Hire amazing people and trust them to do their job
It all began when…
I decided to get more involved in school during my third year of university. While looking for extracurricular activities, I signed up for a tour of the on-campus incubator at Brock University, BioLinc (external link) (now the Linc). Going in with the idea of starting a t-shirt business, I was welcomed by the BioLinc ambassador, Drew MacNeil. No one else showed up to the tour, so I had a great chat with Drew and found out he was already running a t-shirt business out of BioLinc.
This quickly made me pivot to my second business idea of filming 360 marketing videos. Getting more involved in BioLinc, I met many other amazing entrepreneurs and eventually convinced Drew to buy a VR headset with me to view 360 videos and play VR games. Our friendship grew as we played VR, but also in realizing we had spent all of our money on this VR headset and needed to make the money back for things like rent and food. XpertVR (external link) was born, and we began renting out VR headsets and shooting 360 videos all over Niagara, and eventually, Ontario.
In doing so we met our first mentors, Rick and Rashmi from Lake & Associates. They showed us how VR could be used for leadership training and how that thinking could be used across education. This unlocked something inside of us, now being able to see what a large impact virtual reality and our contribution to the virtual reality space could have on the education industry as a whole, leading to more accessible learning content, more engaged students, and a greater impact on students' understanding of the content.
We wouldn’t be where we are today without having access to tools, resources and mentors that push our minds and make innovation more accessible to us.
I joined the DMZ because when we started XpertVR at Brock University, we had a couple of friends who had graduated to work out of the DMZ. While visiting them, we saw the incredible culture of the DMZ firsthand and instantly made it a dream of ours to work out of the DMZ one day. A few years, later the DMZ opened a partner office in Niagara Falls (NFRIH (external link) ) so we jumped at the opportunity to become a member company. Completing the program, we were invited to interview for the DMZ incubator program and made our dream come true!
When we first started XpertVR, we were renting our VR headsets out to events like weddings, birthday parties and conferences. In doing so we had everyone from the age of 5 to 95 in our headsets. Today we build the simulations in the headset and are focused on the education space. Needless to say we have pivoted multiple times. But our biggest pivot was in 2019 when we brought on our first technical hire, Josh Egamino. Bringing on Josh allowed us to pivot from renting hardware to actually developing software and this has allowed us to get to where we are today.
The biggest challenge I faced during my journey so far was…
Balancing my personal and professional life. As an entrepreneur, you are always going to have ideas and problems bouncing around in your head. But you need time to relax and decompress sometimes, plus you need to be present with those in your personal life. Although I would say I still struggle with this challenge, the way I have partially solved it is by setting reasonable working hours and expectations for myself, while also setting aside thinking time. The reasonable hours come with knowing yourself and how much your brain can work in a day, and how much social/relaxation time you need. For me, I set aside “thinking time” by going on long walks and listening to audiobooks or listening to podcasts on long drives. Listening to influential people tell their stories and give advice gets my gears turning so I can work out both professional and personal problems in my head.
Currently…
I am working on innovative marketing campaigns to help spread awareness of the benefits of VR in education for both students and institutions, ultimately with the goal of helping 1 million students learn through actions, not statements. Two of these innovative marketing campaigns are: building a community and building a mobile VR demo bus.
The community is a place for educators to gather and discuss immersive learning, but also a space to collaborate and take action in creating the next evolution of education. A major way XpertVR will promote this collaboration in the community is by funding “co-op projects.” As an example, XpertVR is flaming conversations around what types of simulations are most needed within academic institutions. Say these conversations bring to light five schools across Canada that need more hands-on learning simulations for their dentistry programs. The community would then launch a co-op project with the five schools and XpertVR, and XpertVR would fund the development out of pocket and the five schools would donate the time of their industry experts and feedback from students. Once complete, each of the schools would get access to the simulation for their classes and XpertVR would have a new product to reach more students with. We are still perfecting this model as the community is new, but in the future, we see multiple partners being involved along with XpertVR, allowing these sorts of co-op projects to grow and revolutionize how new education content is developed and deployed.
The mobile VR demo bus will be a bus that my sales team and I can use to work and live on the road, and most importantly, schedule VR demos with potential clients and then pull up with everything they need to try VR for the first time.
The best piece of advice I received was…
To focus. This is something I still struggle with almost every day but when you focus on one business model, one marketing campaign or one industry, you’re either going to find much faster success in that area or find that it’s not working and be able to pivot and move forward faster. Either is a win win, so finding those areas to focus every day is crucial.
One piece of advice I would give to aspiring entrepreneurs would be…
To hire amazing people and then trust them to do the job you hired them for. When you’re starting, you can’t have people slacking off so hiring amazing people is really important, as they will be the foundation of your business moving forward. At the same time, if you hire amazing people but are always micro-managing, you aren’t allowing them to be creative and succeed past your expectations.
I believe access to innovation is one of the most important benefits to society today. Without innovation, the world would not move forward and so many problems would not be solved. By giving better access to innovation and the services that surround it, it only grows that much faster. This obviously comes from more people now being able to contribute to innovative ideas, but more importantly, brings in more people of different backgrounds which allows innovation to be looked at from multiple angles. I know for XpertVR, we wouldn’t be where we are today without having access to tools, resources and mentors that push our minds and make innovation more accessible to us.
Connect with Evan Sitler on Instagram (external link) or Twitter (external link)