The 25 Year Mindset is an interview series celebrating our finance company’s 25 years in business by spotlighting the business owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs who understand what it takes to build something that lasts. Through candid conversations about their journeys, challenges, lessons, and future ambitions, the series explores the long-term mindset behind sustainable success. Each episode looks at the experiences that got them where they are today—and the vision that will carry them forward. We begin with Joelle McLaren, who is the owner and CEO of California Closets, a multinational Canadian owned and operated custom closet franchise and company-owned organization that has been delivering custom-designed organizational solutions for the whole home since 1978.

If you're struggling to make your mark in a business with history, the challenge is real.  So is the opportunity to break new ground using powerful legacy tools and experience.  This episode is all about finding the difficult, but valuable, balance between innovation and history, harnessing the past for a better, energized future.  

Whether you are born an entrepreneur,  or born into a family of entrepreneurs, there is no doubt that moving beyond the family legacy can be both a burden and an opportunity.  

Anthea Sargeaunt started her entrepreneurial career right out of high school, building a business to pay her rent through her post secondary education path and launching her ambition to build something meaningful.  Her lessons in entrepreneurship motivated her to create something world changing, while respecting the boundaries between family and business - an age old problem to which she applies a modern approach.  Her company, 2S Water, has a huge mandate - to enable real time water testing and help enterprises and governments to improve global water safety.   But, transitioning from intergenerational legacy to leading edge innovator is daunting in many ways, and running an engineering-focused business as a risk taking entrepreneur is no less overwhelming.

Today we are exploring the strange and wonderful world of Venture Capital. Kristina Milke started her career as a chartered accountant, with ambition, but an unformed game plan. Being open to opportunity however, brought her to one intersection after another, where she was able to stretch her boundaries and grow her talents in some really diverse organizations.  

 From industrial supply, to aerospace, to her tenure at the incredibly innovative growth company Intuit, her last employee role before launching into venture capital, was as CEO at Investopedia working on its sale.  She credits her life journey to having an innovation mindset – being ambitious to learn, but open minded about what form that learning would take.  

Today Kristina is supporting her favourite type of startups, technology,  into scaling opportunities, while mentoring the founders behind them using her own hard earned leadership and investment skills.  VC is innovating itself – as an industry traditionally dominated by niche risk takers, all the way through to the IPOS where big investment banks flourish, there is a  growing peer to peer investment community supported by regional and national angel funds whose investment theses cover almost any type of business vertical market.   Through mentorship, networking and focused collaboration, there are some amazing things happening in the world of growth and venture capital that are putting many new entrepreneurs squarely on the map.