Executing Victory

Posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013


You’ll have to pardon my arrogance, seeing as we hardly know each other, but I’m going to make some assumptions about you dear reader. I’m going to assume you’re either interested or involved in the Algonquin College community in some way, seeing as you’re currently on the website. I’m going to assume that you have a particular skill set that has drawn you to post secondary education (and the Office of Applied Research and Innovation specifically), which is great. Whether that skill set is technical, design, or humanities based is inconsequential, you still have it, and that is fantastic. Finally, I’m going to assume you have an idea. Again, it doesn’t matter what kind of idea it is, the fact that you have one is awesome. But would you like to know a secret? I know how much your idea is worth: absolutely nothing.

My name is Alex Mahon and I’m Student Entrepreneurship Coordinator with the Office of Applied Research and Innovation here at Algonquin College. Along with being tasked with the creation and development of an entrepreneurial culture at the College, my job demands that I be a realist. People speak of “million dollar ideas” all the time, and some people even write them down in notebooks that gather dust on a shelf in their office somewhere, but the thing they fail to realize is there are no “million dollar ideas”; there are million (and billion) dollar executions, and until your product or service or establishment or book or piece of art or wedding proposal transitions from idea to execution, it is worth less than the napkin you wrote it on.

Now I’m a realist, and realists are often confused with pessimists, but there is a clear distinction between the two. Pessimists never believe an idea will work; “that will never work”, “the competition is too fierce”, “you’ll go bankrupt” they’ll chant when you tell them about your business. Realists on the other hand will look at a plan to sell ice cubes to the citizens of Nunavut for $100 a cube and will ask “is there a market and a customer willing to pay that?” If the answer is yes, and supported by facts, that realist will book your ticket to Iqaluit for you.

Now let’s get to the good stuff; working at Algonquin College and being a realist has been a real pleasure. Why you ask? Because the vast majority of student and early stage entrepreneurs I’ve worked with are execution-oriented. Thanks Karma! Rarely have I met with someone who hasn’t done extensive market research, prototyped the design of their product, or developed a realistic plan to get a minimum viable product to market in the shortest amount of time possible (as my boss Dr. Mark Hoddenbagh so often says, “the biggest cost to a business is time to market”, and I couldn’t agree more). The students and staff at Algonquin are embracing this concept wholeheartedly.

I’m long winded and I apologize for that as no one likes an overly wordy author, but allow me to close with this; our work developing Algonquin College into the most dynamic and supportive entrepreneurial college in Canada has just begun. That being said, with the combined support of the many faculties at the school, the Algonquin College Student Association, the Board of Governors, and the College community as a whole, we will continue to rapidly develop into the foremost destination for entrepreneurially minded students in Ottawa, in Ontario, and in Canada. The mission is simple to state yet overwhelmingly difficult to succeed at: “help entrepreneurs execute”. And we will be victorious.

-Alexander Mahon
Student Entrepreneurship Coordinator

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