WE-CAN: Making the Leap from Hobby to Business

About this Event

What's the difference between launching a passion project as a hobby or a side hustle versus launching a revenue-generating business?

This virtual session provides an honest look at some of the tactical and practical elements of starting a business from someone who’s been there, done that.

In this 90-minute workshop, presenter Dr. Lindy Ledohowski of the EdTech startup, EssayJack will share her story of quitting her job as an English professor and starting an online SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for academic writing

Can you start a business with no formal business training? You sure can! Can you start an online business if you're not a tech person or developer? Why not?

In this session, you'll gain a high-level overview of the nuts and bolts of starting a business from digital marketing and building your social media presence to strategies for online engagement and finding freelance/contract workers to fill in the gaps for you.

We hope to see you there!

NOTE: A Zoom link to the session will be emailed to attendees 2 days prior to the event.

The WE-CAN Project is committed to providing universal access to all our events. Please contact Kerry Ramsay at kerry.ramsay@queensu.ca if you have accessibility requirements as soon as possible as advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Register on Eventbrite!

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:

Dr. Lindy Ledohowski has a First Class Honours degree in English from the University of Manitoba, a B.Ed., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She was a high school English teacher and then English professor before quitting her tenure track job and cofounding EssayJack Inc. (Sept 2021 edit: EssayJack has been purchased by Wize).

She served two terms on the Board of Trustees for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and is a published scholar of English-language Canadian literature, winning the nation-wide Kobzar Book Prize in 2018 for Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home, a book she co-edited for the University of Toronto Press.

Since starting EssayJack, she has won awards for entrepreneurship and served as a mentor for SheEO and the Laurier Women Entrepreneurship Center. EssayJack is a patented, award-winning educational platform that is used by schools, colleges, and universities in Canada and abroad and has individual subscribers who sign up monthly or yearly. It standardizes the approach to teaching academic writing, helping students to get better grades and increased confidence.

ABOUT THE WE-CAN PROJECT:

The WE-CAN Project is led by Queen’s University and supported by the Government of Canada. Its mission is to inspire and empower existing and aspiring women entrepreneurs by providing them with tools, resources, expert mentors, networks and community building to expand existing businesses and to launch new ventures.

The Government of Canada, through FedDev Ontario’s Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES) Ecosystem Fund is providing $3.2 million for Queen’s University to design and deliver programs and services to accelerate, train, mentor and provide resources to women entrepreneurs and women-led companies in the community.

The focus of the WES strategy is to provide support to women entrepreneurs from diverse and underrepresented groups.