"If you knew you could never fail, how big would you dream?" This question forever changed Manvir Deol's perspective when he came across it scrolling Instagram.
"It's my core. It's what I believe in," he says.
A Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) marketing alum who graduated in 2018 was recently named one of BCBusiness magazine’s “30 Under 30.” He runs two growing businesses and jokes that Google Calendar has become his best friend.
Coming from a family of business owners, Deol worked at his parents' insurance company while studying at KPU.
"My family's been in business for the last 20 years, and it was something I wanted to do as well," he says.
In his final year at KPU, Deol cofounded CLIQMedia, a marketing agency, with a friend who is now his business partner.
"The story behind this is quite amusing," says Deol. "I remember calling my friend, who was also studying marketing at that time, to tell him about an idea to start a marketing agency. He responded that we couldn't do it without master's degrees. I just laughed and said, 'What do you mean? Trust me, we’re going to start a marketing agency.'"
Their first client was an aesthetic centre seeking assistance with branding, designing a website and creating a social media strategy.
"I had no idea what those three things even meant. I remember watching a ton of YouTube videos to make sure we got the basic principles right. But we did it. We learned on the job. This is when I realized how passionate I am about marketing," he says.
For Deol, entrepreneurship is about identifying and solving a problem. It was a problem that inspired the idea of his future business, Plan Your Space.
While building a home for his family, Deol realized that the house plan on paper wasn’t the house he wanted it to be. Once he faced the framing stage, he started to make numerous changes to the original plan, spending tens of thousands of dollars.
After bouncing ideas with a friend, they found a solution to the problem many people experience when building a house.
"We're going to create an experience where homeowners can literally walk through their plan in life-size."
Plan Your Space allows clients to walk through a floorplan of their future house in actual size, get a sense of what it will feel like and make adjustments before construction starts.
Deol believes he is relationship-oriented and shares that the small classes at KPU helped him build strong, close relationships with classmates and instructors, who are still his friends, colleagues and mentors.
"I like connecting with people and I want to learn from them all the time," he says.
The Melville School of Business at KPU provides a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing Management and a Diploma in Marketing Management. Students acquire general business knowledge and delve deeply into the discipline of Marketing to develop industry-required skills and experience.
Deol’s advice to students is never to take no for an answer.
"If someone tells you it's impossible, it's because they can't envision how to make it happen. When you have an idea, what's the worst that could happen? It might not work out, and that's alright. You should absolutely pursue it. After all, we only live once. Why settle for anything less?"