The Most Ambitious Girl at Work
Ambition and the work place go hand in hand, but when we’re speaking of ambition, we’re often talking about a negative form of it. It brings to mind hotshots who play “the game”, immersing themselves deeply in office politics to pull ahead into that new management positions or get sent to that next big conference in Florida.
There’s good ambition too. The most ambitious girl at work leaves the company today, but under good terms and going on to new and far better things. She went to university and got a degree in computer science and had good long-term prospects in project management, but her ambition was never to climb the corporate ladder, it was to open a dance studio. Saying that she followed her dreams might sound like a cliche, but that’s exactly what she did.
The dance studio isn’t a blind venture. She’s worked on promoting herself within the dance community for years now, and has managed to attract some of the premiere instructors in Calgary. She’s been handling logistics in her spare time, and renovations on her new space will be finished by February. I only got a short run down of her marketing strategy, but she’s leveraging social media as well as more traditional forms of promotion. I liken her to Andy in the Shawshank Redemption where the guards find his cell empty, only to further discover that he’s been building a means to escape for years without anyone realizing it.
Alberta may be one of the best places on Earth to start a small business, between extremely low sales tax, generous tax laws for small business, SRED, and universal health care (those last two are good for all of Canada), the benefits are very real and the risk is reduced compared to elsewhere. I talk a lot about startups, and I’ve had two coworkers in my group alone quit in the last years to persue their own ventures. I’m running out of excuses. Everyone in Alberta should be running a small business.
See the emergence of something great at Pulse Studios.