's not really in my family history. So it was just by fluke. I started to feel. I did have some premonitions about it though. But I won't go into that because that's a whole other story. But it was super weird. But anyway, I did have some symptoms that were kind of like hard to pin down. Like I was just really fatigued. I had that sort of general sense of malaise. I could, I couldn't explain it. It just felt like off and really tired. Like I was having to nap in the afternoons like you say, like did.

You know right away that I was.

A health related or you think maybe it was work and stress from. Sorry, which, which company were you with when, when that happened? Was it at Company?

I was still at company. I was just transitioning actually from company to bosa. So Company is a subsidiary, an investment company of bosa and I then I'd been pulled into the parent company and I was just making that transition and I did think it was possible that I was burnt out. I'd gone through a divorce. I was like, there's a lot that's going on in the last 10 years. So it had another kid, then went through a divorce. Yeah, change jobs, like from one pretty major job to another big, you know, job. So yeah, it definitely, I definitely thought I. And then I was burning the candle at both ends for sure at Company because I was trying to work on the education side as well as, you know, keep the actual CO working space running. So there's a lot going on. So I thought, yeah, maybe I'm just hitting a wall. You know, I'd been burnt out once before, so I thought it could be that. But I just had some weird, I don't know, I just had some weird niggling feelings. And then I got a couple tests done in different areas and they didn't turn up anything. And then I found a lump that was probably three months after I started thinking that something was up. And I went to my doctor and she said, well, you're very young and you know, this has some features that we worry about, but some that we don't really. So we could just keep an eye on it. And I was like, no, I want to get a test. Like, now. Get me. I think it was an ultrasound was the first step. And she said, we could try to get you an ultrasound. I said, please, let's get an ultrasound now. Healthcare system being what it is, that meant I think an emergency or, like, an urgent ultrasound is, like, still three or four weeks out. So I think we found it in December early. Yeah, it took about a month to get an ultrasound. And then the ultrasound. I mean, that was the hardest part of that, in a way. That whole process is just getting diagnosed because you. You're with technicians, but they can't help but react to what they're seeing. And I'm like, I think I'm pretty emotionally intelligent, and I could see what they. That they couldn't tell me what they were looking at, but I could see.

That something was wrong on their face. Something. Something was up.

Yeah. And just the way their. Their mood changed. Right. So that happened with the ultrasound. I knew something was up. Then they booked me for an emergency mammogram and a core biopsy. And again, like, exactly the same scenario where, like, you go in people like, oh, hi. And they just think they're like, oh, yeah. Young, healthy person. And then they start looking at stuff and they're like, oh, like, you're like, okay. Like, one woman grabbed me by the shoulders and just said she was going to pray for me and my family. And I was like, that is a bad sign. Yeah. Yeah. So I got diagnosed. It turned out that I had. I still. I think I was still stage one, which is great. So it's like that they base it on, like, the size of the tumor. So, like, the odds were pretty good. But I got scheduled right away for a surgery. So I had a bilateral mastectomy, and then they had to determine if I get chemo or radiation or both. In the end, I didn't have to do chemo, which I was really relieved about, but I did have five weeks of radiation. But, yeah, like, again, I'm earning the money to pay the rent on our place, so I didn't have the option to go on leave, really. So I worked full time through that whole process, and I ended up having five surgeries because there were complications from my surgery. And, I mean, in a way, I guess I'm proud that I was able to do all that. But I. It's crossed my mind that I have. I have a lot of resiliency and the program that I wrote, the eight week program that I taught to entrepreneurs through company, was called the Grit program. And like, it was all about it, right?

Yeah. You had two eyes in there. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, Just. No, just grit. Just like the word. But so I, like, I taught resiliency to athletes and to entrepreneurs and then. But it occurred to me that after getting sick that it's possible that my own resilience had gotten to the extreme side of what resilience could be, which a word that I've heard bandied around, I've kind of adopted is endurism. So it's just taking resilience too far. It's like when your identity is locked in to being resilient, it's very hard to take breaks or to step back or to take time for yourself or just to do things for yourself. And so you get into this habit of always pushing, pushing, pushing, and you kind of get, you know, if you're not pushing, you kind of don't know what to do. And it's crossed my mind that that kind of quality could have set me up for getting really sick. Like, nobody knows. But, like, the long nights, like, lack of sleep. Like, we know that we need sleep for our bodies to take care of, you know, things for us. Yeah, you need deep sleep for that too. You can't just be having shallow REM sleep all the time, which is what you get when you don't sleep, when you sleep four hours a night because you're working all the time. And so, I mean, I can't make that causal link, obviously, but it did make me think twice about how much I'm willing to push myself for work at the expense of my own health and my own family. It just really reconnected me to how important it is for me to be there. Not that I didn't know that before, but when you think you might be gone and you've got kids in the mix, it really hits home that it's more important to make sure that your health is number one. So, yeah, I mean, well, I don't know what else to say about that except I haven't come up with an answer yet. I can't seem to help being who I am. I take it back to like I was, you know, I was raised by a very stoical father. Every summer we'd go hiking in the White Mountains, which is a mountain range in New Hampshire which has the worst weather conditions in the world. And my mom says it's the only time that she could get him to unplug from the office. So we'd spend like five days and we'd drive from. I lived in Ontario then. I grew up in Toronto. We'd drive to New Hampshire and we go hiking for five days on these quite high mountain peaks from the. And this is me from the age of seven. And it was like, those were formative experiences of, like, you are so tired and you've got a huge pack on and you've been hiking all day, but you just got to keep going because you got to get to the hut so that you could sleep for the night. And there's like a lot of that kind of thing, like Navy family. You know, my grandfather was a vice admiral in the Navy. And that, like, that just like carries down that kind of mentality of like, just get up and go and push and do it. Right.

And you again, get preconditioned to do these things because, yeah, all, you know.

Yeah. So.

Yeah, but definitely, like, again, I know.

You and you're a very, very impressive woman. You were very transparent with what you're going through. I know you had Instagram posts. And a lot of the women that are around us, they were so appreciative of the transparency because we actually did a hackathon at Launch Academy for breast cancer awareness. And one of the biggest challenges is self testing at a young age just doesn't happen because young women think it's not going to happen to me. But reality is, it does happen. And your transparency and openness definitely probably.

Opened up a lot of eyes and.

Made some women in our circles think very differently about their own health. And I'm happy to see you're healthy now and you're doing well. You get two amazing kids that are becoming social media stars of their own.

And one of them anyway. Yes, TikTok.

But where do you see yourself going now with regards to. I don't want to say specifically to health, but the self awareness that you have now with who you are, what you put yourself through before and how you want to handle yourself, both professionally but also at home knowing that you survived this health scare, but you still got two kids and you've got a.

Family.

And you're building a new business with.

I know. Well, I have simplified things a lot and I've taken a bit of pressure. I mean, it's so hard because it's like you are who you are, you know, and like, I did, like, I'm always taking a course or doing something because I love to learn and that's never changed. And then I tried, like, paring that back, and then I just find that I'm not that happy because that's fulfilling for me. So I either have to. Well, I mean, if I'm learning on the job, I'm pretty happy, but I still like to be learning something else. And. But what I can say is, like, I think what I reflected on when I was sick and, like, going through treatments and spending a lot of time in waiting rooms and recovery rooms and things like that was just trying to kind of connect back with the simple things that made me feel happy and connected with my family and not, like, my family of origin, like, my mom and my brothers and everybody, and also with my kids and my partner. And I just stopped trying to do too many things. Like, I. My routine is. I decided I had to focus. And I think this is true for people when they get to a certain age and their life has certain complexity of its own. You kind of have to start to choose. Like, I realized I can't be. I can't do it all. Like, I just can't do it all. So I had to really try to reflect on and narrow down, like, what are the things that have been really meaningful to me. And, like, maybe for the next five to 10 years, I just focus on those things. So that's. Like, I still have. Like, it's still hard to keep that list small. But I realized, like, I still just love books and reading. I started my career, like, way back. I worked in book publishing, and I still just. I just love reading. And I still think it's the cheapest and most incredible way to gain knowledge and connect with the wider world and just be an intelligent person. Like, books, to me are so cheap. It still makes me crazy that you can buy a book for 25 bucks and you can change your world, right? By reading that one book.

Still the truest of. No, it's a paper book. Has to be a paperwork, not a Kindle. I want a physical book in my hands. Or have you shifted to the digital?

It depends. I do everything. So there's some things that I like to read on, like a Kindle, and that's mostly nonfiction, because I like to highlight it. And Kindle is really good at saving your highlights. So if I want to return to things later, because I'm always still thinking about things to teach, too. Right. I can't help it. I'm like, oh, I might, like, want to teach this in, like, this could be part of a class. You know, I want to remember this bit of Research or whatever. So with nonfiction, I tend to do it digitally. There's stuff that I like to listen to on an audiobook and that tends to be stuff that's less like, technical. So. And especially where like the narrator can be really important. So like philosophy, for example. Like, one of my favorite audiobooks is a version of J. Krishnamurti's Freedom from the Known. And it's. It's read by a South African narrator. And I don't know what it. I just love it. It's a beautiful book and it's deep and like you can listen to it over and over again. But I also just love the narration. So I've got the audiobooks and then I've also got. And then I'll order paper books. So like, recently I just, I just bought a book called the Overstory, which is, which is the first novel that I've read in a really long time. But I just knew that I want. Yeah, I'd want to like sit on the couch and just like tuck in and read it like that. So there's the literary side. And then music has also always been a big thread in my life, but another side that you probably don't know that much about. So I've like allocated time to music, which luckily is also something I can do with my family.

And then I work, like actually playing.

Yeah, Yeah, I play trumpet. Yeah. So I'm learning jazz trumpet. By learning, I mean, like. Yeah, really? Oh, we could jam.

No, no, you don't want me jamming with you.

I am not Good. So we totally, totally can. It's just fun. Right? And that's the other thing is like taking the pressure off. Like, okay, I don't need to be a professional musician to enjoy music. I can just noodle around and like learn a song or, you know, just. It just puts your brain in that different. It's flow states. Right. It's just, it's good for you. And it can be communal. Like. Yeah. The whole family can like pull out different instruments and I'll hang out together. Yeah. So I like, I do my job, you know, I try to take care of the basics. I try not to rush too much. I'm just trying not to spread myself too thin and realize like. Yeah. I don't know, like I was at a certain point, like, why, why, why do you. I don't want to say, like, accomplishment is fruitless, but what are you, what are you doing it all for?

True, Objective. And what's the real return that you're going to get from that accomplishment.

Yeah.

And what are you sacrificing to get there? So it is. It is difficult to say no. It's even harder to slow down when you're the type of person that you are, type A personality that's going to take over the world and challenge the status quo. But I'm so happy to see you and know that you're healthy and thriving and this has been an amazing conversation. I always have great conversations with you. I want to close this off because we're running pretty long here. Hopefully our audience is still with us. What are some tools or resources? You would definitely have a lot here that one or two tools or resources that have helped you really become the entrepreneur that you are today, the executive, the leader that you are. Something that our audience may not know about or you might want to encourage them to explore hypnosis, maybe.

Yeah, well, mine are really. Oh, I feel like there's so much about meditation and hypnosis now. And I. It's such a huge topic that I don't even think I want to touch on it now because I have all kinds of opinions about it that are different and I don't think are actually currently the status quo. Let's save that one for another conversation. But mine are really simple and people have heard about them. But I'm going to try to hammer home the things that I think actually contribute to just overall performance and like happiness and productivity. So note taking, it sounds. That sounds sort of ridiculous, but knowing how to take notes so that you can keep track of your ideas and the work that you do and to prioritize lists like, you need to figure out a system. Especially now because we have so many apps. You need to figure out a system. It could be a notebook. You could be a person that uses a daytimer, or you could use workflowy, or you could use a combination. But figure out a system to keep track of your ideas, what you're doing, the things you need to do, and the people that you meet, all of those things. That's. I think that's critical. Just understanding how to take control of like the knowledge and the things that you're. You're doing. If you can't do that. Yeah, go ahead.

A lot of people just naturally associate note taking with education and learning. But to be really effective in operations and executing strategies, constant data is flowing your way and you need to know how to not only collect that data, but be able to analyze it, then ultimately visualize it in an executable way. And note taking is essential in all three steps.

Yeah. Agree. Yeah. So I'm not. I don't have any specific tips for. I could throw out some ideas or, like, send you some links later, but there's so many different ways to do it. You just have to get to know your own brain and to figure out a system and then maybe rework it every once in a while, but generally do that. And then the other big one for me that I see doesn't get reinforced enough, and I see it in our mental health care system as well, is fitness. I think everything is better when you're taking care of your body and staying fit. And I mean, like, not just like I've told people. I used to have people that were coming to me for more mental health issues when I was a hypnotherapist, and I'd ask them, like, have you ever, like, really trained, like, have you ever, like, done, like, physical training and, like, really gotten yourself into good shape? And oftentimes, especially with depression and anxiety, a lot of times that was being left off the table, which also contributed to things like insomnia. And I often would say, you know, like, take if you. If you can afford to go and see a psychologist now. I'm not, I. I don't want to muddy the water. It's like, mental health issues are critical and need to be attended to, and sometimes they really need, like, acutely a mental health professional. But there's a lot of things that get better in your life if you're in good shape. And that means sweating every day or every other day and lifting some heavy weights. Like, go to a facility and work with a trainer if you need to. Get to know how to move your body correctly. And then, yeah, train and train hard. Figure out what balance works for you. But I know you can attest to this as well. It's just so crazy how it helps. To me, it just helps everything in your life, including focus, including sleep. Um, just feeling good about yourself. Like, I just think that people feel good when they're inhabiting a body that they've trained to move around. Um, and I, I grew up as a kind of a geek and a nerd, and, like, my body was sort of just like a brain case, you know, it's like, it was a thing that I used to, like, move my brain around the world. And it took until, like, I was a little bit older to discover rock climbing and then kind of get into my body and, yeah, it just totally changed my world. And I, I did. Like, we haven't touched on depression but like, I have suffered from depression and like, yeah, the difference is like night and day, if, if I was working out or not.

So yeah, we definitely talk about that quite a bit. Like, mental health is really important, but physical health is just as important because they're so intertwined. And you can't think that it's, it's not for you or other people are just preconditioned to just jump up out of their bed and go for a run. It's hard for everybody. Running sucks. I hate running for the first 10 minutes. I hate it, hate it, hate it. And then usually around the 15 minute mark. Okay, I love this. The endorphins start kicking in and it's really going, but it is a task. And for me personally, I work so much, I'm sitting at my desk all day finding the time to actually break away and stand up and get some, some, some blood flowing. It can be challenging. And you very easily can fall into this trap of I'll do it tomorrow or I'll do it later on in the evening. And that never happens. And so you do have to condition yourself to think about yourself and take care of your body, both physically and mentally.

And that leads me to my last tool, which is, again, it's not like an app or something like that. It's just, I believe that discipline, cultivating discipline, especially as an entrepreneur. Because us entrepreneurs, we tend to love to like go off in all these different directions and like see the next sparkly thing. And it's like, can be really hard to focus. Discipline, especially as we age, is critical to managing attention and focus and staying ahead.

Yep.

I think that when you're younger, you can get by. Like, we're still young. But you know, I'm technically middle aged myself.

Right.

I think we're both middle aged, aren't we? Anyway, whatever. So when you're really young especially and you're getting started and like the tech world is like so like hyper fast, there's so much going on, it's so much energy, lots of ideas, small teams, like, exciting, exciting, exciting, and you can work tons of hours. And as you get older, it's just the reality of aging. It's not like, you know, you suddenly get tired and you can't do anything in your retirement age, but it does get harder. You just don't have as much. And I just think that as, as you get deeper into your career, you need to have, you need to be able to discipline yourself again to decide like what not to do and what you really want to Focus on. So another reason that I like try to lead people into the fitness direction, because it takes a lot of discipline to decide that you're going to go to the gym four days a week and get up at 6am and go and do it. So by doing that you're naturally cultivating discipline, but deciding how you're going to be and then sticking with that and having integrity by practicing discipline and whatever that is for you, it's just like building it up. But I do think that that's something that especially in our day and age, which is the age of distraction and.

Sedentary lives, people sit at their desk, they don't walk, they drive, or they're taking a lime scooter somewhere. So you find it hard to get those steps in. Whereas 30, 40 years ago it was a given. You're gonna get 10,000 steps in a day because there's no alternative.

Yeah, but, and I also think that discipline in anything, how could I say this? It just, it lends itself to like a kind of maturity and wisdom that you can't get if you're just constantly flipping around from thing to thing to thing to thing and never sticking with anything. Yeah, that's, that's just that I will see like if I can prove that right. But I just, I think discipline is so it's like the discipline to like keep meetings to their a lot of time and to recognize like when your attention is wavering and like and bring it back. It all takes discipline. And if you want to be running a company, sure, you got like a three person company that you're running, you can be like pretty fast and loose and just do things here and there and you don't have to have as much structure. But if you want to scale a company, you better believe you're going to have to start creating processes. And if you can't, if you're a leader and you can't stick to those boxes, good luck getting a team to follow. Right. And to behave in the way that they need to to keep processes going as you scale. It just won't work.

Entrepreneurs definitely always have to evolve and grow with their businesses. If not, then it's time for you to step aside and let somebody else that does have that discipline do it. We want to wrap this up here really quick. What is some advice that you would give to entrepreneurs new and old, first times, repeat entrepreneurs, building something in today's world? Because you're actively building something that has to change in real time to address Covid and the life after Covid and what the industry will look like. What is some advice that you'd give to people that are starting something new today?

Such a good question. I never feel equipped to answer questions like that because I think it's such a case by case. Everything's so case by case. But one thing that I will say is that I think it's impossible to be all things to all people. And I mean that as a person and also as a brand. And I think that some like. I think that when I think the things that I have, like the things that I've admired, the companies that I've admired that have been built, they start with somebody with a very clear vision and values that go along with a vision, whether they sometimes have to surface those values as they go. But there has to be a vision there. And you can't be the idea of like going around, I think you have to do market research, but the idea of going around and asking people what they want and then trying to create that for them. People don't generally understand what they want and the best things for them are things that they have never thought of before. So you have to like. I think that yeah, the coolest things in building a business is like being certain, being somewhat certain about a vision and then being able to, you know, yeah, build a team around that and drive it and like be true to it. Those are the exciting businesses that I've seen and where the founders remain passionate about them. I'm not saying it's the only way to do it, but I think that people, once they start to get close to going to market, I've seen entrepreneurs just have apprehension and just start to go and see what supposed competitors are doing and just second guessing the things that they originally really believed strongly in for whatever reason. And I think that can sometimes be a mistake and it can kill what a really great brand is built out of.

A lot of times it's a fear of failure. And to your point, it's lack of focus, people losing that focus for whatever reasons. It could be fear, it could be something happens in the industry, a competitor comes along and launches before you. But you need to stay focused and true to what you're doing. And it's hard. As we talked about, saying no is hard. Staying disciplined is hard. Focusing on your health and mental and physical health is hard. But they do have positive ROI for you in the long run. Sylvia, this has been a great conversation. We want to end this with your call to action. You've given a lot of insight and advice to our audience. What is that our audience can do for you? How can we help you?

Right so. Well, right now I'm definitely interested in hearing from people that are interested in Anco for sure. Whether it's for them, their company or if they just think that somebody would be a good fit for this beautiful space that we're building. But we've only again by the time this airs we might not have any space. But that's always going to be something on my radar. We want to fill this set of offices, about 18 offices with the best possible companies that we can and create this collective. So I'm always going to be interested in hearing from great fits for this community.

So definitely this will probably air after you guys have your opening. But where can people go to learn more information about and co so they.

Can go to our website which is and co ca so a N dash co ca and even if they're not in the Vancouver area or they don't have businesses here, you know there will be likely wider ways to connect with events that are happening here and the community at large as we build it. So you can keep track of what's happening there.

Yeah, link will just follow us on Instagram, the link will be in the comments, all the links on our social and everything else. But I did want you to say the URL out there and we definitely know from our audience and traction and everything that we do at launch. There's a lot of international companies are looking to set up offices in Vancouver. Development teams, international teams and that shift to smaller offices, coworking spaces and reimagining how they're going to function. International offices is changing and so I can definitely see Enco as being a strong option for some of these more established businesses. Maybe not for their first two person startup teams, but definitely some of the more established and appreciates the all in one service that you're building. Like having physical fitness right in the building is going to be really attractive for some people.

Well, I and I also will always want to hear from people that want to use our event space because we do have this incredible form which you can see on the website there's a sort of a fly through and as we build it we'll have actual images of it. But putting I love hearing from people that have creative ideas about how to use space because we want happenings here, you know, we want to be part of the cultural community in Vancouver and help to build that too. We've got connections to opera, to the indie music scene, connections to filmmakers independent filmmakers like, you know, we want this to also be a place to be and a place to connect and a place for people to exchange ideas. Yeah.

It's not just all about business, arts and culture, physical fitness, mental fitness. It's everything you want to have a true enriched work environment and lifestyle.

Yeah, totally.

Sylvia, this has been amazing. Thank you for joining us on Founder Journeys.

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