Prof Bruce Breakout Session at Growing Rural Tourism Conference

Prof Bruce Breakout Session

Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (Civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD

Ottawa Senators founder and ROYAL LePAGE Performance Realty broker

Go 1 on 1 with a Canadian legend—the person who founded the modern era Ottawa Senators and their home arena, Canadian Tire Centre at the upcoming Growing Rural Tourism conference hosted at Camrose Regional Exhibition February 23 – 25, 2015.

Find out what has worked, and what hasn’t, in terms of developing small towns and communities not only in Canada but in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Crete, India, Sri Lanka and other nations and places.

Ask Prof Bruce—

1. How to boost rural tourism in your community
2. Why leisure is the new infrastructure
3. How to keep your kids at home or attract them back
4. How to develop and encourage your own entrepreneur class
5. What low cost programs you can adopt to get your local economy going

Find out—

1. What “eyes on the park” means and how to produce a supply of affordable residential lots
2. How to develop your own goodwill ambassador program
3. How to get new events and festivals off the ground
4. How to differentiate your community from everyone else’s
5. How to use social media to get your message out and communicate with your stakeholder group
6. How to repopulate your main street/look more like (It’s a Wonderful Life’s) Bedford Falls and less like a parking lot
7. How to register every business and attraction in your community with Google maps
8. How elders can live in sustainable communities for less than $500 a month
9. How to add home-based businesses and in-home suites
10. Why you should allow accessory residential in industrial parks
11. Why it’s important for entrepreneurs to be able to own their own premises
12. How the only retirement plan that is really working for most Canadians is owning their own home, place of business and perhaps a few rental properties
13. How to create mixed use places
14. Why attracting trans-national companies ddoesn’t work/you need entrepreneurs who live, work and stay in your community
15. How micro-farming/grow and buy local are saving small communities across the planet
16. Why every person on earth might just end up with a personal business for life…
17. TLGO

More about Bruce—

Firestone is known as a developer, hockey executive, professor, entrepreneur, urbanist, author, coach, mentor, consultant and keynote speaker for organizations and institutions with a positive focus on creating new opportunities for their stakeholder group.

One of Bruce’s favorite quotes is—

“To live through an impossible situation, you don’t need the reflexes of a Grand Prix driver, the muscles of a Hercules, the mind of an Einstein. You simply need to know what to do,” Anthony Greenbank, from The Book of Survival.

Bruce knows what to do and he’ll share it with you when he gives the keynote at www.growingruraltourism.ca and also during his breakout session where you get to ask him questions, one on one.

For more information, please contact Ms Nina Brooks, ninabrooks@rogers.com.

Twitter Bio, Bruce M Firestone

140 Character Résumé:

Bruce is an entrepreneur/real estate broker/developer/coach/urban guru/keynote speaker/Sens founder/novelist/columnist/peerless husband/dad.

@quantum_entity

@ profbruce

Brief Bio, Bruce M Firestone

Bruce M Firestone is best known as an entrepreneur and founder of NHL hockey team, the Ottawa Senators, their home arena, Canadian Tire Centre, and the Ottawa Senators Foundation, a children’s charity, as well as author, professor, coach, consultant, real estate broker and urban guru. Prof Bruce is an effective keynote speaker for organizations with a positive focus on creating opportunity for their stakeholder group. Firestone advises counties, towns and cities as well as economic development agencies on how to develop live-work-play communities based on the principal that is nothing is sustainable unless it is also economically sustainable too.

“Bruce Firestone has an inspirational message and a voice that will break down the walls,” Carolyn Parker, Triple I Event Services.

In May of 2006, Dr Firestone joined the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management as its first Entrepreneur-in-Residence. He later taught at U of O’s Faculty of Engineering. He previously taught or studied at McGill University (Bachelor of Civil Engineering), Laval University, Harvard University, University of Western Ontario, University of New South Wales (Master of Engineering-Science, Traffic and Transportation), Australian National University (PhD in Urban Economics) and Carleton University.

Firestone was a founding director for the Ottawa Art Gallery, vice-chair of CIRA (Canadian Internet Registry Authority), first publisher of Ottawa Business News (now Ottawa Business Journal) and founding executive director of Exploriem.org, a Canadian registered not-for-profit corporation, which focused on educating and mentoring entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs in Canada and around the world.

Prof Bruce has launched or helped launch more than 300 startups in fields including tech, real estate, design, art, entertainment and services. He advises clients on business modeling, self-financing, smart marketing, social media, differentiated value, strategic selling and business development, market channel development, harnessing the Internet and mobile web, urban design, real estate development, finance, retirement strategy, design economics, product management, sponsorship, fundraising and development economics as well as issues related to entrepreneurial organizations including not-for-profits, NGOs and charities.

Dr Firestone has been an operations research engineer, real estate developer, hockey executive, professor of architecture, engineering, business and entrepreneurship, real estate broker (with Century 21 Explorer Realty Inc), writer, researcher, consultant, columnist and novelist. He is a peerless husband and father of five great kids and one fine grandson.

More about Bruce—

Bruce applied to go to McGillUniversity in Montreal, at 14, arrived after turning 15 and graduated as a civil engineer before legally an adult (then age 21). He was rejected in his first job search because he was considered a ‘child’, not legally responsible for his actions. Three and a half weeks later he was living in Sydney, Australia. A new and exciting labor government had just been elected. First two things Prime Minister Gough Whitlam did were recall Aussie troops from Vietnam and lower the age of majority to 18.

Firestone worked for the New South Wales government doing operations research and building mixed integer programming models to solve significant environmental issues that LGAs (Local Government Authorities) in the Sydney Region were facing at the time. While there, he continued his education at the University of New South Wales where he obtained his Masters of Engineering-Science degree and then at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he received his PhD in Urban Economics.

He was among the first group in Australia to fly hang gliders and not die. He has traveled/worked in Canada, Australia, the United States, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, India and many other nations.

“‏Entrepreneurs follow a moral path when they—first, take care of their business so second, the business can take care of their families so that, third, their families can take care of them so, fourth, they don’t become a burden on society or their fellow human beings, so, fifth, they can help others so that, sixth, others can help their business,” Prof Bruce, 2014.

Bruce got his start in business his late 20s with just $10,000 for a downpayment and a yard of guts, which he invested in a faltering business that he turned into a commercial real estate empire; this became the foundation for a successful bid to bring the National Hockey League back to Ottawa after a nearly 60-year hiatus. In just nine years, that business grew from $350,000 in revenues to $120 million. Then Firestone put it all on the line, risking tens of millions of dollars, to bring the Senators back to Ottawa. It became a high tension, multi-faceted endeavor with all the suspense of a Borgia series, with competing cities and political interests aligned against his team’s bid. Their resulting success changed the City of Ottawa and brought a sense of pride to all of Canada at a time when the country was going through another tough recession and had already lost two existing NHL teams, in Quebec and Winnipeg.

You can follow Firestone on Twitter @ProfBruce and @Quantum_Entity and read his blogs at www.profbruce.tumblr.com, www.eqjournal.org and www.dramatispersonae.org. You can find his works at www.brucemfirestone.com. You can engage with him on Facebook via—https://www.facebook.com/QuantumEntityTrilogy as well as via LinkedIn at—https://www.linkedin.com/in/profbruce. His real estate interests are summarized at www.OttawaRealEstateNews.com. His YouTube channels include—

https://www.youtube.com/user/ProfBruce and https://www.youtube.com/user/quantumentitytrilogy.

His current motto is: “Making the Impossible Possible”. 

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