Don Fletcher will be the first to tell you he’s a workaholic. What else would you call someone who’s juggled several jobs at once for the past 45 years?

Thankfully, hard work pays off. And the Red River College grad is finally reaping the benefits – in a big way.

A builder and creator all his life, Fletcher’s latest invention, Nice Trim Fit, is taking the bathroom renovation world by storm – and sealing his fate as Winnipeg’s next big success story.

“I basically had to sell everything I had to get this all going, but it’s finally paid off,” says Fletcher, a self-described inventor who graduated from RRC’s Machine Shop Apprentice program in 1982.

Nice Trim Fit is a sealing system that’s easily installed on tubs, showers, backsplashes, baseboards and even toilets to protect them from mold, mildew and leaks.

Fletcher has obtained patents for the product in Canada and the U.S. (Australia is pending), and shares are sold out at $10,000 apiece. Nice Trim Fit is currently available at over 80 Home Hardware stores, and will soon be sold at Lowe’s, Ace Hardware and Rona.

RV companies and Manitoba Housing have also shown interest, and Fletcher has recently done demos for the Hilton, Canad Inns and Best Western hotel chains. He’s constantly taking the product on the road to trade shows, with another tour planned for this fall.

“It’s going haywire,” says Fletcher, who employs a staff of five. “The president of 3M came in to see my product,” he says of the multi-billion-dollar adhesives company. “He liked it so much, he said, ‘You’ve got a winner here. I’m going to endorse it.’ Now we’ve got their logo on our package.” Read More →

Jeremy Senaris took his main courses seriously as a Civil Engineering Technology student at Red River College. This summer, the 2010 grad aced appetizers and desserts too, as the runner-up on the third season of CTV series MasterChef Canada.

“I’m still pretty proud,” the 35-year-old self-taught chef says.

“I’ve always been a fan of the show. I’ve always watched the American one and then once the Canadian one started I tried out for the first season. I didn’t make it that season and at that point I was like, ‘OK I tried, I’ll never do it again.’”

Never say never. The show’s producers invited Senaris back to audition for the third season, and he wowed the judges through all 15 episodes up to the finale in June.

As a building plan examiner for the City of Winnipeg by day, Senaris works strictly by the book, making sure residential floor plans comply with building codes and checking the structural design of every house to ensure it’s safe and sound. After hours, he likes to colour outside the lines, concocting creative menus that might include anything from bison tataki to squid ink risotto and “ice cream” made with purple heirloom rice, whipped cream and candied bacon.

The key ingredient to success on both fronts is preparation.

“I’ve always been interested in structural design, which is why I took civil engineering,” he says, adding he chose RRC because he wanted to begin working in his field as soon as possible.

The three-year course met his need for speed, and the combination of classroom theory and hands-on co-op work experiences equipped him to hit the ground running after graduation. Read More →

Every business has to start somewhere. For Eric Olek’s hip hop-inspired clothing label, Friday Knights, that start came while the Red River College grad was selling T-shirts out of the trunk of his car.

“It was really messy,” says Olek of his company’s hard-knock beginnings in the spring of 2011. “I didn’t have any organization or accounting skills or anything like that. I look back on my social media feeds and I cringe at some of my marketing efforts. I was a rookie.”

Thankfully, there’s an RRC program for that. In September of the same year, Olek closed his trunk and opened the doors to the College’s Business Administration program so he could put his company on the right path. As challenging as the two-year experience was, it would be prove to be less rocky than the routes he’d taken in his younger years.

“I was kind of troubled in my early 20s, and I just had a big wake-up call and I wanted to do something positive with my life,” says Olek, now 26. “I really knew I needed to turn it around so I put my head down and focused on my education, and trying to start the business.”

Hip-hop music and style had always been a big part of Olek’s life, but designers just weren’t making clothes that he liked. He figured he wasn’t alone, so why not just make them himself?

Creating the clothing came naturally, as did the name for the company – which he thought of while mopping floors at a local convenience store on Friday nights, wishing he were out pursuing his passion instead. But clearly there was much more to running a business than that.

Going into Business Administration, Olek already knew what he wanted to do; he just needed the tools to do it properly.

“When you go to college, you’re doing things because you want to do them – you’re not doing them because the next guy in high school is doing them or because you’re worried about what your peers are going to think,” says Olek, who juggled both Friday Knights and his full-time convenience store job while going to RRC. “You really fall into your own and you learn about the type of person that you are.” Read More →

In television, every good story opens with a strong visual.

Toronto-based Global News anchor Crystal Goomansingh’s mom likes to show off a snapshot taken more than 30 years ago during a Santa Claus parade in downtown Winnipeg. At age five, Crystal is posed in front of the old CJOB broadcast centre at Portage Avenue and Lenore Street where, years later, she’d get her first big break in broadcasting.

“My mom said I did not want my picture with the Santa float at all — I wanted my picture with the radio station as the background,” Goomansingh says.

“I don’t know if that was an early sign or what it was; there was something about it that I really loved.”

Fast-forward to 1997, when Goomansingh was getting her feet wet in radio and TV broadcasting while earning dual academic and vocational diplomas at Tec-Voc High School.

“We would do news programs and you’d get to do all the different jobs, and it was just something that clicked and I loved it,” she says.

That fall, at age 18, Goomansingh would be one of the youngest students entering the Creative Communications program at Red River College, but as high school graduation loomed, her future was still uncertain.

That’s when CJOB entered the picture again, with a full-ride scholarship that would not only see her through two years of intense schooling, but would also provide on-the-job experience.

“I still remember the day that I got the letter from CJOB saying I got the scholarship,” she says. “One of my best friends drove me down to CJOB and … I think I held it together in the office, but I got to the car and I was just crying and shaking reading that letter.” Read More →

As a kid, Justin Currie used to spend hours drawing dragons, robots and monsters. As an adult, not much has changed – other than now he gets paid for it.

“It’s a much better deal,” says the Red River College alum.

Since graduating from RRC’s Graphic Design – Advanced program in 2007, Currie has managed to transform his childhood passion into a bankable career as an illustrator for his own design studio, Chasing Artwork. The Exchange District company publishes Currie’s own graphic novels – his first one, 2014’s Cassie and Tonk, won the Manuel Dias Manitoba Book Design and Illustration award for 2015 – and originated a unique art technique he calls “shattered vector painting.”

When Currie’s not on the 9-to-5 grind, working on pages and artwork for clients – one of his recent contracts was with Blizzard Entertainment for the popular new Overwatch video game – you can find him possibly anywhere in the world, rubbing elbows with celebrities at comic conventions.

“It’s a lot of fun,” says Currie, fresh from a trip to Megacon in Orlando, Fla., where he moved a pile of copies of Cassie and Tonk.

“I think academically I never really excelled very much, but drawing wise I always seemed to be at the better end of the spectrum, so I just kept that up. Upon graduating from high school, it didn’t look like artwork was going to be much of a career option and then I found out about Graphic Design because a cousin of mine was in the program, and it just really clicked with me — ‘OK, this is what I want to do.’ ” Read More →

You don’t always get a replay in life, but sometimes luck tilts in your favour.

Pinball wizard, carpenter and family guy Eric Swanson pursued two careers as a graduate of Red River College programs, and he enjoyed the college experience so much he embarked on a third career in 2014, returning to RRC as an instructor for the Carpenter Apprenticeship program.

Swanson, 36, graduated from the Hotel and Restaurant Management program in 1999, but when he and his wife Angela decided to start a family, he knew a career reset was in order. The hospitality industry’s late hours weren’t conducive to fatherhood, so he joined his dad Robert Swanson’s building company and headed back to RRC to earn his Red Seal certification as a carpenter.

“The instructors that I had when I came through my apprenticeship were the real inspiration for me wanting to do this as a career,” he says.

“I knew from Day 1 of my very first level that this was something I wanted to do. These guys are just so inspiring here, and they just make your day fun. When you come in, you’re learning but you want to be there. I rarely hear somebody say, ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ Everybody wants to be here.”

Read More →

Some people choose a career based on passion, while others are driven by necessity.

For Rebecca Trudeau, it was both.

Trudeau always knew she wanted to help break poverty’s vicious cycle, but it wasn’t until she discovered Red River College’s Community Development/Community Economic Development program that she realized she would be able to pursue her dream job — and, just as importantly, hold down a steady 9-to-5.

“When I was 17, we got evicted,” says Trudeau. “And that’s when my mind changed as to what I wanted to do with my life.”

The West End resident grew up on social assistance. Her mom, Kerry, is schizoaffective, meaning she exhibits traits of both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. It made working to support Trudeau and her two sisters impossible for the single mom.

While Trudeau knew she wanted to make a difference in the lives of others as well as her own, she went ahead with her plan to study history and conflict resolution at university for two years. But with student debt racking up, her fear of not being able to land a steady job straight out of school had her mapping out a different path.

“I chose the Community Development program so I was not only able to help the people that helped me when I was little, but also to learn about my own family and how to get my mom to be a more productive member of society,” she says. Read More →

When Augustina Foley’s young charges at the Morrow Avenue Child Care Program (MACCP) at Hastings School go home each day, they take a little piece of Foley along with them.

“Parents will tell me, ‘We take you home, because these kids don’t want you to know that they’re being disobedient at home; they have that much regard for you,’ ” Foley says.

The 2007 graduate of Red River College’s Early Childhood Education program is proud of the relationships she’s built with parents and the kids in her care. As MACCP site manager, she’s on hand at 7 a.m. each morning to greet parents so they can share information about daily activities and any issues that arise in the child’s life, both at the centre and at home.

Sometimes, if kids are acting up or acting out at home, Foley will sit down with them to see if she can get to the heart of the matter, and then invite parents to join the discussion when the child is ready to talk about any underlying causes.

“Which has helped most of the parents, too,” she says. “I do appreciate when parents trust us that much to be involved in that manner with their kids.”  Read More →

An artist at heart, Danielle King had no doubts about forming a creative arts company. But it was her time in Red River College’s Small Business Management program that really put her at the top of her game.

“When we landed our first big project, Clandestine: Anomaly, I can tell you in all honestly that we might not have made it through if I didn’t have the practical business skills I acquired at RRC,” says King, who co-founded the Winnipeg-based company ZenFri with her husband Corey in 2009, and graduated from RRC in 2010.

“The creatives in us would have drowned.”

After receiving $700,000 from the Canadian Media Fund and plenty of worldwide recognition, ZenFri’s Clandestine: Anomaly was released in June 2015. The groundbreaking mobile game uses augmented reality with GPS to allow players to crash land an alien vessel in their own city. It’s the biggest original game ever made in Manitoba – and it marks the start of other big things for ZenFri and King, who recently took the time to discuss her experience at RRC, the gaming world, and her future.

What drew you to RRC’s Small Business Management program?

I was drawn to RRC and the Continuing Education [option] due to classes offered in the evening and part-time, which fit my schedule and let me pursue creative endeavours during the day. While business and management were never really what I dreamed of doing for a living, I also don’t see it as a diverging path. I see it as having the skills to supercharge the path I was already on, which is to be a creative.

What was the program like?

I really enjoyed the Small Business Management program and especially the amazing library filled with books on business. I learn best with my nose deep in a book, so the wide availability and extensive collection of materials in the library was extremely useful. I was definitely one of those students who would drag 10 books to class with me to read during breaks. This balance between reading, talking to the instructors and taking the Continuing Education programs helped ensure that I could both learn what the instructor knew would help me succeed, as well as tailor my knowledge to suit my goals.

How did your experience at RRC help prepare you for your career?

After just coming from the Film Studies Program at the University of Manitoba, it was refreshing to change my learning habits to how RRC works, with more emphasis on practical skills such as payroll, managing human resources, applying for business loans, and anything else that might come up in the first years of a business that needs the owner’s attention.

Read More →

Mark Southern learned the airline business from the ground up, rising from an entry-level position to become Air Canada’s managing director of airport operations for North America.

He’s made a lot of connections over the years, but the 1988 Business Administration grad credits Red River College with launching his high-flying career.

“It was a good experience for me. It was exactly what I needed at the time,” he says, adding it was just what his parents, Dawn and Oakley, needed too.

“Both my parents were teachers; my dad was in administration for years. I think they were a little concerned that their son was playing a lot of hockey with no clear career plan.”

Southern was intrigued by leadership even as a teen working for Pacific Western Airlines, one of the companies that amalgamated in the late 1980s as Canadian Airlines, which itself merged with Air Canada in 2001.

“It’s one of the most interesting topics for me, leadership. It’s what I’m kind of passionate about it, and so that’s why I chose Business Administration,” he says.

“In that moment in time, the first big step was I had to get a management position and I thought, ‘Well I need to get some education.’ ”

The RRC program gave him a solid grounding in the broader business world, and as a union lead hand at the airline, Southern was able to put some of the lessons of organizational behaviour into practice right away.

“The other part that I thought was really cool was a lot of the instructors were business guys who were passionate about education,” he says. Read More →