Lead with Vulnerability
Start-Up: Chic Geek
Founder: Kylie Woods
Located: Calgary, Canada
What is Chic Geek?
Chic Geek was established 5 years ago as a non-profit with a goal of building a community for women in technology in Calgary. They hope to bring more women role models to the technology space. To achieve this, they run 20 to 25 events per year and 3 core programs. They’ve had more than 1100 women and men participate in their programs each year.
How did Chic Geek get started?
The Founder, Kylie, was working a full-time job in a product management company and found that she loved the energy in start-ups and tech. She wanted to learn more technical skills like coding, but found it difficult to find the right resources and found it was quite an intimidating, male dominated space. She thought other people were probably facing the same issues and within a few months she teamed up with another female entrepreneur to tackle the problem. They leaped into building the business with the attitude that everything didn’t need to be perfect.
After a couple of years as a passion project on the side, Kylie quit her job and worked on the idea full-time. The first year was used to experiment and Chic Geek ran 14 different series from book clubs to dinners and coffee and coding events. By year 2, Kylie understood what worked and what didn’t. She started to establish metrics to help the team decide whether an event should be continued or not.
Kylie’s entrepreneurial roots
Kylie currently resides in Calgary but grew-up in Saskatoon. Even though her parents came from government backgrounds and she never considered starting a company as a career option, she has worked on entrepreneurial projects her entire life. When she was young, she took apples off the apple trees at home, made apple sauce, and made her parents buy ice cream. She would then sell this combination. She also loved to bead and one year she sold all her crafts at a craft fair and was able to break-even on the costs. Since moving to Calgary, she’s gained experience in communications and public relations and has taught herself graphic and web design.
Feeling like an imposter
The idea around “feeling like an imposter” has come up in conversations when I’ve spoken to people about how they felt when starting a new job, and Kylie brought it up too. She noted “I feel like I am an imposter promoting women in technology” because she considers herself coming from a non-technical background. My conclusion is that this is completely normal when you are pushing your boundaries, growing, and starting something new! Embrace it!
Is it possible to have a plan when in entrepreneurship?
Kylie noted “I didn’t plan for it as well as I should have. I basically quit my job and decided to go Chic Geek full-time. So I was working on Chic Geek full-time and wasn’t taking a salary. Things were tight in the first year and there was a lot of pressure for me to generate enough funding to pay myself enough the next year.” One thing about Kylie is that she’ll jump on a problem when she sees one and is eager to find a solution. And in the end, it worked-out! Entrepreneurship is full of risks, so at some point you do have to make the leap.
When do you scale?
Currently Chic Geek is based in Calgary and they have considered expanding but have held back because they want to nail it before they scale it. They’ve already doubled the number of volunteers each year.
Shadow values: challenges and benefits of being a non-profit
Kylie considers Chic Geek a hybrid between a traditional non-profit and a start-up. She chose to go the non-profit route because she didn’t see other examples with similar business models and she had some insecurities around whether people would really pay for their services.
She also mentioned this idea of Shadow values: when something is good there is always a shadow to it. One example is that Chic Geek is built on volunteer power. She noted the volunteers are the most passionate and wonderful men and women that she has had the pleasure to work with. On the flip side, Kylie noted that “we are doing our operations with people that might have 10-20% of time capacity to give. We do a great job with working with that, but the bigger question is around how we can engage and motivate and give back and support these people that are helping us out.”
There are different forms of mentorship
For Kylie, she has had a lot of mentors. She has coaches in a paid capacity that help her out with personal development. She also has experts in the community that she can reach-out to when she’s in a situation where she has no idea what to do. She also has a peer group of other leaders of non-profits that she can always reach-out to.
When you get busy, it is easy to have this “tunnel vision” and focus on nothing else but one thing and community might be one thing that drops off the priority list. Remember, community is important! Kylie noted that you need to strike a balance between treating yourself as an individual and moving the business forward.
Learning about yourself will help you be a better leader
For Kylie, an aha moment she’s had has been to recognize emotional triggers that cause her to react in ways she may want to change in the future. Once you can recognize these triggers, you can set boundaries for yourself. For Kylie, that means setting boundaries around her time. One way she does this is by setting an email auto-responder to notify everyone that she will check emails twice a day. This helps her act in the best way even in the toughest moments.
Culture at Chic Geek
For Chic Geek, culture is important because the volunteers choose to be there. It’s important how they are treated as its what brings them back. The team is highly remote, which adds a level of complexity to building culture. Therefore, Chic Geeks core values are incredibly important and are reinforced by starting every meeting with value stories, which solidifies the culture Kylie is trying to achieve and helps the team get to know each other better.
Get to know Kylie:
Something nerdy: “I love organizing, sorting, making things look neat and tidy. I ordered myself a bunch of sink organizers for Christmas and when they came I almost started crying. I was so excited.”
If she wrote a book, she would call it: Quitting my job at the height of a recession was the best decision of my life.
Books that have inspired Kylie:
Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown
Give and Take by Adam Grant
Advice for budding entrepreneurs…
One of Kylie’s biggest learnings has been to lead with vulnerability. Reading Brene Brown’s Power of Vulnerability was lifechanging for her because she realised she didn’t need to have all the answers and she didn’t need to be indestructible as an entrepreneur and leader. She could accept and share the things that she struggles with, which rallies people around to support.
Thank you for sharing Kylie! If you are in the Calgary area and would like to learn more about Chic Geek’s events, please visit their website. Feel free to reach-out to me if you have any questions!
“In the end, if you are in the pursuit of something meaningful it is all worth it ”
