Corporate to Start Up

Before I built companies, I learned inside the beer business at Labatt. What started as a chance meeting at a bar turned into a crash course in branding, sales, and mentorship. Those lessons followed me into every startup since.

Agenda:

⏳️ Estimated Read Time: 5.5 minutes (of packed jewels)

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I never sat down and said, “I want to work for a giant beer company.”

It started because I was at the bar. Literally.

There was a Labatt career event at UBC my friend dragged me too.

Everyone else the event was shoulder-to-shoulder in the speaker room, shoving resumes at an exhausted Labatt employee who had just finished his talk.

I stayed back, wandered to the bar, and that’s exactly where the speaker snuck off too. We had a beer, I told him “nice job up there,” and a week later he offered me an interview at Labatt.

Lesson number one: sometimes the best networking strategy is not networking. Everyone fights for attention at the podium. The real conversations happen when the speaker sneaks off to catch his breath.

This is the story of my year and a half at Labatt and the lessons I learned in a corporate environment that I brought to my startups.

At 21, I was handed the keys to a Kokanee van and told to sell beer around Vancouver. I parked illegally at Kits Beach (allegedly) until the security guard would come and tell me I couldn’t park there. I would usually act surprised, gave them swag, and asked to snag a photo real quick.

The next day I’d pull the same stunt, with a brand new security guard and a brand new t-shirt giveaway.

What I learned:

Labatt was a branding and marketing factory.

Every quarter, our team meetings were measured on a PowerPoint slide showing a beer can filling up with foam.

If you hit your numbers, the can was full. If you didn’t, it was half-empty. That small detail actually came with me to SAXX except we outlines of underwear instead of beer.

I was the lowest rung — Sales Rep. Above me were area managers, territory managers, and the West Coast leadership. Despite difference of seniority, they pulled me in taught me the craft, and made me feel like part of the team.

They put a lot of energy into training me while still not being micro managers.

We did ride-alongs. Once or twice a month, my boss would hop into the Kokanee van, sit quietly through my sales calls, and let me do my thing. When we got back in the van, he’d break it down like a coach reviewing game tape:

It wasn’t harsh criticism. Just small, direct tips that made me sharper.

That’s where I learned selling is more than pushing product. It’s about how you package it, how you position it, and how you make people feel.

Lesson learned: Find mentors who will sit in the passenger seat, let you play the game, and then give you the honest review. That kind of feedback will make you better faster than anything else.

Another jewel: Label on the table. If you’re representing a brand, make sure the brand is visible and you look the part. Whether you’re selling Budweiser, Canada Goose jackets, or SAXX underwear, it’s the same principle. Don’t just sell the product — be the product.

And the mentors — guys like Gary Hickey and Trent Carroll. They weren’t just bosses. They were role models who taught me how to show up, how to lead, and, occasionally, how to dangle Budweiser-branded hockey gear to get me onto the company beer league team.

Here’s my honest take: working for a big company before starting your own thing is underrated.

The downside can be when you can get stuck for too long. A steady paycheck, free beer, and good parties can keep you from chasing the thing you really want.

Shoutout to some of the main mentors at Labatt:

Q&A

Question: When you look back, what decisions in the early days helped SAXX not just grow, but last as a brand?

Answer: My take on this was that I understood the value of brand early on. I grew up watching my dad build physical things like roads and bridges, and I feel like I translated that understanding into building a brand, knowing that a brand has tangible value.

I also had the drive to protect the design innovation. We were often told that a patent is only as good as your ability to defend it, so I knew if we could build the brand quickly and correlate it with the innovative design, we’d be better equipped to protect the patent if one of the big guys started trying to imitate.

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Tonight in Kelowna, a few familiar names are stepping up to talk about Mental Health.

Andrew Ladd, Jordin Tootoo, Mike Smith, and Wade Redden will be part of Open Ice: The Locker Talk We Need, an event hosted by Okanagan Lifestyle and Third Space Charity.

It’s an evening of unfiltered conversation about men’s mental health — loneliness, resilience, and the struggles players carried long after the game ended.

The timing matters. Suicide is a leading cause of death for men under 50, and more than one in ten Canadian men face mental health challenges, most in silence.

For me, this conversation hits close to home. When I hear guys like Redden and Tootoo share what they were really going through behind the public labels, I’m reminded of a friend I lost to suicide last year.

With September being suicide awareness month we wanted to shed light on an amazing cause driven by great people.

~ Trent