I almost missed it.

Last week, at 9 p.m. on September 11th, I brought my daughter to bed when I realized – it was a better birthday of lemonade stand.

12 years old.

September 11th is actually the anniversary of many major events in my life, both good and bad.

Exactly a year earlier on September 11, 2011, I was released from my first career from college and a number of events that have dictated my life since then.

The layoffs

I was in Vancouver, Canada, and for 5 years I had been working for a local chain of entertainment complexes (similar to Dave & Buster) and Golf & Country Clubs.

I quickly made my way into the chain and directed marketing and operations for several locations with a few hundred employees.

In the years in which I was there, however, we were confronted with increasing financial pressure.

The owner was a recessed rich man who bought up the rich man (country clubs) and overturned himself.

By 2010, the financial pressure of his purchases became too much. The owner commissioned the company’s vice president considerably, and it was decided that this cost reduction would mainly come from layoffs.

The Vice President typed me to help with the layoffs.

Mind you, I was incredibly young at that time and had no idea what I was really doing, but the Vice President was also a mentor for me, and this was his way of throwing myself into the fire and giving myself a real business experience that I would probably never experience.

And so it started – a slaughter festival.

We started to take dozens of employees, starting with junior positions and quickly to leadership departments – management, operation, accounting and marketing.

I didn’t have a say in who was cut, but here I was a 25-year-old child my age that they were released.

Fear and guilt consumed me in every conversation.

The process was not quick either. When the owner was exposed to more and more financial pressure, the cuts took months.

When they went on the premises, they wondered what everyone thought about them. When they talked to you, they only acted particularly nicely because they were afraid for their job?

Spoiler alarm, they were.

At some point, both the VP and me asked whether we should eat in our own restaurant facilities for fear of being poisoned.

When we slowly came at the end of all cuts that we could do without completely closing the shops, I felt restless and mostly defeated by experience. We were a company with Barebones employees, nerve employees, a reduced brand and products and the continuing financial pressure.

The turning point

Then one evening I received the text from the VP, which I immediately knew that he would change my life: “Biz Innovates, can we meet tomorrow?”

It was my turn.

The next day, September 11, 2011, I met with the VP to get a foretaste of the same drug that I had passed on to over 100 others in the months before.

Although I can’t say that I was happy, it felt like a final end of a very interesting chapter and a few months in my life.

A new way

In the weeks after the release, I bought Tim Ferriss’s 4 -hour working week, which triggered the next chapter in my life.

I read the book cover on a few nights and remember that this was my future.

I wanted to build my own business and be responsible for my own fate.

Inspired by the book, I spent the next year to build small E -Commerce companies -to learn how to select winning products, negotiate with suppliers in China, import products in Canada, build an online shop and set up online marketing.

The birth of Biz Innovates

Ironically, it was registered exactly a year later, on September 11, 2012, Abetterlemonadestand.com – mainly as a space to distill my thoughts, ideas and experiences in E -Commerce.

It is wild that the only decision to write about my thoughts and experiences would change the course of my life.

Just a year and a half after I started blogging, Biz Innovates made the attention of Shopify, and I joined the growth team, expanding the shopify blog from 200,000 to 2 million visitors during my tenure and experiencing the unique opportunity to take part in a tech exchange.

As much as I loved Shopify, the product and the people with whom I loved, I only left Shopify a year and a half later to pursue entrepreneurship all day and continue to pag my own way.

From defeat to determination

September 11th has always been a symbolic day for me – a day with great losses and even bigger beginnings. From the loss of my job and the question of questioning my purpose, to Biz Innovates and again my passion, every September 11th gripped me closer to what I should be.

It is a memory that success does not come without setbacks. In fact, these setbacks give the heights their importance.

For me it was never just about building business – it is about building me through the shops that I create, the risks that I take, the lessons that I learn and who I am on the way.

In the past ten years I have survived storms that tested my resistance and experienced heights that I have never imagined. But one constant through everything? My commitment to growth. Regardless of whether I help someone to launch their first product, navigate new digital landscapes or create a space in which co -entrepreneurs can thrive, I was always driven by the desire to create something larger than myself.

And that’s why I’m still here after all this time. I still create. I am still learning. And I still appear for this next chapter 12 years later.