The Civi-Side story summarized.

I just read this AWESOME post from another startup founder and felt that I had to create a similar summary of where Civi-Side came from and is going:

http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/1215873671/bootstrapping-stormpulse

By no means have I persisted through hard times as long as these guys did, but I would, and maybe will have to still if things don't take off like I think they will. Without further ado....


Civi-Side first occurred to me sometime in mid-2005 according to my first blog post about it: http://civiside.blogspot.com/2007/12/civi-side.html. I don't actually recall when I had the idea, so I will trust my words from Dec. 2007 to be the authority on the inception. The original concept was to connect military Reservists with Reserve-Friendly employers in order to solve the problem where the Reserves were losing trained young people after they graduated from post-secondary because they were going to work for employers that did not support their military career.

March 2007: Get meeting with Sonya Bata of Bata Shoes, more relevantly, Ontario Chair of Canadian Forces Liaison Council. Sonya listens intently but doesn't seem to have a clue about what I'm talking about. Meeting goes absolutely nowhere.

Dec. 2007: Get invitation to meet with General about the concept and he displays great enthusiasm, but apparently legal kills the proposal.

Jan 2008: Honorary Lt. Col. Kevin Reed offers $15 000 in seed money to get the service up and running. I find a technical partner and pay him for 3 months to build the site. Beta is up and running in April of 2008. No adoption of service whatsoever.

Nov 2008: Do massive press campaign leading up to Remembrance Day under the title "Tomorrow's Veterans Need a Supportive Employer Today". Get great press coverage coast to coast including CBC Radio interview. Unfortunately leads to no greater adoption of service by either employers or Reservists.

Jan 2009: 3/4 of a page in Business Incubator section of Globe and Mail. "Experts" assembled to critique the site give kudos for doing something good for Reservists but soundly spank our design and technology. Oh yeah, and my co-founder/technical partner quits on the same day, so I can't do anything to fix the problems.

Feb 2009: Find a developer who will work temporarily on redesigning the site so that the service can overcome some of the difficulties identified in the Globe and Mail article. Attend North America's largest HR tradeshow as a vendor and start to feel some interest in what we are doing. Lots of leads to follow up on. Unfortunately none pan out, there goes $2000 I didn't have.

March 2009: Relaunch new site...still no significant adoption...this is getting frustrating.

April 2009: Reposition and rebrand Civi-Side as a location to source professionally trained young leaders. Try this new approach for a year but no employers are willing to pay for a service that sources them trained young leaders. Doesn't help that we only have 300 Reservists in our database.

Sept 2009: Move to Ottawa to try to persuade Department of National Defence decision makers that backing Civi-Side makes financial sense. Thus begins a frustrating 6 months of fruitless meetings with no end in sight.

Nov 2009: Accepted into Lead to Win program for technology business acceleration. Cool program and great community of startups but I discover that despite the best intentions of the program, there are essentially no serious technology investors in Ottawa and that I am not going to raise any money to build the company.

Warm winter, cold part of Civi-Side history where I seriously began to doubt whether it would be possible to build this company. Start to wonder if I should just get back to furthering my own life rather than sacrificing more for a startup that seems to have not a chance in HE double hockey sticks of getting any traction.

May 2010: Get a LinkedIn message out of the blue from an ex-Air Force officer turned CEO of a tech. company in Hamilton that he was at a PwC CEO networking event and that one of the CEO's at the event brought up the idea that they as corporate citizens should be doing something for veterans and all of the CEO's agree. CEO that contacted me says that he knows someone working in this space and offers to come up with some ideas. CEO that contacted me offers to meet and we discuss a few ideas including priority hiring, and an off the cuff suggestion from him that "maybe we could guarantee and interview". I go to work researching the idea of priority hiring and come to the conclusion that would be too complex for the corporate world to adopt readily. I start thinking about the guaranteed interview idea and realize how brilliant and adoptable it is. I refine the idea and then go back to the CEO who contacted me and propose it, idea needs a bit more refining.

Program is now defined as: "Employers guarantee an interview to at least one veteran who meets the qualifications of the job posting and applies with a Civi-Side resume". The idea here is to make the program as simple and flexible as possible so that the company can adopt and apply the program without any reservations. The philosophy of the program is not that any one employer should interview all veterans but that all employers should interview at least one veteran. A small but important distinction that emphasizes that all employers should be publicly committing to corporate citizenship in giving their nation's veterans a hand-up in transitioning to the civilian workforce.

July 2010: With idea refined a bit more I contact CEO who originally suggested idea at PwC event and propose that they be the founding partner in what I have now called "The Guaranteed Interview Program" or G.I. Program for short. He loves idea but needs me to sell it to his management team, this takes another 6 weeks to get them in the same room. We meet in late Aug.

Aug 2010: We have our founding partner signed. The management team loves the idea and definitely wants to be on-board.

Sept 2010: Meet with Chris Fralic of First Round Capital about G.I. Program and ask him for help in connecting to CEO's in the U.S. who would want to be part of the program. He offers his help, we now have a toe-hold in the U.S.


This brings us up to today. I feel very confident that the service, which has morphed into a vehicle for the G.I. Program, is poised to take off. We have our 3 founding partners for the program and 7, yes 7, interns from the Mohawk College PR program who are going to help us tell Canada's media that there is a simple and tangible way for employers to support their veterans.

Everything is coming up Millhouse!