“I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned was to make a meaningful impact on everyone you meet,” she says from her hometown, Saskatoon. “Maybe it’s a kind gesture, a follow-up email, but it’s amazing the opportunities that come when people remember you.”
Through her involvement with a program called Junior Team Canada (JTC), run by the Canadian nonprofit Global Vision, Cook went to the 2010 G8 and G20 summits in Toronto and Muskoka.
JTC members receive a mandate—or “Trade Mission”—from their home region in return for a financial contribution towards attendance at major geopolitical meetings, like the summits. Once there, they must try to further or accomplish their Trade Missions. But Cook says you usually only have a short window of time to do so, given the people attending these events are the likes of Barack Obama, Stephen Harper, and Nicholas Sarkozy.
“We had two minutes, maybe, to engage with the leaders on an individual basis and try to give them our elevator pitch,” she says. “They had so much going on, you know, real world stuff ... so you really have to make it impactful and meaningful. I think I said something like, ‘Just know that the youth of Canada is with you on this and is committed.’ That there’s a younger generation that’s concerned and interested in the impact they are having.”
Cook got involved with JTC upon her return to the University of Saskatchewan, after a year spent travelling and working in New York, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. “I signed up for the workshop because they were offering free pizza and my friend was going,” she admits.
But at the summits, Cook’s “make it memorable” technique worked: six months afterward, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the President of Global Vision selected her to be one of four Canadians representing the Invest in Canada Bureau at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit. And one year later, the CEO of the Canadian Youth Business Foundation—who remembered Cook from a lunch date at the G20—called to invite her to participate in the 2011 G20 Entrepreneurs Summit.
“She could tell that it wasn’t an interest in public policy and government that drove me, but rather an interest in business,” says Cook. “She phoned me and said, ‘You know we’re putting together a delegation to go to Nice, France, and we think you’d be a great candidate to represent Saskatchewan.’”
She makes it sound easy, but at the time Cook was studying and in the thick of running her first small business: a hip, Saskatoon-centric social-networking and video platform called Thread (www.threadmedia.ca) that was inspired by a study saying Saskatoon was struggling to retain its young professionals. Along with “up to 20 hours per week” with JTC, keeping up with it all, Cook admits, was a struggle. “At times the motto was, ‘C’s and D’s get the grade,’” she says, wryly. “But you just have to balance.”
Long hours spent studying for straight A’s isn’t necessarily the most effective way to achieve your goals anyway, at least not for an up-and-coming entrepreneur. In 2011, Cook’s commitment to Thread got her selected for the Next36, Canada’s most prestigious mentorship program for young entrepreneurs.
Along with 35 other young Canadians, Cook was placed into a group of four and given one year to come up with a financially viable business idea, closely supervised by two established Canadian business leaders. Cook’s team produced Triumf Mobile Rewards, a loyalty program for smaller and independent businesses whose loyalty programs tend to consist of a dog-eared stamp card.
“The idea was sort of started because customer attraction isn’t the issue,” Cook explains. “You have daily deals and Groupon; people are going to the businesses. But [getting] more customer loyalty, retaining those customers for long-term loyalty, [that’s when] businesses are way more profitable.”
Cook has achieved all of this before she even graduates. She hopes to finish her Bachelor of Communications, Marketing, and International Business, a double major, in 2013, but her whole life she’s known that entrepreneurship lay in her future. And having tasted success at such a young age, she knows exactly the kind of dedication it takes.
“Nothing replaces hard work,” she says. “Any success that I’ve had, it’s because I’ve pulled those all-nighters, those early mornings, the 6 a.m. training for soccer. You complain about it, but nobody cares, because everyone else is working hard as well. Just work hard and put yourself into a position where you like what you’re doing so it doesn’t seem so hard.”