Millennial entrepreneur, Karson Humiston, is the founder and CEO of the largest recruiting agency in the cannabis industry, Vangst. After being turned away by career services at St. Lawrence University for inquiring about careers in the cannabis industry, Karson decided to create a company that helps people secure careers in the fast emerging industry. Karson, age 25, now leads a team of over 30 people who have filled more than 5,500 positions to date. Before founding Vangst, Karson started On Track Adventures, a student travel organization which she sold in March 2015 before heading to Colorado where she currently lives. Prior to On Track Adventures, Karson started many small businesses growing up, including a resale golf ball company, where at the age of 11 Karson was employing two of her peers to help her collect, clean and resell golf balls.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Sara Blakely
- Josh Reeves CEO & Co-Founder of Gusto
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I really think scaling is really challenging. Vangst in a way is a different company every six months because of all of the new people that we are hiring. So where I spend a lot of my time thinking and where a lot of our challenges come from is what is the difference between a 25 person company and a 50 person company, and what is the difference between a 50 person company and a 100 person company? And what we need when we are a 100-person company versus when we were a 50-person company. And figuring out how to connect all of those pieces and scale. So, what is right for the next phase of the Vangst may not be right for this phase of Vangst. So trying to strike that balance I think is pretty challenging”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir Book by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change Book by Stephen R. Covey
Favourite Quote:
“If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always got” Tony Robbins
Recommended Online Resources:
https://slack.com/ is a cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services, founded by Stewart Butterfield. Slack began as an internal tool used by his company, Tiny Speck, in the development of Glitch, a now defunct online game. The name is an acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Being persistent, having patience, really believing in your idea and yourself to a point where you don’t give up after a few no’s I just think is the number one thing. It’s easier to just throw the towel in than to continue going and continue having people turn you down and continue overcoming challenges. And then being the real. I don’t think people should pretend that they are something that they are not or pretend that they are smarter than they are or that they have experience that they don’t have. I think it is important to be real with your clients, be real with your employees, to be real with your investors if you have investors. Just be real.”…[Listen for More]
More About Karson Humiston:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways?” Jean-Yves Leloup
Other Quotes From the Chat with Karson Humiston:
- “I think every business when the start-up has challenges. And some of the challenges that our industry presented actually turned out to be opportunities”
- “I do believe that being part of the industry as early as it was, while it was a challenge there was a lot of advantages from an entrepreneurial standpoint. The most significant being first to market, really paving and defining the way ”
- “we should have hired more experienced people early on”
- “I think working at a start-up is a great way to get a sense of what you are going to be joining. So if you are working for a big company you are not going to really have an understanding of what it’s like being in the start-up. So if you join a start-up for a couple of years in its infancy you will get a taste of what it’s like building a company. A very close experience to what the entrepreneur has. And so if you are someone who is thinking that you might want to be an entrepreneur and start a business and grow a start-up working for a start-up I would say could be a great place to start so you can get a sense of what it is actually like”
- “I could have written a million case studies about why this business could or could not of worked or I could have just gone out, which I did and try to actually do it and quickly figure out if it will or will not work”
- “something that is a challenge is you are responsible for a lot of other people’s lives and livelihoods”
- “it’s very hard and you have to deal with a lot of no’s and not giving up really is challenging”
- “I think 9/10 businesses don’t make it to a year because they just give up”
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