Karl Roy Wants To Give Moncton Entrepreneurs A ‘Better Life’ Through New Training Centre
MONCTON – Karl Roy has been an entrepreneur since he was a teenager. At age 19, he founded the digital marketing company Connetik Interactive. Now he’s taking the things he’s learned over the years and offering it to other entrepreneurs and small business owners.
On Wednesday, Roy and his team officially opened StanceWise at the Millennium Business Centre to help train entrepreneurs on business management and marketing.
“As an entrepreneur, when I first started my business, there wasn’t a whole lot of resources out there that I could have access to inexpensively that would actually give me assistance with my business,” he said. “There’s a lot more since then in different organizations, which do very good, but a key missing component I found is having consistent access to the training.”
StanceWise is a membership-based company that provides workshops about business and marketing strategies, including social media, web metrics, budgeting, sales and other topics. Members can access the material online in video form and re-watch it as many times as they want.
In a world where Facebook and many other platforms are available for free, it’s not that entrepreneurs don’t have access to the tools.
“The missing link is not necessarily the ability to do it, it’s how to do it,” he said.
Like going to the gym, in business, entrepreneurs need to constantly train and see better results in the long-run, he said. But most of the time, workshops are offered in one-off hours-long session.
“It’s kind of like drinking from the firehose,” he said. “There’s so much information being thrown at you, and you can’t comprehend it all and you certainly cannot execute on all of it.”
StanceWise will offer training on a regular basis and the workshops will be offered in “bite-sized” form, he says, which will allow entrepreneurs to execute on what they’ve learned.
It also has a co-working space and one private office on offer, and more private offices will be available soon after renovations. However, this is a small component of the business, said Roy, who owns the Millenium Business Centre.
“We do it because we have it. We have the building, we have this big location, so it makes sense for us to do that. And it’s one area that we can help small businesses start up,” he said.
For Roy, StanceWise is where he can share his own learnings with others.
“My goal for this training business is to help new entrepreneurs get into the business, but it’s also to help current entrepreneurs that are in business live a better life,” he said. “I was that entrepreneur that worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week.
“You hear of so many businesses that burn out because their owners just decide, ‘you know what, I can’t take it anymore.’ Which is why with proper training in business management, my goal is to help entrepreneurs actually have a good life outside of their business as well.”
“My journey over the years has been a lot of training myself and learning a lot about how to take my business and make it into an entity that doesn’t require me on a daily basis to make it survive.”
A membership at StanceWise costs $99 a month for the training and workshops, $99 a month for the co-working space, and starts from $300 a month for a private office. The co-working space is being offered on a promotional price of $50 per month for the first 50 customers.