Attended a great networking event at Collab Space, Entrepreneurs in Action last night and meet a number of old faces from OSEB, eSAX and BNI, but tons of new people looking to network and share there story. For those of you unfamiliar with Collab Space its essentially a working environment for the self employed, small business and companies who want the feel of a large corporate community and work space but without having to have a large company or office space of their own.

Collab Space is also not just all hard work and business either, someone brought out a ride on kids toy towards the end of the evening and my friend Konrad decided to take a ride on the new flooring for a little childish fun…go Konrad!

I was introduced to Emile Salem from Collab Space today, and we had an interesting discussion that lead me to a tour of his facility. The concept behind this company is to promote self employed people, small business and companies providing not only a work space (office space is also available too) but the feel of a larger corporate community and others business to share and interact within a friendly and easily going office environment. The appeal I see is in helping the transition from a small home office to a corporate building, providing the intermediate steps in the middle through Collab Space from a work space, to board rooms and meetings rooms, then eventually renting office space, then building up some warehouse, manufacturing before outgrowing and buying your own building, and even then one would be likely to keep an office at Collab Space just to keep in touch with the corporate feel and community that helped build you up!

They also host a number of networking events, including Entrepreneurs in Action, which I will be attending next Thursday from 6:30 – 10:00 at the offices. Hope to see you there!

Like many of my fellow Ottawan’s we had a whopping 51 cm of snow Tuesday and the clean up was still going into Wednesday and we had a second snow day for all schools. I kind of felt like the guy in the above image as I dug my driveway out to get to the unplowed street… This unfortunately meant my event was cancelled as no kids were at the school, but it is supposed to be reschedule for sometime in May. I’ll keep you posted.