YORKTON - The Yorkton Chamber of Commerce held its 22nd annual businesses diner, and it featured guest speaker Kendal Netmaker.
Netmaker is an entrepreneur and author who, according to his website, "is on a mission to empower and motivate people worldwide by sharing his story that regardless of where you come from and what challenges you face, you have the power to enact change."
Netmaker, who said he was supposed to come and speak in Yorkton over a year ago, but COVID-19 delayed his chance to do so, said he was thrilled to be able to go and speak.
"You do what you can to take that service and adapt it virtually, whether it's a different way of delivering, whether it's doing curbside pickup, whether it's doing stuff through online e-commerce, doing stuff through Amazon, creating virtual studios," he said. "There are so many ways you can now, and the pandemic exploited a lot of that in a way, and it's been a blessing for a lot of people."
He said that anyone wanting to start a business or become an entrepreneur should start as soon as they can.
"The hardest part is to start when you don't have a lot to lose, so to speak. Many entrepreneurs find a passion when they have a mortgage, they have a family, so it's tough for them to jump into it," he said. "It's best when you're young. I'll be very honest, when you are young, it is the easier time because usually, you don't have a lot of money, so as a start-up entrepreneur, you have to get used to not having a lot of money in the beginning, so it's an advantage to start young and to learn the mistakes while you are young."
Netmaker said that the best advice he can give people is to learn from their mistakes.
"My advice to anyone is the obstacles, the challenges, in our lives set up future successes, but you have to see it as what are the teaching points in all of these failures, these obstacles, that I go through. If you can see it from that perspective of what am I meant to learn from this, you will be willing successful in the future," he said. "Don't become part of the problem; see the problem, analyze it and learn from it."
