Andrew Livingston was climbing the corporate ladder while simultaneously hosting a golf show on TV. It was a pretty sweet life!...until the one-two punch of the dot com crash and 9/11. He lost both gigs and found himself unemployed.
Andrew did what every consummate entrepreneur does: he researched, made plans, failed and grew. Who is Andrew Livingston and what is Neat.Space.Edited? Let's go inside and find out.
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Andrew Livingston was climbing the corporate ladder while simultaneously hosting a golf show on TV. It was a pretty sweet life!...until the one-two punch of the dot com crash and 9/11. He lost both gigs and found himself unemployed.
Andrew did what every consummate entrepreneur does: he researched, made plans, failed and grew. Who is Andrew Livingston and what is Neat.Space.Edited? Let's go inside and find out.
Enjoying the podcast? I am fiercely independent, and rely on listeners like you to help me stick around.
Can you share the episode on social media, or write a
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review in Apple podcasts?! I would be so grateful.
Andrew Livingston had a busy life. He was climbing the corporate ladder at Rogers while simultaneously hosting Adventures in Golf, the TV series. It was a pretty sweet double life until the one, two punch of the dot com crash and 9/11. He lost both gigs and found himself unemployed with limited prospects.
Andrew did what every consummate entrepreneur does: he researched, made plans, failed and grew. Who is Andrew Livingston? And what is Neat.Space.Edited?
What's this place. What's this place, this place let's go inside and find out. Hi, Andrew. Hi, how are you? I'm good. So I have one question for you. What is this? Um, I, I think have more than one, but we can certainly start with that one. What is a space meets space editors. We're a 14 year old Canadian company.
We sell funky homewares from all over the world at the beginning of the business and the Toronto market. In fact, in Canada, it was kind of boring. Homewares was dominated by products that we couldn't find. I couldn't find personally, I have something to say about that a little bit later, in terms of the sort of value proposition around entrepreneurs, starting business.
To fill a gap that they can't fill. It makes for a much stronger businesses. In fact, private equity companies out there. Look for companies that are founded by entrepreneurs who are trying to solve a problem in their lives. For example, Joe started club Monaco because he couldn't find a white t-shirt in the price that he wanted.
At all, even the bricks and mortar, retail space, bricks and mortar retail space. Is it true that you were an adventure travel television host? That is actually true. So within my mid thirties, I found myself with a, a corporate position at Rogers media, and then I just had a baby, my daughter alive. I've been born and this opportunity to host a international travel adventure series for golf.
This PR local Toronto production company couldn't find any hosts who could play golf. Like they could find pretty boy models, but they couldn't play golf. So they needed this sort of hybrid or whatever. Clearly not being a pretty boy, but being able to play anyways, I did it with a much music host, so he was the cool guy.
Preppy guy or whatever. But the point of that was like, I saw that and I said, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to get that gig because it sounds like so much fun and it's something I have to do. So we had two or three seasons of adventures and golf. It was a terrible show. It had horrible. It was only watched by alcoholic insomniacs two or three o'clock in the morning, but we had a hell of a lot of fun doing it.
You know what? I learned a lot, everything I try to do more now than I did when I was 35 years old, but everything I try to do, I try, I never make mistakes. I can't fail. I can only. So I learned a hell of a lot on that show. I thought it was a lot of fun. I actually was very nervous to be on camera. I had memorized lines.
Um, that kind of stuff was very difficult for me. So it was a personal challenge outside of my comfort zone. The weird part about that was around that time, the internet crash happened, but 2001 crash. So there was like catastrophe Rogers laid off 150 employees. I had a daughter I'd finished this terrible golf show that was not going to get.
And I didn't have anything to do. I'm going to jump in here and say, I really identified with, when he said he didn't know what to do. It's that uncomfortable situation where a door closes, but a new one doesn't open up right away. And in Andrew's case sounds like a really amazing door closing. He was traveling the world, playing golf with a much music star, but he did what every successful entrepreneur does.
He licked his wounds and started talking to everyone he could about what he should do next. I saw an industrial psychologist who said, you know, while I was, I said, well, we gotta go get another job in a corporation. And they said, you know, you're frankly making a cognitive error about corporations. And I was like, well, what's that?
What do you mean? It's like, you're thinking that corporates. Or a place of safety and comfort and fulfillment, and you couldn't be more wrong. It's a hyper competitive environment where you're not safe and you will never have a relationship with it that satisfying to you. So I took that advice and then I actually did another thing, which was sort of humbling.
Cause I was at work for six months or even a year. And I said to one guy, I have no idea what I'm going to do. And he said, you've got to be out of your mind. Those guys are jackasses, uh, about what you said, you're an entrepreneur. So this is what we're going to do. I've got a concept down here in Boston.
It's called the Boston urban golf works or something. I looked at that business and it really didn't look like it had the return I was looking for in terms of spending the rest of my life on it. What that did though, is I started looking at, well, there has to be something entrepreneurially that I'm interested.
Where there's a gap in the market. I came across a us concept called the container store at the time. It was a niche business in, in the states still is, and that's an old textbook Canadian strategy, like sleep country, golf town, many other Canadian retailers. Have, you know, decrease the risk of that. They have to take starting businesses by looking at the U S they can take bigger risks.
There's far more capital without the risks that we shoulder in Canada. I looked at that storage and organization, and I had a bias toward design and utility, a little bit fashion music a little bit. And that's where we innovated the concept, which was. Punky homewares or international homers, because a lot of stuff that was happening at the time and cities like Tokyo and New York and Amsterdam people are generally wanting the same kinds of luxury products for their homes.
So we just found that, geez, there's so many vendors, internationally have beautiful product that we think Toronto customers would want. And we were right. And the second thing that we got right was there was this Manhattan ization of downtown Toronto. During the last 10 or 15 years, which meant that what are you going to do when you live in a small space, becomes very, very real.
If you don't have your trash and recycling taken care of, and you're in a 800 square foot apartment, we had great products. We were able to do this small space solution. We had a busy queen street, west retail location, where tons of people were coming in all the time. So kind of had a great run there of growth, at least in the queen west or downtown west side of Toronto corridor.
And that's where you started then upon Davenport. Was that, well, that was close to my house. That's another thing a young growing family said, geez, I only want to walk two or three blocks to work or whatever, but if we're going to put an anchor in time, it's like I identified myself as an entrepreneur. I had identified a category that I was interested in and I was ready to launch my business.
What I wanted to do was take on as less risk as possible and take small cannon. Before shooting one big one. Cause you may miss a small cannon shot. There was to do a short term rental in an abandoned, dry cleaning factory. Disgusting. So we were there for about six months and yeah, it was like a sh the guy was, he didn't carry, cleaned out the dry cleaning factory.
He had no use for the space. I think there was a for lease sign on it, but I mean, it was literally a disaster. It had just all it had all the equipment taken out of it. I don't even think it was heated that well. So you saw that you had success within that. I saw that what I was doing was something I wanted to do the math wasn't great on that business, but I felt that there was enough there.
And I'd learned enough that I could take that learning somewhere where I could grow the business. Did you know that you wanted to move to Queens? Was that calculated? No. What has been an evolution that we're missing? One step, I rented a lower level retail space under Flo's diner in Yorkville, which was level location.
Again, I wasn't really ready to declare myself to the world with a lot of risks. So when people start their businesses in your kitchen, in your garage, in a base. And then hear your success, learn from everything. And then, you know, and you find out whether you want to sort of do it. So that also wasn't a successful necessarily financial decision on my part.
And I did learn a lot of lessons there and I was lucky because one advice, piece of advice I would have for people interested in starting a business or entrepreneurs, make sure you have enough. There's lots of companies that are, have great ideas, beautiful products, and they never make it to market. And they end up in the business junkyard because they ran out of money.
So make sure that doesn't happen to you. It would be my point and I was lucky because that didn't happen to me, but we were very perilously. For a long time. And then finally we were lucky to find queen street west. We just caught it at a perfect time. Like it was, it was a crack sort of neighborhood for awhile, especially clean in bath.
First was very touch and go. And you couldn't attract the major American retailers or anybody there. And I love that neighborhood I've lived. I loved it in 1990. I love it now. So I'm not going to suggest that I think there's anything wrong with the people who live there or it's, it has a lot of personality.
Fantastic neighborhood. Andrew emailed me shortly after this interview feeling pretty badly that he'd called his beloved queen street west crack neighborhood. That it could be taken out of context or misconstrued. I want to keep it in because it's important to this retail story. You got to know what queen west was like 15 years ago.
It would have been a huge financial risk for neat this chic designer home. To move a Stone's throw from the big bop and countless after hours clubs, which is what the neighborhood was at that time. So I hope he lets me use this clip and I hope if he does that, you can forgive him. The cool part about it is everybody in, in Canada.
Who's 25 years old wants to live there. So they go, and the joke that we make is like, so you're going to move from, you know, Regina or whatever, come to Toronto. You're going to live somewhere in a small space with three or four people, and they're going to need like a low-cost shower, caddy or a trash can.
Oh, look, I just met somebody. So I'm going to move in with that person. And then all of a sudden that's an upgrade. We catch the boom. On the other side who moved back down there. So it's kind of a fun cycle. The way it has worked. Although, as you know, the internet is sort of thrown a big branch into how people are blind, how people are shopping, but that was a great model for awhile.
And I didn't know that was going to happen. You can only live that. You can never write that in a business plan. That that's what that neighborhood will look like. And that's what that business, how that business would. So the store is called neat space edited. Have you always been attracted to being neat and organized?
You know, it's weird to answer your question. It's somewhat related to organization and design. I am interested in elegant design and utility, and always have been when I was a kid, I was sort of not really adopted by a family, friends, family, but I spent a lot of time with a family, friends, family who were in the antique business and a stamp collecting business in Vancouver.
And We used to spend our weekends, we would go to fleamarkets all over the lower mainland of BC and we were dragged along as kids. And that was actually super fun. So I remember this sense of discovery around walking around and talking to vendors who had just set up shop to sell World War II metals. So you're always kind of looking for this one thing
that's, you know, this diamond in the rough, at a great price. So I think that in one respect that attracted me to being an owner operator of a small business. So that was one element too. My family had a produce warehouse. In Vancouver. So I was working in that small business when I was 12 years old and it had a series of terrible jobs like dishwasher and room service guy until I was 25.
So maybe 25 jobs. But while I was doing all that work, I was always observing on either a conscious or subconscious level, because that answered your question about set up, meet being needs or whatever is your home life. Uber organized and meet. Wants to know that. Well, you know, I found a second, I had three kids, all living at home.
I really have to have order. I find it difficult to have a disorderly environment, it gives me anxiety. An orderly environment makes me feel good, a disorderly environment makes me feel bad. So running on storage and organization concept with funky organizing products is probably pretty good now that I think about it.
And now as I sit in this big store in Bayview, it's very organized and I feel pretty good. So I hope that answers the tagline underneath the neat, the space edited, which I love was that at the Genesis of the, yeah. You know, I think our business was called meat storage essentials originally, which is almost like.
Well, that was my framework. That decision to rebrand was a pretty big one. I was, I'm a big fan of this guy, Ray Dalio, he's a business guru guy. He's suggesting if you need to make a big business decision, you need to triangulate it with three people. And those two people that you ask other than yourself, you're the third,
they need to be trustworthy and they need to have experience. Because you're going to make mistakes. There's an old adage. Success has a family and failures in. So I've learned that the hard way I actually now seek out decisions people make, and I try to figure out whether they're community-based or individual, and mostly the bad ones are individually, this loser sort of way space edited.
The rebranding and expert looked at us from the outside and said, like, what are you? We're about space. We make sure that objects and space speak the same language. Like I went to Japan they're way, way ahead of us maybe in every, almost every sphere, especially the homewares one. They even have a word for the language between objects in space.
And that's an interior design concept, meaning, well, does this piece speak the same language as this and what you want is coherence. So if you have a lamp that speaks Russian and a carpet, that's Chinese and a Polish ceiling fan, it's going to be a cacophony. So that. Where the space concept came in after the fact, oh, the idea of space when you have to live in a small space or when you're living intimately with objects, design is about emotion.
If you look at something it's going to produce an emotion in you. If you have a small space and very. You'd better, make sure that they're beautifully designed and have utility because it's going to impact the way that you think of it has the Marie Kondo movement. If you can call it a movement, has that translated into sales for, um, you know what Americano, it might be a sort of about minimalism.
If I'm getting a corrected, you could keep only things that give you joy. So, yeah. You know, we've had a lot of experience where people go, you should partner with a professional organizing company because it's a perfect fit. It's actually not a perfect fit. And I'll tell you why people who go to professional organized one, want to bring some order to their lives in their houses and they can't do it themselves.
I'd often though that's an emotional issue. Like they attack so much emotion, meaning to everything in their lives that they can't get rid of. It that's really not an area that we sort of operate in. So macro trend and Toronto and globally, which gives me optimism is people with the internet and Pinterest.
Stan aspiration and frankly, affluence like just a gen we're living in the greatest flourishing in human history. All over the world, people become more interested in design. They become more interested in their home. They have more money to spend on quality. That is a trend that you have anything in your store that is a neat product.
You make any of your own products. And have you ever thought of doing well? We sell, my wife has a line of reversible women's clothing called Helene Clarkson Design.com or heleneclarkson.com. Anyways, When your wife says you have, you've got some space in your store to sell my clothes, you're going to sell the clothes in your store, even if they don't have a lot to do with home organization. But I learned a lot there too.
It started funny cause I was teasing landfill. I'm sorry. We have a shop in shop at our baby location of that clothing, which is utility reversible. Actually it was at one point travel now sort of pivoting towards a broader lifestyle brand, primarily because of the pandemic. I was like, there was no way I fought that tooth and nail totally wrong.
Find people coming back. Like a trash can bottle cap, opener, coat rack, and the top of one of my white. So there's no rules. There are no assumptions. And there are sort of, it has been success. She's turning product with your store.
I was wondering what it's like to have two retailers in one household during a lockdown. It's good. We provide each other with moral support. That's been one of the things we make a lot of business decisions together. We've certainly taken it on the chin based on the pandemic. I've just got, I'm sorry.
I've got this ups guy who wants to deliver. That's fine. You can edit it. That was unexpected given. Can I give me sure. If you're wondering how I put what's this place together? I did it one small step at a time. Learning about Mike's remote recording, but I have an important mountain. To climb monetizing.
I need advertisers so I can keep interviewing these entrepreneurs a good match, be Canadian businesses that did really well during the pandemic, local breweries and wine cannabis banks. If you have a connection to one of these or an ad idea, let me know. So then the next season we can start putting their ad right here in the middle of the show.
You can also help by giving me a review subscribing or sending me some feedback. Now back to the. So, uh, oh, I just want to add, as an aside, I did look at your wife's website and I'm interest I'm interested in. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. You've got a great proposition. Women buy a lot more clothes than anything else.
And Warren Buffett's said there's no extra points for degree of difficulty. Right? So why wouldn't you choose something that's easier than hard. My business, homewares is unbelievable a scrappy....oh, not to mention that in the last 20 years, Amazon came along, which is literally a magic vending machine in the sky, right? That's just gonna send product...oh um, I think I'm gonna compete with this magic vending machine in the sky that.
Moro it's like, do I think you should do that? No, I don't think that's a good idea. Anyways, there was a lot of money to be made in certain categories and less than others. So make sure that you study the market that you're going to enter into. How big is it? What's the competition. Like all of that requires very detailed research.
Like as if you were going on a. Whole expedition, because I promise you once you're on that journey, it's going to feel like that. So you better, you better do your research before you sort of get into that. Okay. You brought up Amazon, which every retailer has to contend with. As much as we hope it will simply go away.
It's not going to, but it has caused massive retail carnage. So I'd like to know what your outlook on the future of retail was. And has that changed since the pandemic. Ah, God is a great question. This is the way that I've been sort of looking at it the way I see it is the e-commerce piece or the digital transformation has affected every aspect of business life and personal life.
So any business has been impacted dramatically by the econ. Transition transformation. And it's moving so fast that nobody can even tell where their feet are planted because it's moving so quickly, which is actually, there's a lot of opportunity in that. For example, for us, I didn't think we, we did have a position before the pandemic.
We were trying to manage, how are we going to compete in an online world? The pandemic forced us to deliver curbside pickup. The. Forced us to find a company called fair delivery here in Toronto, that has kind of an Uber style model of next day delivery or 48 hour delivery Shopify, but Canadian miracle of e-commerce sites and has live chat.
So what I'm going to argue is, okay, well, you know, we're. Giant vending machines in the sky. Well, what about a fantastic bricks and mortar retail experience where you could actually go shop and build a sense of community around the store that you're shopping in which believe it is still something people are willing to do and interested in doing it's kind of an ancient sort of IDI thing.
The other pieces. Oh, well maybe I just want to do curbside pickup. Well, you could easily do that. Amazon can't do that. Can I get this thing delivered within 48 hours? Yeah. Well, Amazon can be up well, so can we, so a lot of the stuff that I didn't think we'd be able to do, we can now do, because we were pushed forward by necessity.
So I'm quite optimistic. Here is the other thing. Get ready for like this Shopify live chat on the web store. I'm the only guy who is signed up for it on our end. So I get pings 24 hours a day from customers like. The size is this stacking bins. So I have to answer that question because it's a potential sale, but you can't ask Amazon about, I can already hear you arguing that you can read reviews from the Amazon community to decide about a product, but who are these random people who have enough time in their day to give you an opinion on something they bought?
Do they have the same aesthetic as you do? They care for their stuff? The same way? Do they live in the same climate, even somewhere. Somehow we started giving random humans with limited experience, more credence than a shop owner who specializes in that range of products. Maybe it's time to shift our perspective.
Yeah. A shop owner is biased. They've done the research and have knowledge far beyond anything. Pacman 5, 7, 8 can give you on ammo. So we have lots of propositions. I think that make us a very compelling consumer proposition going forward, postpone down X I'm feeling quite, uh, when the pandemic first started last March.
How has your optimism changed since then? Where you did it? Did it, did it knock you down a bit? Yeah. Well, I think we were coasting along, which is another problem. I think real change and progress happens that you know, where your comfort zone stops or whatever. So I think we've become a little bit complacent.
I'm not going to say a welcome the pandemic by any stretch was, well, I think everyone was very scared and they didn't know what the future looked like. So the second block down was easier. Hi it on our side of the landlord side because they go, okay, well, you know, the government stepped up, our vendors looked at and said, well, people aren't just going to declare bankruptcy.
We're not gonna lose all our money. So it looks like second wave was a lot easier than the first wave and people were very afraid. So the idea of a dictum, you were asking it, what my thing is like, well, I would never quit. As I said, it's impossible. You know, I have, I'm a long distance runner. My wife's going to kill me.
Cause I in a Toronto group called run two beer, which is sort of a joke. You actually run to a brewery and you have a beer, but that's actually a very serious. Hardcore running groups and elite group of runners. They do a lot of fun stuff. Hey, so anyways, to make a long story short in long distance running, you can never quit.
You'll never walk in that sort of weird orbit of long distance runners who are very solitary and weird people. Anyways, one of the things is, and I know that community and I like to consider myself one of them. If you never walk and you never quit. So that's one thing. The other dictum would be tough times.
Never. Tough people, you know? So the idea of quitting or the idea of it not going until you can't do it anymore, it never crossed our minds. The only solution was to sort of power through it. And that has worked out. I learned a lot in that pandemic sort of funniest, like you're really learn who your friends are.
Like you go through. Say specifically how different partners or vendors behave. But our friends in Quebec were tremendously supportive, very grateful for those relationships. We had vendors there who trusted that we would pay them. Eventually. They gave us product on credit. We had other vendors who panicked and just shut down the relationship who put me into collections.
So that really pisses me off because it says we don't have any faith in your business. You're done. We're going to offload your account. Everybody reacted very differently. Many of the relationships we have in particular with Umbra couldn't have been more supportive and couldn't have been a better partner for us.
So we're very grateful for that. And you know what? Bricks and mortar retail is really hard. It's a very complex business and it requires a lot of physical labor. Cause a lot of hours, a lot of maintenance. I don't think e-commerce guys can do. So, if you can come out with a company with, on your left-hand this expertise, which is very difficult and on your right hand, on e-commerce expertise, at some point you're going to prosper, you said something earlier about how it takes a community and to bounce ideas off of people and that making decisions alone.
Yeah, it's bad for you. I think it's bad too. And it immediately made me think of all these people in lockdown that don't have the ability to bounce things off of each other. Yeah. Mike has, you know, I've considered myself very lucky. I have three kids at home they're older now, but they've been. Stay at home with us.
Family has become central to our experience in the pandemic. And I feel very lucky and the good news is we like each other. You know, no one's going to go, I didn't know who my dad was, like, my dad was a stranger. I promise you, I am not going to be a stranger to my family, which I think is important. I'm sympathetic.
That that situation has not been. The same four people living in isolation and in any sense, a singles in apartments, older people that would be primarily an astonishingly different experience in a pandemic, cultivate a community. When you see people that are engaged, optimistic, forward, looking successful, they're not individuals they're going to.
Wide networks of people who they've worked hard on developing relationships of trust on. Right. And it's also something that we don't get from. If we just get deliveries from Amazon, we miss out on that. Like the thing I miss the most in the lockdown. Well, there's a lot of things I miss, but one of the things is going into stores.
You bounce ideas off of people, and now we don't get that bounce. We don't get that. Amazon is so flat. I hear you. There's an entrepreneur in Toronto, her name's Jen Agg. She wrote a book and she also owns seven restaurants. One's called The Hoof, on Dundas. Restaurants have just taken it on the chin. She talked about when a restaurant has a whole bunch of staff working together,
and a full amount of tables, open at five, closing at 2, there's a certain magic that can't be duplicated anywhere. So I think it's certainly not a mystical concept, but there's a certain magic to independent retailing. I guess, in the communities that are built around them. I had one experience where I was talking to a customer and she was like, I was like, we're in a.
We're fighting for our survival. And that sort of really changed the, you know, which humanized it's like, how, you know, we're Canadians bugbears. Like you, we should be shopping a local proprietor. Like people don't make the connection between the communities they live in and the neighborhoods they live in and the relationship they have with local retailers or this don't sort of get it's like if you purchase something from.
Which is a Canadian owned local business. The revenue that comes in, it's going to support all the local, the local landlord, the local vendors, the local suppliers. It's going to support my family, which I spent, you know, we spend money in our community. If you buy from Amazon or bed, bath and beyond, none of that happened.
If you want to ship all your money off shore to American wealthy, private investors or people who own large multinational conglomerates go for it. You know, I mean, that's one of the beauties of decision-making or making a consumer choice, but I'm going to argue that if you shop the local proprietor, Is going to be much richer, much fuller.
And it's also, you're performing a civic duty there that you aren't really even aware of. That is kind of an invisible hand. We are the invisible hand. People don't know how impactful their one little buying hand in. We once with my son's walked from split on I to Christie and we counted the number of restaurants.
Do you know how many restaurants are between Brea pandemic between Warren split, Ida and blur and Christie? This guest? I got to tell you many, I think between Christy and. Yeah, 160. That's a good guest. 2 20 20. Wow. Think about that. That's like eight blocks. There's 220 restaurants. So 220 owner operators, 1800 or 2,500 tables.
That's like 500 waiters. Yeah. Apps, it boggles the mind to consider just what is happening. But I think we need to raise the flag on shop the local proprietor tour that I don't think people get that. And I think if they did their lives would be Richard. I want to circle back to that thing that you said a little saying that the customer is rarely, right.
Um, what, what do you think about that American term? The customer is always right. That's a very interesting question. The best, the best answer I could give you is I think it's true in one respect, which is, you know, we interpret that as being a customer service and an interpersonal relationship kind of concept.
You know, I went to Japan on a trade mission at the invitation of the Japanese government. The idea was to bring buyers from north America to Japanese companies so that you could try it. I met a guy. From Israel. And he had a concept, he was an immigrant to New York and he just started a concept that was called basics.
Plus he grew it to four to 15 stores, but he was a super interesting entrepreneur get Israeli, military training and a great sense of humor. But he said, you know how I started my business. They were mocked. Okay, because of their security training or whatever. So they go around and like unlock locks. Then they opened a 200 square foot store to cut keys and he was bored.
He wasn't getting any customers. He'd ask people if they'd come in and they wouldn't buy anything and say, what were you looking for? So we're looking for light bulbs and they go, okay, so you remembered that and go, oh, I was looking for toilet paper. Oh fuck. I really want to really need is the coffee cups.
Every time someone came in and asked him for something, he went out and got it and started stalking his stores and he ended up with a super successful concept. So in that respect, the customer's always right. The other concept is that a business in law is like a purse like meat. You think it's me? It's actually not me.
Meat is an individual entity. It was once a child. It was once a teenager. I'd like to think it's an adult now. So we try to put meat as an entity in between ourselves and the customer. So in a transaction, let's say it's a refund, or let's say there's a problem. Well, is meat being protected or the rights of the entity?
Being represented in this transaction. Cause meat can't always be ripped off because it doesn't have a voice and we're here to protect its interest. Right. I think it's an American cliche and like a lot of American cliches, we should reject them, but because we've been sort of bombarded with American entertainment and business culture for all of our.
We really don't understand our own identity. I'm not sure how well developed our kind of Canadian identity is per se. But yeah, I understand the question. I understand the cliche, I would reject it's been rejected. Do you have a thought or a book or something that helps you persevere in retail? Oh, because like you're on a incredibly difficult sort of you're
you're always in adversity...it's impossible to see what the future looks like...we were already collapsing before there was a global pandemic and then a global pandemic came along and shut our businesses down or whatever...?
I, I don't know whether I could summarize it in a simple dictum. One thing has been a big motivation for me. There's never a fixed outcome to any, you know, like the Toronto urban golf experience, which was a failure. And it actually ended up producing this great company almost 20 years old at the end of the day as an entrepreneur, you're a systems engineer.
So what you're doing is you're building a system and you have to master every element of that system for it to be successful. Last question, it's going to be kind of a corny question. Okay. Feeling you, aren't a very corny guy, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What's your favorite memory of that is funny question that you answered.
You know what, I really don't have a kind of sentimental attachment to events or moments. I guess one would be in the pandemic. I didn't know what the future was going to look like. And I had a couple of vendors who out of the blue said, let's just do whatever we can to make sure for Andrew. Without the business consequences or the financial concept.
And when I got that news, a littler was driving on the four. What I like was crying my eyes, I'm a 56 year old guy. And I started like crying because we were like, I was like, oh my God, people. And that's such a nice thing to do. So I'm not an emotional person, but that would be one way that I could honestly answer that question for you, which is a general altruism where you think you got.
All right. Well, I think we've covered a lot here. You're incredible. This is like 1159, like one minute. We're at the bottom of the page. That was like five hours later. I could see myself like a near-death experience. I floated about myself and watching myself, but I really enjoyed it. So thank you guys so much and good luck with all the podcasting efforts and thank you.
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