Fearless young entrepreneur a triple threat
Biz wunderkind rides a ‘sense of urgency’ as he devises marketing and other products
Good things come in threes, they say, and for young Toronto entrepreneur Jordan Whelan, that means three robust and diverse companies.
Call him a triple threat at 28 years of age, or simply call him fearless, creative and driven. And “restless,” he says.
“If you don’t work incessantly to make your own way, you’ll end up working in a job picking up the leftover scraps of someone else’s dream.”
Whelan’s newest company, Framestr, is poised to shake up the social e-commerce industry, his cardboard marketing firm Our Paper Life will have its products prominently displayed at the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games, and his public relations firm Grey Smoke Media has attracted major legal and political clients, including the John Tory for Mayor campaign.
“To me, Jordan represents the millennial entrepreneur, the idea that being good at just one thing doesn’t cut it,” says Britt Aharoni, a radio producer at Newstalk 1010, where Whelan worked as a producer before starting his business career. “It’s about being great at many.”
Framestr acts as a conduit for word-ofmouth product recommendations between friends. Users can share any product on the site via a unique link through social media or email. If friends make a purchase, the original user receives a cash commission from the business, usually between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of the object’s value.
Since launching in August, Framestr has posted more than 20,000 products from nearly 300 businesses — including camera-maker GoPro — spanning 18 countries. The site has doubled in signups every month.
“The only way a small business can compete with a large corporation and massive ad budgets is the invaluable power of word of mouth,” says the Hamilton-born Whelan, naming Sara Blakely’s Spanx as one such business that became a billion-dollar household name through the power of talk.
With his sights on business, Whelan broke from the family tradition of working in health care — his father is a urologist, his mother a family doctor, his younger sister studies public health and his older sister is a former nurse now exploring entrepreneurship. He earned a bachelor of commerce degree from McMaster University.
After school he worked for five years in the media — with host Mike Bullard at Newstalk 1010, in digital production at MuchMusic and Virgin Radio, at Sun Media, with a humour column called “Try Guy,” and at the Huffington Post, where he currently blogs.
His first breakthrough company was Our Paper Life (OPL), a marketing design firm that uses 100-per-cent local and recycled materials to create custombranded cardboard items such as chairs, desks and umbrellas. For the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games, OPL has developed products to be used in the athletes’ village and sporting facilities. Some of the items will be functional, takeaway keepsakes, such as a small recycling bin. OPL will have pop-up displays at various outdoor festivals this summer. A past highlight was OPL’s cardboard “beach” with recliners and umbrellas in David Pecaut Square for June’s Luminato festival.
“Furniture is so ubiquitous,” says Whelan. “We want to offer it as a brandable communication tool for all businesses.”
The young entrepreneur’s third company, Grey Smoke Media, has attracted major legal and political clients, including Tory’s campaign and Diamond and Diamond Personal Injury Lawyers.
Whelan rolls out unique concepts using his “parketing” (PR and marketing) model, collaborating with search-engine-optimization experts. “We’ll get a client a media hit in a major news outlet and then also parlay that into getting them on page one of Google.”
Whelan says he’s content to have his social life on semi-permanent hold and has “stopped counting the days before the weekend.
“There are so many baby steps, coffees, favours and unpaid initiatives I took in order . . . to reach this point. When you have an innovation, it’s very difficult to show your value properly to your customers — it’s challenging to be the first, and definitely no one wants to be the last.
“In business you always have to operate as if someone is breathing down your neck. Always have a sense of urgency.”
“In business you always have to operate as if someone is breathing down your neck.”
JORDAN WHELAN