S2: Episode 17: Gord Delamont, Founder & Creative Director, TreeTown Media Group Inc. & London Inc

"Entrepreneurship is another level of responsibility, but the successes are a little sweeter."
 
 Gord began his career as a musician with a side hustle of journalism. Some of his talent is inherited, some is self-taught and all have led him to a successful career in journalism and starting TreeTown Media Group. 
 
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 Thank you Jann Danyluk, Career Resilience.

Transcript

| 00:04 | Hello and welcome to season two of Career Resilience, where we talk with people about their career path and their career journey and maybe we can all learn from each other. My name is Jann Danyluk and I'm a human resource resources consultant in London, Ontario, Canada. I work with Ford Keast LLP, providing human resources advice and counsel to my business clients. I also support people through individual one on one coaching in helping with career development.

 | 00:32 | I hope you will enjoy our series where we talk with ordinary, extraordinary people. We get to hear about interesting journeys. We get to talk with people about failures, successes, advice and counsel to us as we develop our own careers. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with these people and I hope you will enjoy listening to us. And now for some logistics, please subscribe on YouTube. Or if you're a listener, please follow me wherever you get your podcast.

 | 01:00 | And if you have a chance, I hope you'll visit my website, careerresilience.com welcome. My guest today is Gord Delamont Gordon. Welcome to Career Resilience. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. This is going to be a great conversation. I just know it. Now you wear a few hats in life.

 | 01:30 | I do. Can you tell us a bit about what you do like on the day today on the day today on the day to day? Well, as I said, I wear a couple of hats. And actually, I will say that it's probably one of the more joyful parts of my occupation in my world.

 | 01:52 | I sort of wear an editorial hat, just sort of presiding over content, whether that would be content in the digital world or digital print or exclusively print. And then my other hat is that of an entrepreneur and a business owner. So you get to deal with all of the fun things such as taxes and business growth and all of those things.

 | 02:20 | So I've always said to anybody that would put up with me and listen that I have a right brain, left brain type of career, which I really like because it allows me to employ my creative side and then allows me to go about the business side as well. And this is all in the auspices of London, Inc. Magazine. Yeah.

 | 02:49 | So essentially we have London, Inc. We have a parent company above that, which is called TreeTown Media Group. And London, Inc. Is a division of TreeTown. It would be certainly the product that probably most Londoners, for instance, are sort of most familiar with and associate our brand with. So that would be London. Okay.

 | 03:16 | And I wanted to ask you, you came to entrepreneurial ship later in your career. What did you make such a dramatic transition? Because that's quite a thing to take on your own thing. Yeah. So without trying to get myself into any more legal trouble than I may have already got myself into in the past, I was editor and publisher of a similar product called Business London for many years, over 15 years.

 | 03:53 | So rode that through. When I joined the company, it was a company called Bose Publishers that was sold to Toronto Sun, which in turn became Quebec or Quebec or rolled it out into post media. Yeah. So we went through a lot. We went through a lot of changes, a lot of different companies. But I always benefited from all of those companies were newspaper centric companies.

 | 04:20 | So I was running a business magazine, and I'd often say a lot of people didn't really know what to do with me. And so I think as long as that even looked relatively okay on a monthly basis, everybody just left me alone. And so I really benefited from I guess it would be called an entrepreneur type of career where I really did feel like I was running my own business. So to get to the crux of your question, why did I just not continue with that?

 | 04:50 | Well, certainly you're probably familiar and most of your listeners and viewers are familiar with the struggles that have been going on in the media landscape over the last decade at least. And it just became harder and harder for me to remain true to kind of my vision and what I wanted to do. And so I was really struggling with the corporate environment that I was in, and I decided to leave and strike out on my own.

 | 05:23 | And so as you mentioned, I was at a fairly senior time in my career to do that, but I did. It's been five years now. We're just coming up on our fifth year anniversary. And although we spent two of those plus dealing with a pandemic, it's been a real joy, lots of sleepless nights.

 | 05:54 | But, man, has it ever been fun. Yeah. Really enjoyed it. I think that sleepless nights go along with being an entrepreneur because you aren't just working in the business, you're working on the business. And that is quite a thing to take on because you're doing everything right. You have to think about the business, the business growth invoicing all those things that go along with working on a business.

 | 06:25 | Yeah. It's another level of responsibility, and you don't really have anybody else to fall back on but yourself. So you're responsible for your business, the bottom line of your business, the advancement, as you say, in the growth of your business, but you're also responsible for your employees and your clients and everything that encompasses the business. Yeah, for sure.

 | 06:54 | There's an added responsibility, but it also makes the successes a little sweeter, for sure. And yeah, as you say, some sleepless nights, but I highly recommend it to anybody that considering stepping out and being an entrepreneur, especially these days, because it's very easy to do it. I highly recommend it. What was your biggest surprise in becoming an entrepreneur? Yeah, that's a good question.

 | 07:33 | My biggest surprise was just the amount of work that's involved. In a lot of ways, I continue just to do what I was already doing. So it's not like I made a career jump or sector jump.

 | 07:53 | I was in the same business. I knew what I was doing. But everything that encompasses being an entrepreneur and a business owner and the amount of hours that it takes, especially when you're a small business, was a bit eye opening, and then you throw the pandemic on top of that, and it was a whole another level of work. So, yeah, it's a lot of work.

 | 08:21 | And if that passion isn't there, I think that's where you'll see most people fail, because if the passion is there, it'll drive you. It'll drive you like nothing else. Right. And fortunately for me, it is there. Why that is so true. Yeah. You need that fuel to keep you going.

 | 08:50 | How did you start out in terms of what did you go to school for? Let's go. So this is interesting. You can follow the bouncing ball. Music is my background, so I went to school for music. I have a couple of music degrees, and I grew up in a very literary household. My dad was a musician as well, but he was also an author.

 | 09:19 | And I just kind of grew up in the type of household that got the day where you got three newspapers a day. And both of my parents were pretty voracious readers and words reading journalism came very naturally to me because I was just surrounded with it growing up. So it was in my early 20s and kind of trying to carve out a music career.

 | 09:46 | And as most young musicians do, I was living in a house with eight other guys and doing that stuff and just trying to get along. One of the things I did is I landed an early column in a music magazine because I could kind of write. And so I started writing about various factions of the music industry, and that had some sort of early success.

 | 10:14 | And then a family friend who was a business editor at the time was working for a publication called The Mississauga Business Time. So why don't you just branch out a little bit and do some work for me? And so he put me sort of to work in the real estate sector. The commercial real estate sector, covering the commercial real estate sector in Mississauga. That was sort of mid 80s when it was just booming. Crazy. That's how I sort of cut my teeth in business journalism.

 | 10:46 | And there was a lot of learning because it was an active sector and a lot of stuff to get my head around. So that's really how I sort of got into it. And then one thing took over from the other, and then a sort of music career kind of went on the back shelf and journalism took over. And it's funny, you'll find a lot of people in journalism, maybe not necessarily today, but certainly growing up in sort of my generation, people that crossed over from different industries, it's pretty prevalent.

 | 11:24 | Yeah. And how do you think all that musical background and acumen and interest and so on influenced your journalistic side? I always listen to music when I work. Maybe that's it. I don't know. I'm not really sure it did.

 | 11:49 | They're so completely diverse occupations, and there's a lot of discipline involved in both music. It's a world of practicing, and there's a lot of self-discipline. So I suppose that kind of helped me out, especially in the early days.

 | 12:15 | I sort of rolled out pretty much into journalism as a freelancer, and those can provide some tough times because you're always looking, you're always digging for work as well as working, so you have to be somewhat disciplined. And I suppose that helped out a little bit. Yeah. Obviously, all these things, all these steps and following the bouncing ball have made you the man you are today. That's the interesting thing about it.

 | 12:44 | And I always find that people when they're growing up have no idea what they're really going to become. And you look back and you think, wow, I just sort of fell into that. And then I fell into that, and I was able to build on, well, as you say, my passion and my interests and so on. I wanted to ask you who was the biggest influence or one of the bigger influencers on your life? You certainly said, you know what? I would reach out to my dad.

 | 13:13 | My dad died when I was relatively young. But like anybody that's been fortunate to have fantastic parents, I mean, their influence on your life, however long or short it may be, always continues to stick with you, and you always run it through that filter.

 | 13:41 | So I would certainly say that my parents have a lot to do with it. I don't think there's any one person professionally that I would look to. There's just been a whole bunch of people along the way that have helped out, that have guided, that have provided advice and opportunity, which is great.

 | 14:05 | And it became especially great in the entrepreneurial world because any entrepreneur will also tell you there's just as many people out there that want to see a fail. Do you think so? Yeah, I do. Maybe it becomes the competitor of your industry. I've had this conversation with other entrepreneurs, too, and I really do think it's true.

 | 14:34 | It's funny that there's a lot of people that will be supportive and be behind you and could have been a co worker or wherever you might be stationed and complaining a bitch about things the same sort of volume as you would. And then once you kind of do something about it, they become very resistant to somebody going ahead and doing something. I found that.

 | 15:02 | And entrepreneurs find that, too. There's people that don't want to see us exist, and that's competitiveness of business. Fortunately, there's more people that do. And London is a fantastic city for support and assistance of all types, but it can also be pretty competitive and cut through.

 | 15:34 | Yes. A couple of things on that. First of all, I think that one of the reasons, actually, that London is a pretty supportive city is reading your magazine all the time and the things you do for the top 20 under 40 and best employer and things that sort of knit us together as a city because it's not the same, as you said, of getting three newspapers a day or frequently even one newspaper a day. You do good work to help with that knitting process.

 | 16:04 | Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. Again, when we come back to passion, it's really what lies the crux of what we do is telling the story of London business people, entrepreneurs of London, business owners. And every story is fascinating, and there's never a shortage of one of the questions I get asked quite frequently is you ever run out of story ideas?

 | 16:33 | And the answer to that is like, simply, no. I mean, you just kind of get out there and scratch the surface and you find people doing tremendous things. I'm constantly surprised maybe not on a weekly basis, but on a monthly basis where I'll stumble into a business that I haven't heard about. And I'm talking about a sole proprietor, a business that may have 30, 40 employees, and it's been quietly kind of doing their thing down in London or wherever it might be.

 | 17:02 | And I'm like, man, I've never even heard of this business. And London is full of those surprises. Yeah. We're very passionate about people's success and telling their stories. And again, when we talk about creativity, I didn't mean to sound earlier that the business wasn't creative, because I think it's tremendously creative. It is. And you look at any sort of business launcher or any business idea, and really, it comes down to creativity.

 | 17:35 | Right. It doesn't matter whether it's in manufacturing, it doesn't matter if it's in tech or in retail. Somebody's getting creative with an idea and seeing it through. And again, it's a very creative discipline. It's something that we love to have our fingers in, for sure. The other thing I was going to say about entrepreneurs is that we automatically think that they're rich and we're not if we're not an entrepreneur.

 | 18:05 | And that's just so not the case. But people do think, oh, my gosh, they can take as much vacation as they want, versus the reality is you can hardly squeeze a vacation in or, you know what? They get to pay themselves whatever they want versus the reality of actually, you know what? When you're an entrepreneur, what you've done is bought yourself a job and everything that goes into that. Right. That is precisely true.

 | 18:34 | And I can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation with doctors. I mean, if you're not there, you stop working. Well, the business stops, right. And if I ever get to be to the point where I'm employing 100 people or more, then maybe that lies out there somewhere. But not from what I've seen, the people that I had seen in this city that are working with larger companies, they're working as hard as everybody else.

 | 19:05 | Absolutely true. Yeah. And that's, again, where passion comes in, because nobody would want to do that. Nobody would want to assume those extra hours and that extra responsibility. If you didn't have that passion for what you were doing, you might as well go back and just get yourself a gig. So I wanted to ask you, too. As you look back, can you tell us about a disaster you had in trying to get an addition out on time or some interesting story along those lines?
 | 19:35 | Disaster. Like a disaster in the last 12 hours, I probably had too, but I don't know if I ever came to a disaster status. I'm not going to tell you specifics, but we've had some like, fortunately, actually, it goes back in my career, too. When I wasn't an entrepreneur, but an employee, I had some disastrous a couple of disastrous front cover mistakes go on.

 | 20:08 | And the problem with doing that in print, that's the joys of the digital world, right? Everything can be changed. Everything can be altered. But once it's in print, it's there forever and you have to live with it. So there's always been some I think every journalist will tell you there's always little editorial things that happen or big editorial Booboo that happened and they stick with you. Yeah. But nothing really, from a production standpoint, really ran into any trouble.

 | 20:39 | No, I can think about mail strikes and things like that that really provided some again, you had to sort of be creative to get around them, but fortunately not some wood. No major disaster yet. You better not have jinxed me. I have not jinxed you. Not to worry. I did want to mention your Bitmoji. So on LinkedIn, your Bitmoji is very interesting.

 | 21:08 | It's a man supposed to be me sitting at a bar, staring at a glass with some ice cubes in it. And the expression is, to me, rather sad and poignant. So tell me about your Big Moanji choice. You know, there really isn't anything other than I like to change. It pops up.

 | 21:36 | So it pops up on LinkedIn. I like to change it now and then rather than just looking for another picture of myself. I'm one of those people that just hates having my picture taken and I just don't like it. When the bit emojis came along, I think we were fooling with them and my wife and I were. Look at this one. There's me sitting at a bar over an empty Scotch tumbler, right? I like that one. Yeah. One day I just threw it up on my LinkedIn profile.

 | 22:07 | And actually, you were the very first person to comment on it. You know what? It inspired me to think, Gee, I should change my photo to a bit emoji. I've looked at it at times and gone, it's probably not all that professional. It may not be that appropriate. My last one and I probably changed that maybe three or four months ago. My last one was when it was a picture of me as a toddler three year old with an army helmet on me.

 | 22:36 | So I ran that one for a bit, too. But I think that's fun. And that's your creative side. Right. Because most of them trying to have a little I mean, sometimes its social media. You never know how anybody's going to take anything. Right. It's just me having a little fun. That's it. You are kind of out there with your business because it's something that we look at all the time, all of us out here.

 | 23:09 | How do you cope with criticism and less than positive feedback? What are some tips for us? So again, I think you go back to your history. Right. And so that's one of the things as my early career as a musician and then as a freelance journalist, you develop a thick skin very early and you learn to handle rejection.

 | 23:38 | You learn to process rejection, and then you also learn to process criticism. A part of it now is I think, again, Jen, to get your earlier question about being an older entrepreneur, I think you benefit a little bit because as you get a little bit older, I don't think things affect you as much. Right.

 | 24:06 | And just you're you and you make a decision and you're willing to stand by that decision. That's going to be me. And then you realize as you sort of age that there is no way in hell that you're please in everybody. And that's just the way it is. And so you do your best and you try to stay true to your vision and your ethos, and then you go from there.

 | 24:39 | Yeah. I don't get too bad out of shape if somebody's not happy with me. Yeah. Maybe because it happens so often, too. I doubt it. I think that with you, you've gone your own way and you probably started doing that fairly early on and that independence is so important.

 | 25:11 | Yeah. I often think that, boy, in terms of becoming an entrepreneur, do I ever wish I had done it earlier? I do for a variety of reasons, mainly just to give myself a longer runway.
 | 25:34 | But outside of that, the timing was right for me to launch my business when I did. So I think had I done it ten years earlier, I probably would not have been able to do it just from a competitiveness aspect. So the timing was right for me to launch Tree Town Media and Monitoring what I did.

 | 26:01 | But having said that, I would really have liked to become an entrepreneur a little bit earlier. But don't you think that's mostly about your thoughts about runway? I mean, the runway? Yeah, I think so. I look at myself and I go, I wish I'm at the point in my life like I'm getting close to 60. So it's where I've got friends retiring and people they've already retired or they're looking at the retirement plans.

 | 26:34 | And I go, yeah, that's not even on my radar right now. I'm trying to run a business, which I'm happy for, because, first of all, I feel like I got a few more laps. Secondly, I don't know what I do with myself. I just like to be engaged. The whole idea of retirement at this point in time in my life doesn't hold any appeal to me. But, yeah, I sometimes worry now.

 | 27:07 | I sometimes sit there and think about, man, I better accomplish a lot in the next five years. So I've got the business where I want it to be to look towards succession. So, yeah, the runway, you hear the clock ticking. I want to comment on that in terms of I often think a lot of times that retirement is to do with the extent of the physical labor you have to do in your job.

 | 27:40 | And sometimes the machine wears up. It just does. And so you're ready for retirement if you're on the line somewhere. And I think in terms of your job, it's all up here. Gord. And that has a very long runway, probably as long as what you're interested in having. That tends to me to be the difference there. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Right.

 | 28:08 | I mean, my job is anything but physical, and jobs of a physical nature require a whole bunch of things that a cerebral type job or a job where you're sitting at desk job. Would you like your children to follow in your footsteps in the career choices you've made? Well, between my wife and I, we have four wonderful kids dispersed around the country.

 | 28:44 | So I do have one son, my two boys. One is in the military, one is an officer, an infantry officer. So lots of worries there these days. My older son is a journalist. He lives in Halifax. I did the best I could to discourage him from. Thank you. Yeah.

 | 29:07 | Just because I knew what the I've been working in the industry and I knew the challenges at the time. Not a growth industry and lots of struggles. And you're going to be fighting, but no good passion in his so came his passion. And then so that's fantastic. You know what? And he's involved in the business. He's an associate editor with London, Inc.

 | 29:39 | So that's a fantastic element to be able to work with the kids. Yeah, great. So he wants to continue to do it and move on back to London and maybe take this thing off my hands when I'm 93. And may I say, having worked with him, he's so personable and great to work with. And the end product of his writing is superb.

 | 30:09 | So he's obviously a chip off the block. Thank you. Yeah, we have our battles. We have our social battles sometimes, which are fantastic. And I'm fortunate that I have the final edit. Right. So if you leave it a little too far left with me, I'll just change the wording on that for a little bit. Is it not so much easier to edit than to write? Yeah, it is. For me.

 | 30:39 | I was never and still not a particularly quick writer. I speak to my son, he can turn around 600,000 words like Vatam. And I do I ever envy that because I'm one of those writers that kind of struggles with every sentence. I like pace and I like lyricism in writing. And boy, it's easier to edit it than it is to do it.

 | 31:11 | Yeah, it's a funny thing. So as my career kind of went on, I found that I was much more comfortable in an editing space than a writing space. But that's where the creation comes from, though, is the writing. So it's still something I really enjoy doing, but it's laborious for me. I wanted to turn to my three questions that I did let you know that I wanted to ask.

 | 31:43 | And the first one is, what has been the best advice you've received about, let's say, career advice? Yeah, I thought about that, and I thought some detailed career advice. But I always come back to a friend of mine who said something to me maybe three years ago, and it's always stuck with me. And that is simply under promise, over delivered.

 | 32:12 | And it's one of those things that you sort of I end up filtering everything, and it sounds kind of simple, but if you filter everything, it's a matter of not over extending yourself. It's a matter of going through a process of being able to deliver on whatever you say you're going to do. And then when you do it, make sure it's a little sweeter and it's a little better than you originally intended.

 | 32:42 | So it's sort of really simple advice and just something that's always stuck with me. And I always come back to, oh, that's a great one. That is really great. Now, secondly, is there a book that you've read that has influenced you in some way? So I will say to this question that in terms of my business life, I read very little nonfiction, but I read loads and loads of fiction.

 | 33:18 | So I'm one of those people that if I don't have a book on the go, something's out of kilter with my life. Right. It's just something's not right now. I read lots and lots of business periodicals, whether it be online or imprint, and I get a lot of business advice that way. But I'm not a big reader of nonfiction. And when I do, it's usually narrative nonfiction, Eric Larson type of novel.

| 34:02 | I love just being able to sit down and read for 15 minutes, 20 minutes before bed or in the morning, whenever it is there a genre all the highbrows need to plug their ears because I'm sort of a serial mystery person. Okay.

 | 34:29 | Charles James Patterson, David Bell Dachy kind of thing. That's really what I'm into. But I'll read a lot of different stuff. But again, I go back to it was my dad that instilled, that love, and it was the John D. Mcdonald's Travis McGee series. And so that's really what put me on a course of loving sort of serial mystery novels.

 | 34:59 | And I still do to this day. Speaking of entrepreneurs, you have to hand it to James Patterson for the career he's built in. Oh, boy. It's just so impressive. Yeah, it sure is. But you know what? We learn so much from fiction. I mean, I'm like you. I love fiction. I cannot go a day without reading because I disappear into it, and I appreciate an opportunity to disappear into something.

 | 35:31 | Yeah. I think it's great. It's one of those things that provide some balance to your life and get your mind out of whatever you might be thinking about the day. It's just one of those things to sort of that keeps you healthy, keeps you in a healthy mental state, or at least contributes to a healthy mental state. I believe that. I really do. Yeah. And finally, what would be your advice to your younger self?

 | 36:02 | Yeah. So again, I think it's simple again, Jim, it's not deep. It's just don't overthink. Just do. It's actually something that's become very paramount through the pandemic.

 | 36:25 | We were one of those businesses that really faced that challenge in terms of revenue and in terms of having to pivot our business into different forms. And I was already, I think, well along the path to be able to sort of come up with an idea and start to execute it. But it became all the more important during this pandemic because things needed to be done quickly.

 | 36:54 | And so you just started throwing ideas at the wall. And if they stuck, then you worked at them, you massage them, you developed them. If they didn't, you turned your back on them and went on to something else. And again, it's that ability to not take something as an entrepreneur. When you come up with an idea, you come up with a concept or a new business stream, you invest yourself. And then when maybe it doesn't flourish or doesn't mature or it doesn't stick again, it's those feelings.

 | 37:27 | Right. And you can become married to anyone but you just got to be able to walk away from it and try something else. And that became really important in the pandemic. And I think as a younger person, I may have struck out on my own earlier, but again, sometimes people overthink things. It's like, well, this needs to be in place. This needs to be in place. This needs to be in place. It really doesn't.

 | 37:59 | I guess the way somebody said to me, good is better than perfect these days. And that's the way it kind of is. So get your idea out there because you can work on it once it's up in life, whatever that idea might be, find a way to find a way to launch something, and then, you'll know, pretty soon whether you got something. Yeah. So that's something that's become sort of really important to me.

 | 38:26 | And when I find myself thinking about an idea and going back and forth, I just go, okay, I got to get out of this mindset. Let's just either do it or not do it and see what happens. So I think that's ready. Shoot, aim. Yeah, very true. Gordon, thanks so much for this. Is there anything else that you want to comment on, or this has been quite I don't think so. It's been a delightful conversation.

 | 38:54 | Again, our passion from a career standpoint and from a business standpoint is London entrepreneurs and London's business people. And we're very fortunate to be able to tell the stories of people and get to meet so many fascinating people. And these days, again, we chatted about it, there's no shortage and you see people launching all kinds of creative endeavors.

 | 39:25 | And this whole advent of the side hustle has brought this whole other layer of entrepreneurialism to society. People that have a career and then are picking away at the side of something which may become a full time occupation. We've covered many stories over the last couple of years where that's come to fruition for people, whether they've been laid off during a pandemic or sitting home and they've got some more time to pick away at something, then you're seeing a lot of sort of incubated ideas really take hold.

 | 39:56 | So it's an amazing time to sort of be an entrepreneur, and it's a great time to watch the city grow. And. Yeah, we're just fortunate to be able to have sort of a front row seat. Yeah, that's what it is, isn't it? Yeah. Thank you very much. And to our viewers and listeners, thanks so much for joining Gordon me in this conversation. And I have to say, there is not an addition of London Inc. That goes by that my husband and I don't say to each other, did you see that in London Inc?

 | 40:26 | That was interesting, isn't it? This is quite a service that you provide a score. It really is. And we appreciate it. For those of you who like to watch, we are on YouTube for those of you who like to listen? Please listen on wherever you get your podcast and thanks much again? For joining in on this each time? Thank you very much till we meet again.