From the challenges faced to the victories celebrated, your host Erin Patchell, shares valuable insights on the good, the bad, and the ugly of her entrepreneurial journey so far. Stay tuned to find out what it takes to be an entrepreneur in today's world, and how to celebrate the small milestones on the path to success! Stay in Touch: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/erin-patchell For more on Erin, her services, and her entrepreneurial journey: https://trainedtohelp.com/ https://www.positivist.ca/   Script: We're helping businesses become more inclusive and prove that and demonstrate that every single day. So it's not just a checkbox. It's actually real. Welcome back to Weirdos in the Workplace workplace the podcast where we celebrate authenticity transparency passion and purpose as entrepreneurs and business leaders i'm your host erin patchell and today we're diving into the exciting milestones for the positivist group which is my company and our software software platform we're developing called cludi which is my company, and our software platform we're developing called Cludee, which is formerly known as the Train to Help project. And the reason why I'm sharing all of this, I'm a huge believer in transparency. And I think it's really important, especially for new entrepreneurs to hear from other entrepreneurs along their journey. And I'd love to share a little bit about the good, the bad and the ugly as we go along in this journey. And I'd love to share a little bit about the good, the bad and the ugly as we go along in this journey. And it hasn't been easy. So I hope that comes across when I'm chatting. It is not an easy process. It is a constant, constant learning as you go and, you know, seeking and sensing into the environment and asking a lot of questions and asking yourself a lot of questions. So without further ado, today we're going to talk about where we are now, what it's been like to pilot the learner side of our platform with 40 live participants, and what is next on the horizon. And yes, I said pilot with live participants. And for those of you who have done this before, you may know how completely insane that really is. So why did we create Cludee in the first place, just to take a step back? Our mission at Positivist Group has always been to make it profitable for businesses to do the right thing. It's a tough economy out there and we need to accept as business owners, every possible strategic advantage that we have. And one of those strategic advantages is to create business models that are built around and clearly demonstrate business as a force for good. And I know I, my friends will probably laugh because I always say this, but I joke around a lot about like world domination for good. You'll probably hear those words come out of my mouth almost every single day, world domination for good, but it's not really a joke. It's our philosophy. world domination for good, but it's not really a joke. It's our philosophy. So if you take two customers who want to purchase a good or service, let's pretend you're going to buy a fridge and you give them two options. So two fridges, two different companies, identical variables, the quality of both fridges is the same or good. The warranty is the same. The investment cost is about the same. They're both convenient to purchase from. The service is accessible. The atmosphere of the business is nice. But the only factor that changes between these two fridges at these two different businesses is that 50% of the profit that they get from one fridge and one of the businesses is going to the food bank, let's say. Meanwhile, 100% of the profit from the other fridge and the other business is going into their shareholders' pockets. So I think it's pretty obvious that unless you're one of those shareholders, the decision's kind of a no-brainer. Almost every time when I explain this to people, they're like, obviously I'm going to pick, I'm going to buy the fridge where 50% of the profit's going to a charity. Business as a force for good makes sense. Business is a force for good makes sense. So if you've heard me talk about this in the past, you know, also, probably that I have physical and neurodevelopmental disabilities, and I'm fairly public about them. I have other disabilities as well that are suspected, but not officially diagnosed. So I don't really talk about those. But even before I recognized that I had disabilities, I was kind of treated like an outcast. And I don't know, it was kind of chicken and egg. I don't blame anyone. I think it was, I didn't know how to be included just as much as people didn't know how to include me. But I was treated like an outcast and it took me many years to understand how I belong and where I fit in and how to be a social person. So something I do care about deeply and something the team, a positivist group cares about deeply as well, because we all have lived experience with this, is disability inclusion.  I also strongly believe that people need people. And I think that's a fact. People who are excluded socially probably need people even more than everyone else. People with disabilities also generally just want what everyone else does and what everyone else takes for granted. Like just to go for coffee with a friend, to go to the store, to buy a gift for a loved one, to socialize without causing a disturbance or to be made to feel welcome and not made to feel like a burden. We know that small businesses particularly struggle with accessibility, even to the level of basic compliance, which is frankly a pretty low bar. With how competitive it is in the market right now for businesses, particularly retail business and brick and mortar business, it's even more important for people with disabilities to feel included and respected in every single customer interaction. For one, they make up over 27% of the Canadian population over the age of 15, if you can believe that. And that's a true fact from Statistics Canada. People with disabilities also spend $55 billion every single year. And that number is going to be increasing. Why? Because we are making it easier and easier for people with disabilities to work. People with disabilities have disposable income. They are consumers and they want to spend their money. They want to live like everyone else, you know? So let's let them, let's help them and give them a great experience, you know? And that's exactly what Cluedy is designed to do. When you become a Cluedy, you know, we're helping businesses become more inclusive and prove that and demonstrate that every single day. So it's not just a checkbox. It's actually real. We're providing transparency around that. We're helping businesses get the training and resources they need to provide an exceptional customer experience while also making it easier for people with disabilities to navigate the world with more confidence. So we're about four and a half months into the actual development of this platform, which is like, sounds like nothing. We're moving extremely quickly. And the last five months have felt like a whirlwind. We surveyed first like back several months ago. I think it was just about the time I did episode 11. So episode 11, I also talked about this project as well and where we were at that point. Around episode 11, we were surveying customers with disabilities. We surveyed over 50 customers with disabilities and we're still talking to people constantly. This is a never ending learning. But at this time, we've surveyed 50 customers with intersectional disabilities to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of their customer service experiences when they go and finally venture out to the world. We interviewed a couple of dozen business owners as well to understand their thoughts around accessibility and whether they were AODA compliant and they weren't. In fact, 97% didn't even know they were supposed to be. These are small businesses, by the way. Larger businesses over 20 employees, there are huge fines if they're not compliant. But the smaller businesses under 20 employees, while there are still fines, they kind of fall through the cracks because it's not really monitored as much. So in the past five months, we also completed the Invest Ottawa Ignition Program. And I went on stage and we did our pitch. Every single one of the program participants did a pitch. And that was really fun pitch competition. Now we're taking advantage of the Flex program, support for business startups. We participated as a vendor in the Adaptive Living Expo. And it was extremely validating to talk to so many people with disabilities about this new venture, Cluedy. And they had huge enthusiasm for what we're doing. So that is really heartening. We attended the Collision Conference, which is North America's largest tech conference, talked to numerous founders and funders, understanding, you know, getting understanding of the lay of the land, how does this work, as we're becoming a technology startup, becoming a CEO of a technology company, there is a lot to learn. And we took away so many insights and growth opportunities from that. And just this Wednesday, we finally launched our pilot phase of Cluedy with almost 50 participants. The goal was to test the learner side of the platform in a real world setting because this platform includes the AODA compliance training that we're calling it Disability Inclusive Customer Service. So that was the platform, the side of the platform that we were testing. And we wanted to see how our training would perform, how users would interact with the content, and most importantly, whether Cluedi could truly make a difference in enhancing accessibility and inclusion. So what does the pilot look like? Like I said before, the largest pilot, I've run many pilots in my life so far. This is by far the largest. Normally I have up know 12 to 15 participants um we had over 40 participants almost 50 participants employees business owners from retail stores restaurants and service-oriented businesses uh we decided to do it live so they were all doing and testing the platform together, providing feedback in numerous ways. We actually basically updated the platform. We had a little button so that any time throughout the entire journey on the platform, as they were exploring through the platform, they were able to provide feedback at any stage. And we knew exactly where that was within the platform. They also were able to write their feedback on a card. And then we held table conversations as well with a facilitator. So we gathered even more feedback that way. These people are on the front lines of customer service and they interact with the public every single day. So getting their feedback was really critical. The pilot did involve that comprehensive training program that I mentioned, covered everything from AODA compliance to practical strategies for engaging with customers that have disabilities. The training was totally mobile based, which is the reason why it's mobile based, at least right now. And that's going to be the primary modality going forward is because people in those brick and mortar businesses don't often have access to computers. Although we are creating different versions so that, you know, there's different contexts that can be used. And not everybody has a phone, we learned. In fact, quite a few people said that they have quite a few employees who don't have phones, which means that they probably won't actually have access to a computer either. So we're going to need some kind of analog method of doing the training as well to make sure that we're including everyone. So that was definitely something we learned. And I honestly, I think I was a little bit naive because I had absolutely no idea there were so many people that still didn't have phones these days. So that's a learning. Yeah. So, but busy employees need convenience factor. After the, it had been something on our minds, but we definitely decided to do an audio only version as well. And we think that will be very popular, uh, especially for employees who are, you know, rushing around, they can pop the audio version in and, uh, do, do some training in between, you know, or when, when they've got a free moment. Um, but the feedback we received overall was incredibly insightful. So many people reported that the content was engaging and informative. They had new perspectives on how to approach customer service. A lot of people mentioned how to communicate with people with disabilities. That was extremely insightful, that module that we did. So, you know, all in all, some really amazing feedback, positive and constructive. People really liked the real life scenarios as well. We took actual real life scenarios from real people with disabilities that they encountered in customer service environments and, you know, kind of like a what not to do. And I think that was very enlightening because there's quite a few scenarios like not moving a person's wheelchair. That isn't always necessarily common sense, you know. It doesn't, it's not instinctive. We don't understand it until we've learned it. So we also discovered some major areas for improvement. A couple I mentioned already. Some people wanted more interactive elements and case studies specific to their industries. So anyways, all of this feedback is extremely valuable. The good news was that the actual technology itself, everyone found to be really easy. So that's good news. The actual software was really easy to access, even for some of the older adults in the audience felt that it was super easy and straightforward. So that was good news. So we've already had several stories about employees who felt more confident and prepared to serve customers with disabilities once they've completed the training.  I followed up with a few people already, and they have really great things to say. So this is only the beginning, and they're going to be getting even more and more out of this platform as we continue forward. And I'm really excited to see how this continues and how the trajectory grows and how they're growing as people through the process. But of course, it was not without its challenges. We definitely had a few glitches, mainly related to the Wi-Fi in the building, which we knew was going to be a problem. And we had created some, we had managed that as best as we could, but we still had some challenges around the wifi. But, you know, everyone typically understood and we were able to manage it without any issues. But I would say if you're, if you're listening to this, cause you want to do a live pilot yourself, I would definitely find somewhere that has a very strong wifi connection or limit the number of people in the pilot and make it a bit of a smaller pilot. Because there was a bit of an overload despite the fact that we had, like I said, done everything we possibly could to mitigate the fact that the Wi-Fi wasn't as strong as it probably should have been.  So, okay. What is next for Cludee? So we are in the process of refining the platform based on the feedback of the pilot participants. We are looking for at financing options now in order to fund the next four to six months of the project. I'm really hoping to bring there's one person, especially who's currently working as a contractor. And I'm really hoping to bring them on as a full time employee because they're extremely valuable. And they're just such a great fit for this project. But we'll see how it goes. Hopefully in the next update, the next, you know, I'm doing every 10 weeks, I'm going to provide an update on the Cludee platform. So hopefully the next update, I can say like, hooray, we've secured some financing, you know, and we're full steam ahead. So, but because we don't have the financing or funding right now, so we're, you know, either a loan or equity funding from investors, we are planning on getting this to market ASAP. So that's really our focus right now is creating the administrative side of the platform so that people can actually go on the website and purchase this product. It'll be the training just to start with adding features. We have so many amazing features that we're going to be adding over the next six months that we're really excited about. But AODA training is really important and a lot of businesses are not currently compliant. So we figure there's a market for that even without the rest of the platform completed. So that is how we're handling, you know, needing to get to market really quickly is really like what is the increment that is valuable that people will be willing to pay for. And that's what we're starting with, you know, and if anyone out there is also bootstrapping a company, you know, that might be a good way to think about things. So, but yeah, we're, we're also in the meantime, we're enhancing the content, we're adapting it to different provincial legislation across Canada. We do intend on moving to the United States as well, but we're going to launch across Canada first. We're improving the user interface just a little bit, a few little tweaks, and then preparing for a broader live launch across Canada, hopefully in October. Our next steps also include expanding the pilot to more businesses. And we're interested in bringing on another pilot, a separate pilot for people who have lived experience with disabilities. And that will be a paid pilot just to make sure that the content is as inclusive and effective as possible. And we're also intending on adding on new modules as well. So this is the Disability Inclusive Customer Service course and then micro learning modules. We'll be adding at least one a month as a value add for all of the members, for all of our Cludees out there, our Cludee businesses. We're also adding new features like the ability for businesses to track their accessibility improvements over time and receive personalized recommendations for further enhancements, as well as the Cluedy grant, which is our own grant to enhance accessibility in small businesses. And we are funding that from the profit of the company. So as a social enterprise, I think I've mentioned before, Cludee is a social enterprise, which means that half of our profit will be going towards a grant for small businesses. So in closing, I want to thank our pilot participants for their enthusiasm, honesty, and commitment to make Cludee a success. This is just the beginning. I keep saying that, but really it is. It is like, you know, getting to market is literally the beginning. So we're even like pre, we're still pre-revenue. We're really, really at the beginning. But I'm kind of excited for you guys to come along this journey with us. And by the time we have our last episode, at the end of January 2025, we should be getting some traction, you know, so that would be the that's the plan. But we're super thrilled to have such passionate businesses and individuals becoming Cludees. And we're excited about the future of Cludee and the impact that it will make in making our world more accessible and inclusive. So stay tuned for more updates. And as always, we welcome your feedback. If you're interested in joining the Cludee community or learning more about how we can help your business or possibly partner with us in other ways, visit our website or reach out directly to me at erin at positivist.ca, E-R-I-N at P-O-S-I-T-I-V-I-S-T dot C-A. And I'm on LinkedIn pretty frequently. So feel free to ping me on LinkedIn. That would be linkedin.com slash I N slash Erin E R I N dash patchell P A T C H E L L. Thanks for listening until, until next time, stay weird, stay wonderful, and don't stay out of trouble!

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