Chief Change Officer - Finish Strong: Canadian Bulldog Holly Bond’s Journey from Starting Late to Graduating Great

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Would you keep pushing for a university degree if it took you four times as long to finish? Holly did. It took her 17 years to achieve her university degree because it was her dream. Her life motto: Always finish what you start. It’s never too late to reach the finish line. Join us as we delve into the extraordinary story of Holly Bond, a remarkable Canadian entrepreneur and president of a headhunting firm. From motherhood to building a successful franchise and eventually transitioning into the headhunting business, Holly’s journey is truly inspirational. Episode Breakdown: 00:33—Holly Unplugged: Dive into the life of a Halifax local juggling degrees, diapers, and dumbbells. 12:56—Tick-Tock Motivation: Holly shares the poignant reason she pushes so hard: “My mother died at the same age I am now. I have so many things I want to do. I’m afraid of one day dying or reaching 85 and regretting not trying today.” 16:50—Franchise Fever: From a concerned mom to an international franchise sensation overnight. It all started when Holly’s son was 13 and overweight. After a TV interview, she received 103 emails from around the world inquiring about franchising. 25:40—The Humble Entrepreneur: “Don’t let your ego get inflated and always listen to genuine advice from people who care about you.” Holly reflects on how she nearly lost everything—both personally and professionally—without this mindset. Connect with Us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Holly Bond Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. We are a modernist community for progressive minds around the world. I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Today's guest is our first ever from Canada, Holly Bond. I used to live in Calgary, Alberta, and Toronto, Ontario, in Canada. Talking to Holly really brings back memories of my adolescence and college days in Canada. Holly is special in my eyes. Why? She's now the president of a headhunting firm.

I'll be honest, in my career so far, I haven't worked well with headhunters. I've mostly landed jobs through networking. But something on Holly's LinkedIn profile and her company's website caught my eye. It said, we are a talent management and development firm with unshakable belief that change is a good thing. I was skeptical at first. It could just be empty words. But then I dug deeper and discovered that Holly had built a very successful franchise business from the ground up before moving into the headhunting business. From that moment, I knew Holly truly believes that change is a good thing. She has mastered turning chain to her advantage, making her a natural fit for my show. After two months of emails back and forth, I finally convinced her to come on board.

We did a 70-minute interview, which I've decided to break down into two parts. In part one, this episode, we'll hear Holly's story of being a mother of two and taking 17 years to earn her college degree, all while starting and building a fitness business that turned into a successful franchise. In part two, Holly will share why she entered the headhunting business and her human-first approach to serving not only her corporate clients, but also the candidates themselves. I'm speaking to you from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada. The population of Halifax is about 500,000 and growing rapidly.

The population of our province is about 1.1 million. So not a lot of people here, but as I've grown through the years, the population has significantly increased. We're in a boom right now. So I was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I've spent my entire life on the east coast of Canada. And I absolutely love it. I've traveled many places in the world and I love and I'm always excited to come back home. So interesting when I go back to, and I'll go back to the very beginning of when I was growing up, it was interesting because I have five brothers and sisters, and education wasn't a priority in our, as growing up, you were

probably going to go to trade school, as we called it, and now it's community college referred to, but trade school, and become a secretary or a hairdresser or one of those careers, which is wonderful, but it wasn't for me. So I was more the black sheep of the family. And I fought to talk my parents into helping me go to university. And I did go and I took two years. So I had a sort of business certificate. And then I left and I moved to another province. I got married and I had two children. And it always bothered me that I didn't finish my degree. It's something that always stuck out to me.

And that was before the internet. We're talking 80s, early 90s. After my daughter was born in 1992, we moved back to Halifax and I went over to my university that I had my certificate from and I talked to my dean. And just a few years before that, I was this mouthy, overconfident young person. And then I arrived in the dean's office with my two children. One was two years old and one was in a baby carrier. And she laughed and she said, I will help you. And it was really difficult, I have to say, because I was reading children's books. I was focusing on being a homemaker. And so I finished my degree. And from the time I

started, and I think this is really important, from the time I started my degree to the time I finished and I got my certificate and it was handed to me, it was 17 years. I make jokes about it now. I said it took me 17 years because a lot of times having a new family and one person in the family was the income earner. Sometimes we didn't have money for me to take one course. So I was taking one course at a time. I knew one day I would get there. So when I look over my left shoulder in my office, my home office, I have my diploma on the wall.

And it's from 2003. And my kids, my husband intercepted it. It came in the mail. And he had it matted and framed. And on the mat, my kids wrote, my daughter wrote, congratulations, mom, I love you. And then my son wrote, we are very proud of you. You're the bomb. And so that is so meaningful to me because I wanted to show them that it's never too late to finish what you started. And that's how I brought them up. You always finish what you start. It doesn't matter if you're taking violin lessons or you are taekwondo, you have to finish the semester.

You can leave, but you have to finish what you start and then continue on. When I started my career, now when I, my whole theme, and I think the theme for the show is change is good. And it's the only thing of course that you can expect in life is that we're going to have changed. When you learn to embrace it, this journey that we're on becomes so much more exciting and so much more relevant and beautiful. And so I've changed my career often. So I went from being a homemaker to working part-time retail to being retail manager. I really love sales, but I don't want to wait for people to walk in. I want to sell. So I thought,

so I looked at all the jobs in the newspaper and I didn't have my degree that prevented me from applying for many jobs, which today when I'm looking at resumes, I keep that in mind because there are some people that do not have the MBA, the PhD, even a degree that are fantastic and we cannot overlook that. And that's one have the MBA, the PhD, even a degree that are fantastic.

And we cannot overlook that. And that's one of the things with AI that we'll talk about later. So because I never let that stop me. I never let it stop me from moving ahead in life. So I took the first outside sales job that someone would hire me. And that was with waste management. Selling large garbage containers from behind shopping malls. I thought I'm going to do two years and have a proven sales track record.

And then I'm going to use that as a springboard to get into a better career. So I was very successful at that. And one day I was sitting in my car, probably in the back of a shopping mall by a garbage can. And my phone rang and it was this man. And he said, you don't know me. I'm a headhunter and I work at this firm. And I am wondering, someone gave me your name and they said that you might be able to connect me with somebody in the waste industry that would be suitable for handling pulp and paper waste from these pulp and paper manufacturing plants. And I said, I could do that. I didn't know what a headhunter was. I didn't know what a recruiter was. I went to see him. I interviewed for the role. And as I went through the process,

I was infatuated with this. So I was offered the job, which was very exciting because it was an excellent sales job, you know, where I got to travel and I would have my own F-150 truck. I like it. This is it. I've made it big time. So, but I said, I told the recruiter who owned the company, I don't want to do that. I want to do this. I want to do what you're doing. I find it fascinating and I love connecting people so can I work with you so I started to talk to him and interview with him and then he wanted to hire me and I thought wait now if I look around at the other recruiters who's what company is the best recruitment company here and there was only a few and I said I'm going to use his job offer and go to them and say look I

can work with you or I can work against you and be your competitor. So that landed me in a recruiting job in 2000. I did that for three years and there was so much that I loved about it, helping people. And I have stories about people crying in my office because it's your career is who you are. It's what you do. And when you're not where you want to be, I want to help people change the trajectory of their life is what I feel a good recruiter can do. So when I was a recruiter, at that time, my father was ill. He was dying of cancer. And it put everything in perspective.

So I thought, I wish I had gone into the healthcare industry. And I thought that if I went to pharmaceutical and I used my sales experience in the pharmaceutical industry, that it would somehow, I don't know, help my father, help sick people. I don't know what I was thinking, actually. And so I did. I headhunted myself to a pharmaceutical company. And while I was there, that is when I read the first really big study about youth inactivity and obesity in North America. I remember where I was sitting when I read it. It was in the New England Journal of Medicine. I read that. I can see the picture on the front cover. It changed my life. I looked at that and I said, this is a pandemic. Over 50% of our kids are obese and 80 to 90% of them are not getting enough exercise, which to me is all, right?

So that was what I was meant to do. And I was a personal fitness trainer and I love to exercise. And I thought I'm going to start a gym. I didn't think I was going to start a franchise. I just wanted to have a gym that helped kids get fit. That was a crazy ride. So I ended up selling that company, moving on to Bullfrog Power, and spent nine years in renewable energy, helping, really helping to save the planet. And using my sales abilities and my connecting abilities, my networking and my leadership skills to put together the team across Canada that could help combat climate change.

And then I left there. I thought, oh, I'm 50 now. I'm going to retire. And then the Halpax Partnership reached out and said, would you like to help sell the city? And that, to me, was probably one of the best things I've ever done in my life. Your job is really bragging about that you live in the best place in the world and that companies should expand here. That was unbelievable. And you can see that I went from retail to outside sales to pharmaceutical to owning my own business. I changed to economic development. And then the

next step, COVID hit and everything was grounded. I couldn't fly to other countries and tell them that they needed to take a look at Halifax. So I became a little antsy, a little bit bored. And then a startup called me and asked me if I could work with them on a contract position for the chief strategy officer. And I love to build. So I helped them build and I helped them get their Series A. And then that's when, where I'm at now, the parent company, Royer Thompson, they wanted to expand their business. And they asked me if I would open a new division and run with it. They didn't know what it would be called, what kind of sectors they would be looking at.

They just said, you do it, you build it, which I love. And so that's where I'm at now. So that is my path. I'm married. My name is Holly Bond. I'm married to James Bond. And people all say, yeah, my name is Holly Bond. And they say, oh, how's James? And they laugh when they don't know if they're really making a joke

or if they actually know, or if they know James. And I have two incredible children, brilliant. My son, Matthew, he's in the ocean sector and he lives in Houston, Texas. And my daughter Rachel is in business development and in environmental engineering technology. She lives here in Halifax. So here we are. So your husband's name is actually James Bond? Yes, yes, it is. Oh, wow, yes. I swear I did not know about this piece of information until now. What an honor to interview the wife of James Bond. Today, we all talk about purpose and making an impact. But when you were younger, in the 80s and 90s, it was all about making money and raising a family.

You know, the American dream, or in your case, the Canadian dream, owning a house and all that. Looking back at your case, the Canadian dream, owning a house and all that. Looking back at your career, have you identified any particular drivers or motivations behind every move you've made so far? It's so interesting that you say that. I had this very conversation over dinner last night. And as I'm getting older and I think of what do I want to do next? And my son, I was talking to him last week, and he said, I was talking to him about what am I going to do next?

And he said, Mom, why can't you just enjoy life, right? You're almost 60. Why don't take time for yourself and enjoy life? And what drives you? Why do you keep having to conquer something else, move, conquer? And I've been thinking about that for a week now, and I had this conversation last night. And I don't know, Vince, I don't know if it comes from when I was young and grandmother was an entrepreneur. She owned nursing homes, seniors residences. And she told me the stories where she had $11 and arrived in Nova Scotia and started off with a little corner shop.

And then she saved the money and then she kept buying buildings and creating nursing homes. And I always thought that was amazing. But I think, I don't know what, I feel like I have to prove something that I can do it. And I think it's be, I think it might be because I did not, when I went back to university, when all of my other friends graduated, moved away, we called it the brain drain. Okay. And in the late eighties and early nineties, people were leaving Nova Scotia and they were emigrating to other parts of Canada and around the world. And our population was declining here.

And I think I didn't have my degree. And in a dinner conversation, when you meet somebody, they go, oh, Holly, what do you do? That always caused me anxiety. Oh, I'm a homemaker. I left university. I have my certificate. What do you do? Oh, I have my MBA.

I'm living in Paris or Hong Kong or Florida. And this is what I'm doing. And so I felt everybody was moving ahead of me. I always had this feeling like I had to run to catch up. And I think it might still be with me. I feel like there's so many things that I want to do. There's so many different sectors that are so incredibly interesting to me. And maybe it's because I'm attention deficit. That could be a two. Who knows? But I just know there's so many interesting things to do and I want to try everything. And I don't want to be 85 and look back and say, I wish I did that. And the other

thing that I think has just been recently, my family has told me this. My mother died a couple of days before my 30th birthday, which also happens to be Christmas. And she was my age when she died. I think through the last 10 years, especially, I feel like that date of that she was like 57, I think that it was almost subconsciously, what if I only have till 57? What do I want to do? And I think it's been driving me. And now I'm here. Who knows?

Maybe I will realize that I don't have to continue to race. You must be really proud of yourself, of what you've achieved with Bulldog Interactive Fitness. Can you share with us the humble beginnings of starting this business? I remember you mentioned that it all began with the idea of a gym. Tell us about your journey, not just the successes, but also the ups and downs, the challenges. More importantly, how did you learn from those challenges? How did they help propel you forward and sustain you all the way to the finish line? Yes, and success is a fleeting kind of moment, right? It's all the other things that people look at, and that was a relatively small company, but people look at very successful business owners and they don't realize that the turmoil and the pain and the sacrifice that they went through, they just see the success.

And they go, oh, look how easy that was. But a while back I said, I read this study in the journal and I took that study home and I showed it to my husband. And I said, listen to this. Oh, my gosh. And he said, I said, over 50% of kids are obese or overweight. And he said, yeah, Matthew, our son. And I said, what? And he goes, Matthew, he's, and I could tell by the look on his face, he realized he had said something really rough. And he said, like Matthew. I said, Matthew's not overweight. Matthew's 13 years old. He still has baby fat. He hasn't gone through his growth spurt. He's not fat. And then I was very angry at him. And I called my best friend. And I was talking to her.

And she said, what's up? And I said, do you think Matthew's fat? And there was a pause on the line. And she said, do you want the best friend answer? Or do you want the real answer? And I said, oh my God, the real answer. And she goes, yes, he's overweight. I said, he hasn't gone through his growth spurt. Like he's 13. He still has some baby fat.

And she said, there is no time in any child's life that they should be overweight. And that's all she said. And then I hung up the phone. I felt like people were keeping this secret from me. It was a very odd feeling. And then I looked at a picture on the wall and it was Matthew standing there, the sweetest face. And he had, he was wearing a short sleeved cotton shirt and the stripes were vertical. And, but they were, you know, when you draw a pumpkin and you draw the lines so they curve, they're not vertical. And it was like a brick, someone hitting me in the head with

a brick. I just saw him as being overweight then. I saw it too. And so I went to him and I said, hey bud, that's what we say over here in Canada, everybody's bud or buddy. You know, I said, hey bud, I think we've got like a little bit of an issue. That's all I said. I didn't tell him what it was. And he goes, yeah, I know. And I said, what do you know? And he goes, I'm overweight. And I said, we had moved into a new house and we had a really nice lower level of the house. And I said, you know what? I wanted to put in the gym. So I said, do you want to help me? And he said, yeah. And of course, little fat kids, they have little fat friends. All our friends were overweight too. They were all over. And now I wasn't going to open it. I had no idea that I was opening Bulldog at this time, but they were over eating pizza and playing video games. There you go. And I said,

I'm putting gym equipment in the basement. And course, they watched Bowflex commercials too, so even 13-year-old boys want to look like the people on TV. I said, what should I put there? They were talking, and I said, it would make exercise more fun. Then Matthew said, if we could play video games. When he said that, I nearly fell off my chair, and I said, of course, we will have a gym, and we will integrate video games into the exercise equipment. And that will be the draw. So I, husband James,

always encouraging. And that is a key when you want to change, when you want any kind of change, it doesn't matter what it is. To have somebody in your corner that is rooting for you and the sounding board is very key and i've always had people in my life like that and my husband james he was amazing he said if you want to do this we'll do this so we had focus groups in our basement with all these kids and we were taping sony play PlayStation remote controls onto the bars of the bikes because the equipment didn't even exist. And so we had this prototype and then we thought, OK, let's do it. Here's lesson number one. Make sure you have enough money to open your business. And then my husband said, I'll give you $10,000. And we met a gentleman who helped us source and create the equipment that would, like, exercise bikes that were fed through Sony PlayStation and so much other equipment that were, and this is going back to 2004. So it has come a long way. But the three of us started this company.

We opened it in Halifax. It had never been done before. There was no other gym in North America. Or I had calls from Dubai, Singapore, all over the world. People wanted these franchises. So this was just one gym. That's all I was going to do. And didn't have enough money.

I was running it. I was there night and day. There I was at the club in the day. And in the evenings, I was working on programming. And then I also didn't have a marketing or PR person. So I started calling all the radio and the local TV stations. They came to the club and I said, you have to come here. It's really amazing. They'll come if you have something interesting for them.

So I called the National News and they interviewed me on CTV National News. And I said during the interview that I was creating a franchise. Now, I didn't even have an application. I'm not kidding. I had nothing. I don't even know that's lesson number two. You just don't do that. So I said, we're franchising.

Now, that was a Saturday. On Sunday, you know, on Canadian news, it loops every half hour. So it's looping. So the story is playing over and over all day. When I got home at the end of the evening, I opened up my laptop and I'll never forget. I looked down and said, you have 103 emails. And my first instinct was spam. Oh my goodness. And I opened it up and it was 101 people wanting a franchise and a lawyer and a marketing company. The lawyer said, I can help you franchise. The marketing company said, we can help do your marketing.

I hired both of those companies. They flew down and met with me. I reached out to every one of those 101 people and I said, I will get an application form to you. And then I had to get an application form to you. And then I had to create an application form, and I went on to an international franchise company that already exists, and I looked at their franchise form, and I tweaked that, and I sent it out to 101 people.

And that's how we started. We sold 11 franchises in a matter of two years. We won awards. It was fantastic. It was Canada and Nova Scotia. There was so many funding opportunities because they were trying to small businesses grow. And then a company, it's called Wildbrain now, listeners would know them as the people who own animated shows. They have a very large library of animated shows

like Animal Mechanicals and Dora the Explorer. And they own Charlie Brown Peanuts, those cartoons. So they saw a real connection with making exercise fun for children. And one of their shows that they had for kids where this animated character had a bracelet. And every time, you know, the animated character would tell kids, jump up and down, jump up and down. And her bracelet would flash on and off. And they thought, what if we sold those bracelets? What if we created this in the Bulldog Interactive Fitness Clubs? And so this is the collaboration that we were going to do. So

we sold it. And then we hit a really bad economic turndown of 2009, the recession hit and they pulled back from any more investment in any new, new opportunities. So it was, they just shuttered it, but it was absolutely, I've learned so much from that. It was the most difficult thing ever. And now I help companies. I help people who want to start their own business. I help people who want to franchise their business. I tell them all the negative things because everybody can imagine the great things about it. Everybody has their head in the clouds and they're like, I want to do this. And I tell them all the really hard stuff. And if they come back to me, then I help them.

But most of them do not. Most people do not come back to me. As you describe your experience, it sounds almost magical. You landed that TV interview, and the next day, you received over 100 emails. Now, while that's absolutely amazing, I'm really curious about the flip side. Looking back, what was the most challenging moment for you along this journey? Cast law was always an issue. So if you're well-funded, you take that constant worry and stress out of the way. You know what I learned?

I learned two hard things. One was really, take it to this day, and I'm a mentor for business owners, and sometimes I see this quality, and I always talk to them about it. We had a board of 16 advisors and shareholders. There were 16 shareholders. At one point, we had an individual who wanted to become a major partner and grow this in Toronto. They wanted to have the head office in Toronto, and they wanted to have 50% of the company. I was told by my shareholders, they were advising me not to move forward with this person. They didn't get a good sense from them. But I was so excited about the growth of the company that I was ignoring advice. And of course, it's the,

oh, Holly Bond is the top seven people to watch in 2007. And, you know, the Export Achievement Award. So all the accolades, all the awards, always in the news, always in the news. And so it went to, it started to go to, it grew my confidence and then my confidence became overinflated. And I looked at my shareholders at times as though they didn't know what they were talking about when they all were extremely successful, tenured entrepreneurs. And I look back at me, I look back at the person I was at that time,

and I wish I could sit there or I wish somebody had sat me down and said, look, I understand you're excited. I understand you have people all over the world who want these, but you need to listen to what we're saying and you need to follow our advice. We can tell that you're going to, we see that you're going to fall in this hole and you're not going to, and we're not going to be able to help you once you are down that hole. It was just

the last minute and the last hour that I grabbed their hand and they pulled me out, then I realized it was like I woke up and I realized how we would have lost everything. And I mean everything personal, business, because this individual was, ended up going to jail. Like it was like a soap opera. It was like a crazy story. But it's listen to people's advice. Listen to people that care about you that have done this before. And that's what they're there for. Right. And so that was definitely one piece of advice. And the other came from an incredible person. She's my mentor. Her name is Pernilla Fisher-Bolter. She's from Denmark and she owns a company called Kisrop International Trade Roots. She is a global connector.

She is a powerhouse. Amazing. And I said to her, and she also was in my corner the entire time, and I leaned on her and I continue this day to run things by her. She mentioned, are you going to sell the company? And I said, oh, I don't want to sell the company. It's my baby. She cut me off and she said, this is not a baby. This is a calf that you fatten and you slaughter it. And then it allows you to go off

and do something else. But do not look at your business like it's your baby. And that was like, she slapped me across the face. It was a really great learning exercise for me. Now, some people will say, you wish you didn't say we're franchising when you didn't have a manual, you didn't have a lawyer, you didn't have, you had, you didn't even have an application form for a franchise, nothing, you had nothing. It probably was. If I wouldn't have changed it, I would do the same thing again, but I wouldn't counsel people to do it. I would say, get your stuff in order and then do it. But because I was pushed into it, I was forced to.

I don't know if I would have done that. Maybe I would have talked myself out of it or let someone else talk me out of it. But sometimes you have to be on the edge of the diving board and you need to jump and take that risk and do that, have that scary change, right? And so you fail. But at least you've tried it. And you're not looking back when you're 85 years old and saying, you know, what if I had franchised that?

Because I see another company that did it. I could have done that. I don't want to be, and I think that's what drives me. I don't want to be, I could have done that. Then do it. Apply for that job that you're not, you don't have the, all the qualifications. Apply for it anyway. What harm could it...

You will meet that recruiter that will look at what you've done. If they're really good at what they do, they will look and they will see how you are aligned and they will reach down and grab your hand and pull you out. It just follows me through everything I do. In this part one of our interview, you just heard Holly's story of being a mother of two and taking 17 years to earn her college degree, all while starting and building a fitness business that turned into a successful franchise.

In the next episode, part two of our interview, Holly will share why she entered the headhunting business and her human-first approach to serving not only her corporate clients, but also the candidates themselves. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me

on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.