James Nunn, ICT team director, Kinross+Render Public Relations

“Glyn was a trusted member of my team and a completely reliable second-in-command. His attention to detail is second to none and as a result he proved a fantastic project manager as well as guaranteeing that nothing could slip, neither deadlines nor budgets. He has writing flair and a creative attitude but most importantly his management and people skills were exemplary. He can communicate at both senior and junior levels with equal skill and grace. He's also capable of making the hard calls and difficult judgments. All in all, I would have no hesitation in recommending him to anyone. If he was living in Amsterdam, I wouldn't be writing this.”

Looking for Glyn's resume?

You can find a palatable summary of Glyn's career highlights and other attributes here:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/glyn-davies/4/80/298

Dead Lucrative

Written for Fuel Inc. magazine, July 2009.
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Dead Lucrative
You’ll see dead people – lots of ‘em. Who knew it paid though?

I know, I know - hanging out with the folks and their friends is already bad enough, so why on Earth would you want to hang out with cadavers for a job? But that’s the point. If we were all squeamish then we’d have no paramedics, tattoo artists, midwives, and certainly no funeral directors. In the words of Monty Python, you need to “Always look on the bright side of life”.

Well…death, that is.

The good news is that if you can keep your breakfast waffles down, stay at college for 2-4 years, and resist the urge to say, “Why so serious?” to those in the waiting room of the funeral home you work in, then this is a job that can easily be done. The better news is that the average starting salary in Canada for a funeral director is more than $40,000, rising by approximately $1,000 before tax for every year you stick at it. Perhaps the best news is that they’ll always, always be new business. The Darwin Awards suggest that there’s plenty of people falling off motorcycles, launching fireworks out of their butt crack, or trying to juggle flaming sticks of dynamite just to get onto TV. You’ll never have to wait long for your next customer. It might even be Johnny Knoxville.

Career constipation? You wouldn’t be the first.

Written for Fuel Inc. magazine, July 2009.

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Career constipation? You wouldn’t be the first.

Take two careers gurus, and three career-changing entrepreneurs for fast and satisfying relief.

The five professionals keeping your career ‘regular’:

1. Karen Dowell – life coach, uses lateral thinking and counselling to identify people’s career goals and ideal work/life balance – aspirations@sympatico.ca
2. Monica Graves – Canada Post cubicle-worker turned jewellery design business-owner, a person following their career dream – http://www.glamjulz.com/contact/#staff
3. Ed Lucas – the hardcore entrepreneur, creating an aviation security firm after 9/11 and a solar & wind power company in response to social attitude change – http://www.tswp.ca
4. Theresa MacDonnell – from uni to Whistler to sandwich shops to the cutting edge of social marketing, constantly remoulds her role to keep it fresh - http://www.empirical.com/about/about.php
5. Doug Schmidt – professional careers counsellor, using comprehensive personality testing to match the individual’s core values and beliefs to their job and work environment - http://www.careersplusinc.com/about_doug.htm

“You get into the elevator on the 20th floor, running into an old friend who mentions they’re considering a career change. What do you tell them in 20 stories?”

That’s the first question I asked them all. Monica Graves reflected, “It’s the scariest decision you’ll ever make,” but, as Doug Schmidt reassures me, “It’s normal to be fearful, but taking no action is worst of all.” So whether it’s your current career or academic area that feels bloated, don’t leave it too long for a laxative.

The first thing you need to know is what floats your boat? As Ed Lucas says, “It’s not just about money. Before that you need self-satisfaction, room for personal growth, and alignment with whatever it is that you’re doing.” Whatever you decide suits you, don’t settle for less. And if you still can’t put your Dorito-covered finger on it, then as Theresa MacDonnell says, “Think about the best day you ever had at work…then ask why it was the best.”

Feeling grounded yet? Flushed? Don’t worry - people often change careers, their majors, or simply their mind about what’s important to them.

If you’re still choosing subjects then make sure you’re not constrained by circumstances or commitments. As Schmidt says, “Were you under any pressure from parents, peers, or anyone else when you made your career choice?” He adds that the main age group seeking careers consultancy is 25-45, meaning that you, dear reader, are slap-bang in the middle of the consequence-choosing time preceding that. If you’re working but already watching the clock more than porn then that’s bad. “It’s possible you’re under-employed,” explains Dowell. “But if work feels repetitive or you’re being micro-managed then that’s usually a sign.”

Leave it too long to deal with, and you may also find your confidence and self-esteem slipping.

Knowing what you’ll be good at and enjoy is about knowing yourself. The most thorough way is to get yourself tested (see box out) or try, “…tapping into your childhood,” explains Graves. “What was important to you? Who were your role models?” Over time, Lucas advises treating your career like a personal relationship: “Does it feel strong? Is there room to grow?”

Just remember though, as McDonnell says, “Not everyone can have a dream job for life. Over time, you and the world around you will change.” For you, variety might be the most important thing.

Steadddy! Don’t cod liver oil things in the wrong direction:

• Make sure your ideal job will exist long-term.
• Know yourself, your money situation, audience, and what a business plan looks like.
• Surround yourself with supporters, not critics (maybe not in the stall though).
• Remember to thank people for their time, and that, yes, they will check your Facebook page.
• Don’t rush for (even) further education if job experience might…ahem…work best.
• With online resume-style content McDonnell says, “Use STAR as the guide: Situation; Task; Action; Result.”
• Network with friends first, then expand to people already doing your ‘wet dream’ career.
• If applying online, use key words from the job posting in your cover letter and/or resume. You’ll get under the radar of resume-sifting software.

Over-the-counter remedies:

• Know yourself!
• Start testing yourself Schmidt-style.
  
• Read “What Colour Is Your Parachute?”
  
• Read “Zen and the Art of Making A Living.”
• Read “The Unmistakable Touch of Grace.”
  

Farrah Meherali, senior account executive, Kinross + Render

Farrah Meherali, senior account executive, Kinross + Render (worked with Glyn at Kinross + Render Public Relations):

“Glyn is a great guy to have around the office. He's professional, polite and courteous, and always has a kind word to say to people. I very much enjoyed working with Glyn.” 13th July 2009.

Sara Render, Chief Executive, Kinross + Render Public Relations

Sara Render, Chief Executive, Kinross & Render Ltd (managed Glyn at Kinross + Render Public Relations):

“Glyn is intelligent, hard working, highly competent and extremely nice to work with. I have no hesitation in recommending him.” 13th July 2009.

solomag.ca team bio

Published on solomag.ca, June 2009.

Glyn was born in England in 1971, emigrated to Canada in 2005, and has lived in Toronto ever since. His teeth are just fine, thanks for asking. Glyn's background is in communications, with emphasis on public relations and writing. However, having met and worked with JP in a downtown PR agency circa 2007, he decided he'd prefer to write for a living, rather than just being poorly paid to annoy other writers. Witty, analytical, and sometimes purposefully provocative, Glyn currently covers solomag.ca financial beat, taking great pride in striving to make it funny, or at least interesting to read.

Learning to be Income Tax Savvy

Published on solomag.ca, June 2009.

Income tax time came and went and we’re happy to have another year ahead of us before we have to start thinking about it again. Or do we? Perhaps we should be thinking about it in advance so that it isn’t such an odious task. By knowing a few ins and outs, tax time can be a lot less stressful come next spring!

Tax. It’s a horrible word, and mentioning tax returns in front of any Canadian often incurs eye-rolling, tutting, and a resigned sigh about yet another thing on the to-do list. But, imagine if the federal government suddenly ceased referring to “tax returns” and began to use the term, “free money” instead?

As Cleo Hamel, senior tax analyst for H&R Block says cheerfully: “Tax is bad enough, but why would you sit back and give the government more than you have to?”

It seems like a rhetorical, almost condescending question. But I’m more than happy to take that from the woman tasked with reading the federal budget every time the government publishes one.

Hamel’s role at H&R Block is precisely that, and with the ongoing objective of – amongst other things - identifying where and how Canadians can claim for every single tax-deductable cent that’s up for grabs.

So why am I telling you about tax in June? Well, the majority of tax-related consumer stories, published often in March or April, don’t help much. One month’s notice isn’t enough when you realize the scraps of paper you need to find in the next 28 days are on the dresser, in the car, in the closet, in your desk drawer at work, incommunicado, or already long gone to that same parallel universe where missing socks and the cable controller go. And, if the recession already has you shying away from Starbucks in favour of home brew, or considering cutting your own hair, then can you really afford to say ‘no’ to potentially thousands of dollars?

Yes, thousands. “As a rule of thumb, your tax return should always be within $100 either way”, explains Hamel. However, there are specific situations in life that may cause you to be taxed incorrectly, that is to say over-taxed.

That’s right, you could be paying too much right now, as you read this. And you can get it all back.

“The key is to be very thorough,” says Hamel. “There isn’t a solitary, windfall payment available but the Tax Act basically encourages people to take back more in return for claiming more.”

So how do you know whether you’re one of the lucky ones? The cool news is that the majority of people are. Are you working? Saving any money at all? Been ill lately? Got a house or kids? Best of all, have you been spending money moonlighting in your dream job whilst putting in the 9-5 grind in your beige, Dilbert-style cubicle? Then there is money for you.

Check out solomag.ca over the next few issues to for more tips on how to get more and give less. In the meantime, go find yourself an empty shoe box. Don’t have one? Time for a new pair of shoes!

Delightful house built on bedrock of positivity

Do not trust the man whose pay-check depends on you taking his advice. Al Gore said similar during “An Inconvenient Truth” and the same thought occurred to me as I leafed through a discarded ‘dream’ houses and condos supplement on the 506 streetcar towards the East end. Doom and gloom sells newspapers, but here was realtor after realtor, lining up to enthuse about the property market in Toronto. I guess whether you’re a glass half-empty or glass half-full kinda person dictates who you believe – realtor, or politician?

Not much of a choice between them though – a clash of the ‘liar’ titans one might even be tempted to say.

And so a similar clash of the titans between full and empty began. The cynical, jaded writer versus the self-made entrepreneur 10 years his junior. To be honest, I didn’t expect to hear such good news for house music lovers when I interviewed Lindi Delight Masunda. After all, regardless of how hedonistic you might be, are you really going to go out and party if you can’t make the mortgage payment?

However, not content with creating – to my knowledge at least – one of the first deep house-specific nights in downtown Toronto, the entrepreneur described predominantly as “positive” on Facebook hopes to be promoting Canadian DJ talent internationally, to add philanthropy to her already successful “TenaciouSoul” venture, and to launch a website that enables anyone else to do what she’s doing…all before the end of 2009.

In addition to TenaciouSoul, managing Canadian DJs to get them on the global map and out of the Great White North, and teaming up with a selection of womens’ charities, her website is planned to be a proverbial online directory of bartenders, DJs, security staff, sound and lighting technicians, plus whatever else you can think of to throw a mini-rave of your own. Oh – and she’s going to learn to DJ herself too. Well, it is only January I guess, but then this is a 27 year-old who gets fidgety if she’s not doing umpteen things at once. “I need variety,” she grins from the other side of a pint.

I suppose it’s not surprising for someone who graduated in electronics & telecommunications on the West coast, and then turned up as the brains behind TenaciouSoul – which isn’t even her day job – on the East coast some years later. “I believe in fate,” says Masunda. “My last night in Toronto before flying back to Vancouver for good, I walked into a bar and asked the manager there if I could help out. He asked me whether I had bartending experience, I said yes, and that was that. I was working in there the next evening as my empty seat on the plane headed West.”

We’re now six-and-a-half years down the road.

Perhaps that puts Masunda’s ambitions into perspective, although she hasn’t been at the single-handed event management and promotions game for all that time. “I decided in about March 2006 that I wanted to throw parties,” she explains. “I was doing it all myself, which made it hard work but also meant that there was no-one around to tell me I shouldn’t do it, or that I was doing it wrong!” And that’s how it went for a year or two. No qualifications, no training, no sponsorship, no grants, no loans, no counsel, no helpline, nothing: “I’ve learned the hard way over the last two-and-a-half years, but I’ve learned fast too. Now I feel more like I’m coming into my own as a promoter, improving my focus, and – at the same time - getting to know myself better as a woman.”

Masunda steals off to the bathroom mid-interview, giving me time to reflect. She’s confident, yes, but not arrogantly so. She’s decidedly cheerful, and the persistent “positive” description from Facebook is being slowly but surely being put into context. She’s going to be one of those people who makes you feel good after you’ve spoken to them. Maybe that’s why Joel Smye, the owner of ‘Footwork’ on Adelaide West, agreed to let her single-handedly promote a Robsoul Recordings night there. Masunda achieved this with good old-fashioned person-to-person networking, via the DJ Phil Weekes, and proceeded to complete the flyers, promotion, and even the guest list for that evening. Needless to say it was a tremendous success, so successful in fact that Robsoul Recordings retained Masunda’s services for the rest of that month, and their other planned gigs.

She’s back, and a simple question I missed occurs to me: “Why deep house in particular, and why ‘TenaciouSoul’?”

“I have to promote something I’m passionate about,” she smiles. “I live and breathe house music. It’s what I wake up to in the morning, and what I go to bed at night to.”

“I didn’t know what to do about a company name. So, I just made two columns of different words that I wanted the music to feel like. I came up with various combinations before TenaciouSoul, but couldn’t believe my luck when I Google’d it and found the company name wasn’t already registered somewhere.”

What does TenaciouSoul the brand actually mean though? For once, Masunda has trouble articulating: “It’s sexy, sensual, classily-dressed women in afros…” But, there’s more to it than that, as the emphatic feedback on Facebook demonstrates. Were TenaciouSoul the end of a battery then it’d obviously be positive. If a car, then imagine a Volkswagen Beetle with a subtle, stylish paint job, and understated but cool chrome rims. Why? Because – like the DJs and music choices that go into each of the gigs – they’re known globally, vehemently reliable, and potentially iconic. However, whilst the bug would definitely be souped-up, it would still be approachable somehow, most likely packed with 20 and 30-somethings, picking up willing hitch-hikers to take them to a festival somewhere. Most of all, there would be no tinted windows. There’s nothing aloof about Masunda or the gigs she crafts, so the only hidden aspect of this particular Volkswagen would be the punching-above-its-weight, hand-tooled power station lurking under the hood.

After all, Masunda has already managed to secure a couple of all-time DJ debuts for Toronto clubbers, most notably perhaps John “Jellybean” Benitez – a name old enough for even me to recognise from a high school disco. Jellybean has had his hands on everything from Madonna’s debut album in 1982, through the Pointer Sisters, the soundtrack to “Flashdance”, Fleetwood Mac, to Sting, and even Whitney Houston in 2000 (remember her before she met Bobby Brown?). It also took her less than two years of promotions to persuade Groove Assassins to come to town for the first time.

I bet that was a good night.

Then there’s Masunda’s ability to persuade DJs to play outside of their typical genre (imagine lifting the hood of said Volkswagen to find a Kawasaki or Sherman tank engine inside). DJ Sneak is best known for a raw, minimal, percussive-almost-dub style house, championed by the likes of Trade in London, UK. DJ Aleksandra doesn’t often stray far from techno. However, both were persuaded to play an out-of-character deep house set for the TenaciouSoul regulars, and both were enormously successful nights. This, combined with Masunda’s method of briefing DJs for their sets is what makes describing the TenaciouSoul vibe so tricky. OK, so we’ve got afros, but then imagine DJs whose only guidance is to, “…play from the heart,” as Masunda puts it. “I wouldn’t expect to have to brief a DJ anyway,” she insists. “It’s their job to figure out whether the crowd is feeling a particular tune, and change it up a bit if it’s not working.” Maybe if TenaciouSoul were a proverb, it’d be, “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know whatcha gonna git.”

I digress.

Picking a company name was the easy part. What followed was the administrative hard graft: getting business cards organised; striking deals; balancing everything with the needs of the day job; painting more than 300 front door keys and attaching a label with the gig details instead of using paper flyers; and networking. Lots of networking. It paid off though, with Masunda running into Eddy K of YYZ Entertainment in early 2006. This gave her the necessary backing to be able to host a night of her own, but she still needed DJs.

“I spent ages familiarising myself with the local DJ talent, scouring online, collecting cards, and asking people for recommendations,” she recalls. “From these I chose DJ Dirty Dale, most of all for his sound, which I felt fitted the TenaciouSoul ideal. It didn’t go smoothly though! The first time I met him he just told me to call him back in the morning if I was still serious!” Through Masunda’s persistence, things worked out though. Jason Ulrich was later secured for the warm-up set at TenaciouSoul’s maiden musical voyage, a humble but packed-to-the-rafters loft at Queen and Spadina in May 2006.

This strikes me as one of those times when you review your resume and think, “Sheesh, did I really do all that?” But there’s still more to come. Each new gig requires another reinvention of the humble flyer and fresh DJ talent for the growing Toronto house scene. Thankfully some things stay the same though. “One thing I’ve learned is that you have to work with people you trust,” states Masunda, possibly in her most serious tone of voice all day. “I have a core list of experienced and reliable suppliers that I go back to time and time again – sound, talent, logistics, work permits, bartenders, security – everything you can think of.”

I suppose if one has trust, then one can relax. And, although Masunda admits to, “…feeling tense until the room is full,” each time she promotes a night, by that point the necessary hard work has already been done. Thus the punters can also relax, which is probably why TenaciouSoul has already become something typically Toronto – relaxed, multicultural, but with a sense of pride that demands attention over the noisy neighbour to the South. In her words, “The music is key. TenaciouSoul is all about having somewhere to go where people can experience a musical journey and forget their worries for a night.”

I guess some houses may vary in price, but well-chosen house is always priceless. Put a value on it yourself at Footwork on 7th March 2009 when TenaciouSoul will be hosting DJ Heather and Colette.

Five cent fine on wastrels the first step in a social change marathon

Wannabe environmentalists such as I, who are tempted to celebrate Loblaw’s announcement this week that it will charge shoppers five cents per plastic bag, may have to put the bubbly back in the fridge.

I know that corporations in general are worse polluters than consumers, but there’s a difference between landfill litter and other weapons in the polluter’s armoury. The City of Toronto told me on Wednesday that shopping bags akin to Loblaws’ make up only a proportion of one type of litter collected from the streets of Toronto, which in turn accounts for only 27 per cent of annual Toronto litter.

I shouldn’t disparage the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee though. With 44,000 cubic metres of landfill-bound rubbish yearly, it has – literally – a mountain to climb, albeit an underground one. Unfortunately the real culprits, all 3,000,000+ of them, are much closer to home. Actually, they’re in the home – mine and everyone else’s in the GTA. The majority of that 27 per cent is from a grubby smorgasbord of retail and non-retail items that, when put together, spell fast food packaging. What annoys me even more is that a significant proportion of them are plastic bottles and jars that could have been recycled, if the previous owner had managed to carry them that marathon distance to the nearest garbage bin, and mustered the staggering concentration required to pick the correct hole of the three. As I discovered, once whatever-it-is hits the street, then the city has to regard it as “contaminated,” and it goes the way of the bubblegum and everything else.

Thus I don’t make myself very popular giving people the ‘hairy eyeball’ when they grumble that there’s no school close enough to them for their first-born, that the ambulance should have arrived one minute sooner, or that there’s a massive power outage on the West side of Toronto. I just quietly wonder how many schools, hospitals, or power stations could be bought with the $20,000,000 that the city wastes every year clearing up after Torontonians.