It was a typical day for second year university students, Ryan Frampton and Drew Mortensen.
The temperature outside was dropping, the leaves were changing colour, and Ryan and Drew were spending their first Saturday of the fall semester lounging at home, full off KD, brainstorming how they could get text books without breaking their bank.
During their quest of exploring options, they realized a problem.
With a new semester comes a fresh Cohort of exciting businesses into The Hub. With this Cohort The Hub continues to support businesses from a wide variety of industries. This Cohort's businesses have amazing products and services and without further ado we would love to share more with you about each business.
Dronemates
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Tariq Ahmed, Founder of Revel Cider Co. Tariq is the 19th cider producer in Ontario and the youngest in North America. Revel Cider is currently housed within our incubator program, The Hub.
In August 2016, four startups emerged from the Hub Incubator far different from when they entered four months prior.
From week to week, these teams met their challenges head on and used the strength of the group to help each other persevere through the difficult times. It was an absolute pleasure to watch each team grow and the progress they made between beginning the Hub and graduation was superb. We wish these startups all the best on the next steps in their journey and leave you with their comments on their time in the Hub:
April 2016 saw another successful group of companies graduate from the Hub Incubator Program at CBaSE.
Five teams; Vintage Instincts, The Making Box, Better Start Naturals, TRAVA and Protein Innovations presented their success, pivots and future goals to a group of Innovation Guelph Mentors (including Hub Manager Niel Palmer). These mentors along with Melanie Lang, Director of CBaSE, judge the final presentations and decide who will receive the final installment of their seed funding, and who will not.
CBaSE would like to extend congratulations to Jamie Westover as the 2016 recipient of the Allison Kane Memorial Entrepreneurship Prize! With an overwhelming amount of applicants this year, Jamie was outstanding in his passion for community involvement and entrepreneurship as demonstrated across his various involvements on and off campus.
Tariq Ahmed, the founder of Revel Cider Co. a cider company producing locally sourced, un-aged hard ciders - is the youngest cider producer in North America and is a graduate of the Hub Incubator Program at CBaSE and the University of Guelph.
Having graduated from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Science, business – and starting one, was not where Tariq’s expertise lay.
It was during a high school election that Bruce Sargent began producing promotional videos. Encouraged by a teacher, he took a community-placement working with a family farm promoting their business through video content. That’s when Farm Boy Productions was born, and the rest as he says “is history”.
"There is no such thing as a "million dollar idea", ideas are worthless until you get them out of your head to see what they can do". We are not immune to the "yeah, but..." comments that come along with a big statement like that, we get it. The commonality between the successful entrepreneurs you're about to read about however, is that they pushed past the "yeah, but..." red flags in their head, and, they were all participants of The Hub Incubator Program.
The University of Guelph’s Business Consulting courses, more formally referred to as MGMT*4050 and MGMT*4060 offer upper year students transformational learning experiences that provide them with real-world applicable skills and wisdom.
Offered in both Fall and Winter semesters, the Business Consulting course is open to third and fourth year students from any program who wish to earn course credit through unconventional means.