Raise The Anchor
Raise the Anchor- is a transformative podcast hosted by Melissa Burbridge, where ordinary people share extraordinary stories of life-changing moments.
From overcoming health challenges like a life-saving liver transplant to bold decisions like a career pivot or adopting a life-altering diet, each episode dives into the pivotal moments that reshaped lives for the better. Through Melissa's thoughtful interviews and powerful narratives, "Raise the Anchor" inspires listeners to let go of what holds them back and set sail toward a brighter future.
Join Melissa each week for stories that will spark inspiration, ignite courage, and remind you that it’s never too late to rewrite your story.
Raise The Anchor
What was Your Pivotal Moment?
Ever wonder how your favorite Entrepreneur started? Or even better what happened, the exact moment they knew they wanted to leave from a path they knew into the unknown?
Tune into here 6 past guests' pivotal moments and let us know do you resonate with any of them? Do any inspire you?
Past Guest:
Jay Fisher: https://www.instagram.com/captureit.photog/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/captureitphotog/
Sharl Cline: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharl-cline-sales-expert/
Dave Reynolds: https://www.instagram.com/the_rumin8_group/, https://rumin8group.com/
Jen Warrington: https://www.instagram.com/jen_warrington/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenwarrington/
Amber Renae: https://www.instagram.com/theamberrenae/
Kerra Aucoin: https://www.instagram.com/kerraaucoin/, https://www.instagram.com/kasocialmedia/
Welcome to Season 3 of Raise the Anchor with your host, Melissa Burbridge. This season, we are going to inspire, ignite, and create space for you to go after the change you want with invigorating interviews and some deep diving into my personal story. We hope you enjoy... Welcome to another episode of Raise the Anchor. Again, this week, we are going to do a throwback to all of our 43 last episodes. And on this week's throwback, we are asking the people what made them or what was their pivotal moment? What was that moment that made them make the change? So we're hoping that this inspires you to want to make that change.
SPEAKER_01:And after that, I was over it and I was ready to get back to work.
SPEAKER_05:So you made a pretty big decision, a life-changing decision, and that's how we actually met.
SPEAKER_01:What
SPEAKER_05:was that life-changing decision?
SPEAKER_01:This was probably now a couple months into the pandemic, and I was living in Toronto, and Toronto is a fantastic city if you have stuff to do. But if you're sitting at home... waiting for stuff to do it it's very big and very expensive and um my partner and i were both kind of over it so we were we're sitting at dinner and uh somehow the topic came up and i just looked at her and i said i'm i'm over this city i just i'm i think i'm done and she looks over and says hey you want to move to nova scotia and and i look at her for a second and i said yes yes let's go
SPEAKER_04:You don't realize how impactful a bad fit in your professional life affects your personal life. And like, I knew I wasn't myself, but I didn't realize how it was infiltrating the rest of my life. So, and that was about the time that you and I met and that's where you were seeing those, you know, markers, right? Yeah. Yeah,
SPEAKER_05:absolutely. Because I remember having coffee with you. as our one-on-one and you just lit up and you were like so happy and lit up at the interaction of the networking. And then I would see you at the BNI meetings and it was almost like, I really don't want to be here. You liked BNI. I can tell you liked BNI, but I could tell you weren't happy in the capacity that you were at that network meeting. When we
SPEAKER_04:try to do something outside of what is natural to us, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter how hard you try. Right. And I've known that most of my life is, you know, I've been in sales and I'm not a hard sell at all. It's always been about relationships. It's been about the long-term goals and it's about me connecting with those people. And what I was finding in that particular job is I wasn't able to do that. And it just wasn't working. It was literally, it was causing me such unhappiness that on sunday nights i was not looking forward to monday mornings and that nobody loves monday mornings you know but this was a different monday morning for me this was a real dread you know and it was sucking some of my soul away and you know people that were knew me knew that that was happening right but what do you do you just have to continue so and that's where your program came perfectly time for me is that what it did was centered me into focusing on myself and then the opportunities came.
SPEAKER_05:So what made you
SPEAKER_03:leave that
SPEAKER_04:world?
SPEAKER_03:So I was actually replacing two maternity leaves. So I took on, so I was there for about 20 months and I really, really saw the potential. So I was the salesperson that hated picking up the phone, which is kind of crazy to think because I take the phone now to text and to interact with people. But I hated doing cold calling. It is still the thing that I hate the most. So whenever I go into a meeting or whenever I talk to somebody, they're like, oh, it was great. I was talking to you online. Like we had a conversation on Twitter or we had a conversation on Facebook. And that made the conversation so much easier because we had a prior relationship. So I really saw the potential of social media. And then when I left, or when, again, my term was over, I knew that social media was going to be part of my life to some capacity. So I applied for a few roles that, you know, had social media manager, social media to some capacity. Then unfortunately, I had a health scare that really made me realize what I wanted to do with my life. And then I went on my own in September 2014.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, really good question. I would say the reason why I jumped into restarting Quicksnap when we went under the Dragon's Den was my son was just born and I knew I just wanted to do something really special. And so at the time I was doing a sales job for a local company and I just decided to dive right in. So we went out and got funding. That was a game changer for us. A lot of risk involved, but obviously it paid off. And then most recently... I would say even earlier this year, I gave up a job that I've been doing for almost 10 years and did really well and paid an incredible amount of money. I just had this draw to become more deeply immersed into the consultant side of the business and actually left on probably one of the best years we've ever had and transitioned over doing our company full time.
SPEAKER_05:And now you're like super busy all the time, very successful, helping other businesses thrive, especially in a time.
SPEAKER_02:My foreman, every day I would just like project manage him and be like, what do you need from me to make sure that you're going to be able to build the road? Obviously, you've been building roads for 40 years. Let me help you. So I was really good at it and lasted about six months full time and then realized that being on a construction site was not my thing. I was never going to be successful at that because I was a petite female. Really, basically, that's what it boiled down to. I wasn't a big, old, angry, overweight man. So I could tell that it was never going to work out for me on that construction side. And so I asked to go into head office. And in head office is where you do design development, basically. So I was in head office for about... three or four months and I was running this major canal development and it was in pre-development stage. So it was in the, we were having stakeholder meetings and each week I would chair these stakeholder meetings with, you know, everyone involved in making major design changes. So there's about 10 men all sitting around the table and me, 20-year-old female. And so I remember one day, you know, we eventually were going, oh, well, we need to get the engineer to sign off on this. And I was like, well, I'm the engineer. And they're all like, oh. Oh, okay. And they hadn't really realized that the little woman running the show was actually the engineer. And then I was like, well, this isn't going to work out for me. And so I quit pretty much straight away. So
SPEAKER_05:what made you position from working for corporate to working on your own doing similar things?
SPEAKER_06:So if you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have said that... I probably wouldn't have transitioned onto my own. Like it was always something I wanted to do. And I knew that I will always wanted to have my own business. I didn't know what that was going to look like. And probably over the last 20 years, I've had a million ideas and a bunch of different notebooks of something that I could do, but I was very comfortable in my nine to five. I was almost 10 years with a financial services organization where I did recruitment and loved it. And yeah, They went through a global restructure on the HR side of things. And I was one of those individuals impacted. And once the, I don't want to say the shock, but it was a bit of a shock. I wasn't really expecting it. Once that wore off about an hour after the phone call that I received, I said, I'm not working for someone else. I'm going to do it this time. Knowing that I had a small buffer in terms of a severance, as well as not wanting to hit the market anymore.
SPEAKER_05:Thank you for listening to Raise the Anchor, brought to you by Alizé Creative Solutions. We hope you found that story very inspiring. We look forward to bringing you more this week. Subscribe to the podcast to stay in the loop. Don't forget to leave a five-star review to spread the love even further. We hope you have a smooth sailing.
