Speaker 1 (00:10):
My name is Chandra Brown and my business is called Freeflow Institute. We're based in Missoula and we started in 2018. Freeflow Institute creates university accredited outdoor learning experiences for adults. Primarily they take place on rivers and in the back country, and we're really focused on creative arts, but also social justice and environmental studies, law policy and journalism. Yeah, I think that we have sort of this bread and butter model, but there are kind of a, an increasing number of models that we use. But the one that we started with and the one that still feels at the heart of what we do is a creative writing workshop, a graduate level creative writing workshop that we lay over the top of a multi-day river trip. So it's like, it's an immersive learning experience that takes place and an immersive trip through a landscape. And so on one of those courses, we will do writing workshop and writing adjacent activities and thought exercises and generative activities.
(01:24):
In the morning we'll go rafting and hiking all day, and then in evening we'll do another session together. And so it's a lot to fit in to a few days on the river, but it feels very full and very rich. I think the inspiration for my business came from all of my sort of disparate professional affections, which were education and the creative arts, specifically writing and rivers. And I've worked as a river guide and as a teacher and as a freelance writer for all of my adult life, my professional career. And so free flow is sort of the confluence of all those things. I think being an entrepreneur requires a significant amount of dedication to an idea, and sometimes it's hard to stay the course because there's not always a template or a framework that's been established for you. And so a lot of it is trial by fire and trial and error and just seeing what sticks.
(02:31):
And so there has to be a significant amount, I think, of allegiance to the original idea. Otherwise it's easy to lose your way. So I do feel like I am lucky in that regard. I really believe in what I set out to do. I also think that in starting my own business, I learned a lot about confidence and about communication. So trying always to be a better communicator and to be more confident in my work and more confident in the fact that it's needed in the world. And then the more confident that I am, the more confidence I think the community and our clients have in the work that we have to offer. I think from the beginning, ever since I started entertaining the idea of my business, I've relied on other people and other people's ideas to validate and encourage what I'm trying to do.
(03:32):
So from the very beginning, I've talked to people who I think are much smarter than I am and ask them to be informal mentors in a way. And so those people are everyone from friends to others that are operating in the same educational and outdoors and creative spaces. And then as the snowball started to pick up speed, it seemed like community played an ever increasingly important role in the work. And now so much of what I try to do is build and maintain and expand our existing community. So I'd say it's at the very core of what we try to do with Free Flow Institute. So before the WBC, there was Blackstone Launchpad, and so the very first year that I started putting together this business idea, I went and talked with Paul Gladen and I called him my entrepreneurial therapist, and he helped me more than anyone at the beginning.
(04:37):
And I still go back to my notes from my meetings with him with regularity, now seven years later. With the WBC specifically, I've worked with consultants and I've attended a number of the lunch webinars and I always read the newsletters and it makes me feel connected in a space that's often quite lonely. Yeah, I think what you guys are doing is really important and it's definitely been a huge mode of support for me. Yeah, I think one thing that's been really difficult, especially as I sort of came up and over the five year mark was what I can only think of as burnout. And so it was just this exhaustion that came from constantly hustling and trying and connecting and also working towards something that at times felt amorphous. So a lack of concrete goals really got me down a couple of years ago, and I felt like I was sort of swinging in the dark and not really sure where I was headed, and that made me really tired.
(05:47):
I also think that that sense of working alone can sometimes contribute to the feeling of burnout or exhaustion. So, in order to overcome that and sort of surmount that tiny obstacle, I've tried to bring in more people that are skilled and that can amplify and enhance what I'm trying to do, but have their own vision and their own energy and their own ideas. And then integrating those ideas into the original vision for the work has been really helpful. And I think those other people are the only reason why I am able to keep going at this point. And I do feel like I've been reinvigorated by their energy and their contributions. So we hire folks on a 1099, like a contractor basis. I did for a little while have a payroll with three employees and it just wasn't a great fit given how small we are.
(06:48):
And I think the scope and capacity of my business has fluctuated so much from year to year that it hasn't made sense to maintain or retain any sort of W2 employees. So most of the people I work with are 1099 contractors. But that being said, I'm working toward being able to retain employees. It's just an issue of capacity at this point. So my journey toward profitability has been circuitous, but I have not taken out a loan and started the business while I was still teaching high school at Hellgate. And I definitely have operated from this model of we build something and I invest my time and energy into it, and if it doesn't sell, I don't get paid. And so I haven't taken out any sort of loans or borrowed any money or taken out capital from any other source. I've just tried to generate capital based on what we've done in prior seasons.
(08:03):
And so it's, it's been a good model for me because I don't have debt, it does make it hard to entice others into that scene that is inherently a little bit risky because if we put a lot of effort, we're working collaboratively and we put effort into building a course, and the course doesn't go, or the course doesn't turn a profit, then now there are others who are sort of in that same position of not getting paid maybe what they would like to because the course didn't turn a profit. So in the future, I'd really like it to be where, a different model where there is consistency and we can trust that the offerings will be well received and they'll sell. And that will help me to feel more comfortable bringing more people into the work. I think there have been a lot of notable and memorable experiences.
(09:02):
This work has taken me to some really amazing places geographically, but also socially. I've gotten to work with populations that I would not have had access to without this tool, without this mechanism of my business. And I do feel like we've been able to support a lot of artists and leaders and educators in their own work and on their own missions. And seeing through their eyes and through their participation in our offerings, what's important in the world, and perceiving their priorities has been really rewarding. And so it'd be hard to name one or two experiences that stand out, but I do think that at its core, this work of bringing people together into cohorts of thinking, people that are looking to solve a problem or looking to tell a story and then putting them out onto the landscape or into these wild river corridors and sort of watching them cohere as a social unit, but then also seeing the way that they're able to take their stories and transmit them out into the world. It's been really beautiful. So as somebody starting out as an entrepreneur, it was very scary and intimidating, especially coming from the stability of a teaching career. And it was scary to sort of take the leap and abandon teaching to pursue these other ideas and these other priorities. But it has been one of the most energizing adventures of my life to try to build something from nothing and then to see it flourish or at least exist in the world, it's been very gratifying.
