Kevin Shaw

Build. Lead. Inspire.

Entrepreneurship

Career Trek: Mind Your Own Business

by

History and concept

During my time working for CNIB as the program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation, I was approached by Accessible Media Inc.. This is a national cable broadcaster in Canada with mandatory carriage on both cable and satellite. AMI TV carries TV shows, movies and original programming with both captioning and described video.

 

AMI asked me whether I’d be interested in hosting a show focused on entrepreneurs with disabilities. I said yes and then, as is typical in television production, nothing happened. In the fall of 2021, I finally got the call that I’d been matched with a production company to produce a pilot episode. This is an episode that often never makes it to air, but gives the network an overall idea of the structure , tone and look of the show. AMI approved the pilot and we began production on season 1. 

 

The concept of the show is quite simple; entrepreneurs with disabilities share their story along with a particular business challenge they’re facing. A panel of mentors advises the entrepreneur and we then follow up to see whether they have taken on the challenge. 

 

We began shooting in early 2022 with 8 entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds and in every stage of business. Along with hosting, I played a role in casting, writing and structuring the show. My cohost, Purdeep Sangha, shot the follow-up episodes with each entrepreneur. After months of shooting and editing, season 1 went on the air in the summer of 2022 and received positive reviews.

 

The show was renewed for a second season in 2023 and a third season in the same year. Season 4 is scheduled to air in the fall of 2024 on  AMI TV.

 

How I Adapted

I have a background in radio and television production having attended Toronto Metropolitan University and working at CHRY for nearly 8 years, so working in front of TV cameras was not a big adjustment for me. The hardest part of live-to-tape production is knowing your script lines and waiting around for the technical aspects of the production to be taken care of. Our production company has been fantastic to work with and I’ve had the privilege of working with top-tier makeup artists, sound technicians and directors who are all consummate professionals.

I memorized many of my opening and closing scripts, something challenging even for sighted actors to do for 8 episodes at a time. It’s a good idea to use the down time on set to work on your scripts, your vocal warm-ups and your delivery.

 

You can watch this season and prior seasons of Mind Your Own Business on the AMI website and through the fully accessible AMI TV app for both iPhone and Android.

 

Kevin on the Set of Mind Your Own Business in front of a logo for the show.

4 Ways I’d Change the Way Radio is Taught in College

by Leave a Comment

I worked in radio for nearly 8 years at CHRY Radio (now Vibe 105) in Toronto. During that time, I worked with many interns from the local college radio program. Many of them were bright, serious and engaged students who worked hard at mastering the nuances of the medium. Many still work in broadcasting currently and I consider it a privilege to have mentored and worked alongside many of these people.

 

As I spent more time at CHRY, I noticed that our younger interns enjoyed working at the radio station, but didn’t engage with the medium outside of their job. It wasn’t their fault; by the end of the first decade of this century, podcasting, satellite radio, Internet radio and on-demand music streaming had displaced terrestrial radio. It had become the media your parents consumed in the car. The result of this shift was a group of students that were checked out of what they ere at school to study. Students suffered, the industry suffered and the medium suffered because schools hadn’t caught up to the new reality.

 

College radio courses need an overhaul. Here are 4 ways I’d change the way radio is taught in schools to yield more engaged college radio grads that are smarter and more competitive. 

 

1. Teach Musicology and Music Appreciation

In preparing this post, I did some research on four large college radio programs around the Greater Toronto Area. Not a single college teaches basic musicology as part of its media programs. I began realizing this was a problem when I was teaching interns how to edit bars and beats to cut music tracks. Many college students couldn’t identify the downbeat, the backbeat or the post in a song to line up a VoiceOver track. I couldn’t really blame the students; this was a generation that grew up with gutted music programs in public schools, the ubiquity of software like Garage Band and no collective experience of having to learn an instrument in junior high whether they had an aptitude for it or not.

 

Graduate better students by providing one mandatory course in popular musicology where students are trained to recognize and identify basic musical concepts such as tempo, meter, key, rhythm, pitch, dynamics, timbre, texture and form. Students should also know how to recognize and identify the studio techniques that accompany pop music production including: reverb, echo, delay, compression, gating, EQ and so on. Students should be able to apply this musical knowledge to any genre and understand how these elements can be programmed on air to create musical flow. 

 

2. Teach Music History

Out of the four colleges I researched in or near the GTA—Humber College, Seneca College, Durham College and Fanshawe College—only one, Fanshawe, had a music history course for its radio students.

Students today are taught to front sell and back sell their announcing with the ubiquitous music scheduler that serves up a station’s tracks for the day based on rules. Many of the students I worked with were not invested in the music they played out in the commercial world, but came alive when they were the ones responsible for selecting the music for a show at CHRY.

Radio schools can make better graduates by teaching the history of pop music starting with the blues and working their way forward through rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, pop and all of the other genres that exploded onto the airwaves over the past 70 years—including international genres. In addition to the music, students should be exposed to the role of—and advances in—technology, social, commercial and economic factors as well as political factors that affected and changed music  history. Radio itself played an important role in shaping the sounds that were the backdrop to generations of people. Students should complete the course and be able to apply this knowledge to music programming and on air delivery. 

 

3. Teach Entrepreneurship

Today’s media landscape is very different from the one I entered after I left high school in the 90s. While terrestrial radio struggles to stay relevant amidst audience segmentation and a variety of offerings, there are unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and new ideas for programming both mainstream and alternative content.

Colleges like Fanshawe College teach students how to generate new programming ideas, but I propose going further by developing techniques for pitching sustainable ideas including content for syndication, monetized Internet content, audio architecture and branded content as well as other types of audio programming. Each of these can have a terrestrial broadcast component or blaze new trails. Tied into this, students should be taught how to pitch and the role of sales beyond filling avails with 30s and adjacencies.

 

4. Graduate Smaller Classes

I was shocked to hear radio colleges graduated classes of around 50 to 60 students, depending on the college. Multiply this by the number of colleges offering radio programs across Canada and the US. Then, look at the current job openings in radio.

 

Today’s music radio station can run with less than 10 staff, not including salespeople who are usually out hustling up leads. Combine this reality with diminishing revenues, automation and local management arrangements (LMAs) and a lack of opportunity will make perfect sense. Reducing class size is one way to ensure only the best make it out of radio college and that there are opportunities in the industry. 

 

Having said this, there are opportunities as mentioned in the third point. Students who leave college with the ability to do new things with new media are the ones who will be rewarded in the future while legacy media looks on and wonders how they did it.

Career Trek: The CNIB Years

by Leave a Comment

Something from Nothing… All Over Again

After sitting down with the CEO of CNIB in the fall of 2017, I explained my decision to wind down TellMe TV. Instead of being disappointed, he got excited as he laid out the opportunity for me to join Canada’s largest blindness charity as the program manager for entrepreneurship and innovation.

There was just one problem. There was no entrepreneurship program to speak of. I’d have to create it from scratch—a task I was all too familiar with after building the production department at CHRY  and starting TellMe TV.

CNIB is hyper focused on getting Canadians with sight loss into the work force. The employment rate among those with sight loss hovers around 28% in Canada. Blind people are extremely capable of holding jobs of all kinds and many have chosen to work for themselves as entrepreneurs. 

The Venture Zone

I went to work right away on developing what was dubbed “the Venture Zone”. It was an online portal featuring tips, tricks, hacks and other useful information for 

  entrepreneurs with sight loss. Articles on the portal included everything from how to network with sight loss, to useful and accessible apps for the iPhone that could help you run your business more efficiently. We even began highlighting local entrepreneurs with sight loss who were paving the way for a new generation of trailblazers. 

In my first year, I logged nearly 40,000 kilometres in flights traveling across Canada, meeting entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences. All of the entrepreneurs were bright, enthusiastic and loved to talk about their journeys. We began featuring many of these stories on our portal as well. 

Shane Cashin

Shane is a DJ in St. John’s, Newfoundland. My team put together a video feature on Shane that highlighted his skill as a DJ and his motivational storytelling.

The Entrepreneurs

In my travels across Canada, I met entrepreneurs doing the most impressive and amazing things from building sophisticated software for the military, to running massage clinics, to making greeting cards. Here are just some of the amazing people I met. 

  • Denise Justin is a Toronto-based entrepreneur who runs a fashion line called Say Hello 2 Blindness. Her clothing features the words “Say Hello” in both print and braille. Denise was featured in season 1 of Mind Your Own Business. Click here to watch Denise’s episode.
  • Hillary Scanlon found herself unable to differentiate which waste receptacle was garbage, recycling and organics. She invented WasteFinders—a tactile floor mat that lets anyone know which container is which. 
  • Jenna White is the founder of Jenna’s Nut-Free Dessertery—one of the only 2  certified nut-free bakeries in all of Atlantic Canada.
  • Kim Holdbrook is the founder of Hands That See—a massage clinic run entirely by massage therapists with sight loss in Montreal.

In addition to coaching, motivating and developing a shared set of resources for our entrepreneurs, we also began sponsoring students who wanted to learn what it took to run a business. 

Venture Zone Game

With articles, videos, podcasts and virtual courses, along with in-person meet-ups at CNIB hubs and offices across Canada, we thought we could do a better job of engaging potential entrepreneurs. While some people like the setting of a virtual class with lectures and quizzes, some people learn best by trial and error. What better way to do that than with a game? Games could be fun and be vehicles for learning.

We connected with a company that specialized in learning games out of the UK called Totem Learning. Working with Totem over the course of nine months, we conceptualized and built a fully accessible iPhone game that taught players how to run a production-based company.

Players chose a product, a price point and received some startup cash to get going. In the life of the game, players had to produce their product, market it, brand their company, hire staff and make sales all while keeping an eye on their brand strength, their profit and their spending.

A screen shot from Venture Zone Game

During testing, we noticed players were getting stuck in the early stages of the game. Some players didn’t know where to begin and swiping around the screen was causing players to close the game out of frustration. What we needed were a set of training wheels so the player could get comfortable with the layout of the screen. Then, they could be left on their own to play and replay the game.

I developed the concept of two characters, Jack and Liz, who would be coaches in the game. Jack would be part of a trial mode that got players up and running, while Liz hung around in the game and explained all of the screens and business terms. I found myself wearing my producer’s hat again as I directed our two stellar voice talents to get the right delivery for the game. 

Screen shot of the production screen from Venture Zone Game

After months of hard work, we launched the game on Global accessibility awareness Day, 2019 in Canada and around the world. We not only reached our download goals for the game, we exceeded them with high praise from the sight loss community and a nomination for a Golden Apple from AppleVis—a website for blind users of Apple products.

CNIB Market

At all of my meet-ups across Canada, one or two entrepreneurs would stand up and tell the group  that they were an artist, a painter, a sculptor, a crafter or someone who made hand-made goods. They all wanted to sell their products online, but feared getting lost on sites like Etsy. 

I saw an opportunity to create a philanthropic shopping destination where CNIB donors could support our entrepreneurs with sight loss by purchasing high-quality hand-made goods with the proceeds being divided up between CNIB and the entrepreneur. CNIB would handle the marketing side while the entrepreneur would focus on crafting.

With a  modest budget, we built an accessible and  fully featured e-commerce platform on Shopify in less than 3 months. CNIB Market had a soft launch in 2020, but the COVID19 pandemic forced the site to be placed on pause. There is still incredible potential for CNIB to fully flesh out this idea and see it through to completion.

My Exit

2020 was also the year I was laid off from one of the most enjoyable  and fulfilling jobs I ever had. I met amazing people from across the country and I got to bring accessible digital products to life. Given more time and with the winds blowing in my favour, I would have transitioned to being a full time developer of digital products. In addition to working with a great team, my favourite memories from CNIB will be working with one of the greatest assistants I’ll ever have. The program, the game and the market wouldn’t have been as great without her help and support.

Over the next year, I’d develop and refine the software for my current startup, begin consulting on accessible design for an education tech company and start a new position with one of Canada’s most forward-thinking banks.

Career Trek – Freelance Audio & Music Production

by Leave a Comment

My career as an audio and music engineer stretches back to the late 90s when I was in my third year of Radio & Television Arts (RTA) at Ryerson. I learned the layout of our 32 channel Tascam audio console and how to operate the remote control for our DA-88 recorders. My third year group recorded a local Toronto funk band and I immediately fell in love with the entire multitrack recording process.

While at school, I read Stanley R. Alten’s Audio In Media from cover to cover and absorbed everything I could about audio production for radio, television, music and sound design—EQ, compression, gating, effects, acoustics as well as all of the intricacies of working in a multitrack recording environment.

Love Method — Reaching the Sun

A career in audio production was nearly impossible to start by working for someone else right out of school. I had applied to several audio jobs in Toronto with no luck, but found myself in demand as a freelance audio producer for friends and friends of friends who wanted to record EPs and albums. This often meant recording in noisy spaces such as bedrooms, churches and other noisy environments on a wide variety of gear.

Karen Pace – Worship Medley

Karen Pace – Worship medley

As I built up my skills as a problem solver in the audio engineering space, I eventually found myself playing the role of producer more and more. This culminated in the largest project I managed from start to finish—a full Christian pop album for a friend who is a very talented singer. We  recorded, mixed and mastered at several top tier recording studios in Toronto and launched the album in 2006.

Deanna — Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing)

My last recording gig was in 2010 when I recorded a full Toronto rock band for my graduate thesis on the accessibility of ProTools. There, I had the luxury of working in an acoustically treated studio on an SSL AWS-900 mixing console.

Heartcore – Blue

Heartcore – Blue

Amidst all of this, I took on recording projects that were a little out of the ordinary including an audio book, VoiceOver demos and lots of PA audio gigs where I was mixing bands live in a room.

I came alive as an audio producer. There’s something fun and exciting about patching in a reverb and riding the faders to add the extra energy a song needs to be ear-catching and hooky. Despite my passion for the craft, a ton of connections and having some of the gear, I began realizing a career in audio was not as easy as it sounded (no pun intended).

Studios were difficult to start and run by the time multitrack recording became ubiquitous. Large studios with big rooms were slowly closing and pop music production was moving away from recording live instruments to using samples.

I will, one day, get back into recording and mixing (the latter being my passion), but I will do it as an expensive hobby rather than a career. As life would have it, all of the late nights as a DJ and the long days as an audio producer were about to pay off with my first full time gig when I sent a demo to a small radio station in north Toronto.

Career Trek – The Mobile DJ Years

by Leave a Comment

This is the first post in a series that will take you on a journey through the highlights of my working life. I have essentially worked my entire career without sight. A lot of that work was work I chose to do when no other companies would hire me after I graduated what was then called Ryerson University with a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Radio & Television Arts. Throughout my journey as an entrepreneur and as an employee with sight loss, I’ve had to solve problems in order to get the job done. I’ll explain how I did it as best I can.

Jump In and Figure it Out

I’ve always loved listening to the artful skill of a mix DJ at work. Listening to radio in Toronto while growing up, I was transfixed by DJs who could beat match, cut and scratch music from a wide variety of musical genres. I had a desire to learn, but figured the startup costs were too prohibitive for me to own turntables, a mixer, speakers and then amass a collection of vinyl LPs.

 

While attending university, my friend Rebecca introduced me to a popular night club DJ—DJ Thomas—who spun music for a Saturday night retro broadcast on a popular Toronto radio station. He used the denon unit week after week and pulled off flawless mixes from a giant case of CDs he traveled with for his DJ gigs. While in conversation with DJ Thomas and Rebecca, I mentioned that DJing was something I wanted to learn.

At the time, there were no courses or schools where you could go to learn to be a DJ. Everyone just “figured it out” on their own.

Rebecca told me to just jump right in and teach myself. I did just that. Thanks Rebecca!

DJ Thomas showed me his rig which held one of the first Denon twin CD decks built for DJs. The unit let DJS play CDs at variable speeds and precisely cue songs using CD frames. This made tempo synchronization and cuing as easy as it was on vinyl.

 

After finishing my first year of university, I rented one of the  Denon decks without a mixer. I learned to mix by connecting each CD player in the Denon to separate stereo systems and working the volume controls independently. My crude bedroom set-up was clunky and awkward, but I had enough to teach myself how to work the unit and get familiar with the controls as well as the tiny collection of CDs I owned. In under a month, I was spinning at my best friend’s 21st birthday party—my very first gig.

 

Kevin stands in front of a mixer and rack of DJ equipment at a party.

 

How I Adapted

Learning the controls on the Denon decks was not that difficult. There were few buttons and each one was sized and positioned in a way where I could memorize what each key did and where it was, so no need for braille labels.

One of the most challenging parts of being a DJ with no sight was selecting CDs. I had a standing rack of 200 CDs, plus 3 or 4 road cases holding many more. Labeling each one with braille was impractical, so I began memorizing the layout of each rack and case using cues from the spines of each case to guide me on which CDs were where. For example, an album in a cardboard digipack would break up the column of CDs and give me an anchor to chunk the order of CDs above and below.

Every so often, I’d grab the wrong CD during a gig, but have enough time to put it back and grab the correct one before the playing track ended.

After several gigs and some saving, I purchased an upgraded Denon deck with jog and shuttle controls along with a very simple DJ mixer. Friends would accompany me to gigs with a cash incentive. I saved money in the long term by renting the PA and lighting gear I needed for each gig. This allowed me to customize each event with the right gear so I wasn’t keeping massive speakers in my inventory if I was playing a small wedding for 50 people.

I spun weddings, first communions, fundraisers and a couple of night club gigs. Over the 7 years I worked as a DJ, the biggest gig I did was for 300 people for my best friend’s parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. I had also amassed a large collection of music and learned a few lessons along the way. 

Lessons Learned

  • Be prepared for everything. Have a backup for your main DJ rig and be prepared to switch immediately to keep the party going.
  • Know your music. Be familiar with your bar counts, in and out points and be prepared to mix disparate genres such as cultural music, rock and reggae. This is what sets you apart and develops your versatility.
  • Know your tools. You should be an expert on how to set up and operate your gear and know every button and function. On the flip side, keep your tech load simple. Sometimes beat matching from song to song is more than adequate without adding a sampler, stutter effects and scratching.
  • Practice and make your mistakes at home. When you’re driving a party at a wedding or night club, there are no redos for a poor mix, so be sure you know what you’re doing when the dance floor is open.
  • Know your audience. Scratching and cutting means nothing if you can’t choose the right song to play. A fundraiser for executives in their 50s is going to be a very different mix than a high school dance, so play to your audience. Your personal tastes come second. 
  • Carry yourself professionally. Use business and rate cards. Be clear with your contracts. Arrive on time for set-up. leave on time after strike. Clean up after yourself. Return calls and e-mails promptly.
  • Perceptions matter. As a DJ with sight loss, walking into a venue with a cane can elicit non-confidence in people who don’t know you can do the work. Your job is to prove them wrong by exceeding their expectations. Use correct spelling and grammar in your correspondence. Make eye contact, shake hands firmly, be agreeable, apologize when necessary and take the high road if you’re dealing with a jerk. Address people by name and say please and thank you. These little things go a long way in building your reputation when you’re starting out.
  • Build a great team. I succeeded as a DJ because I had great friends around me who were willing to drive me to gigs, set up speakers and tell me when people were leaving the dance floor. No one succeeds alone, so surround yourself with great people who are invested in your success.

I left the DJ world in 2005 after selling my DJ rig. If I do get back into it, it will be an expensive hobby.

Today, a DJ with sight loss can easily get set up with a Mac running VoiceOver, accessible DJ software from Algoriddim and accessible DJ controllers such as the Pioneer DDJ SX3. These tools can put you on par with your sighted counterparts.

If you’re going to venture into the world of being a mobile DJ, have a plan and set goals for performing a certain number of gigs in the first 30, 60 and 90 days. Build good habits for practice and be prepared to make sacrifices with your time. The DJ world can be fun, but it is hard work.

 

My Old School Mix

Here is a set of 80s and 90s old school hip hop and R&B that was fun to mix. The Denon DM2500 had a crude sampler which I used for parts of this mix. Enjoy!

My Current Startup: MenuVox

by

Imagine that you’re like me, and live with sight loss. Picture yourself at the table in a busy cafe or restaurant. How do you read the menu?

You don’t read braille. Your server is too busy to read the menu to you. Your OCR apps aren’t cutting it. Scanning a QR code takes you to an inaccessible photo of the menu and the restaurant’s website is a mess. You feel uncomfortable asking for help and so you get “the special” without knowing your favourite meal is available.

My latest startup, Menuvox, solves these problems with a location-based app and service that pushes an accessible restaurant menu right to a diner’s smart phone. 

I got the idea for MenuVox after I found myself alone in a chain restaurant—trying very hard to navigate the restaurant’s website on my mobile phone. It was a mess. I thought, “there has to be a better way to do this.”

MenuVox solves a number of problems with the dine-in experience for those with and without sight:

  • Eliminates the need for braille menus. Braille is expensive to produce and fewer than 1 in 4 in the sight loss community read braille regularly. 
  • Increases dignity and independence for people with sight loss.
  • Improves hygiene and reduces viral and bacterial transmission. Since the menu is on the user’s phone, no need to share menus or print disposable paper menus.
  • Improves the efficiency of serving staff. Less time spent reading the menu aloud to a customer with sight loss is more time spent serving others.
  • Reduces app clutter. One app works in every location that supports MenuVox. No need for multiple restaurant apps on your phone.

Unlike other apps that focus on delivery, discovery, reviews or reservations, MenuVox is focused on the experience of being at the table. The app lets the  user adjust the display settings of their phone to make the text more legible or have their screen reader read the menu aloud. Since the app is location-based, there’s no need to scan QR codes or scroll through a list of nearby restaurants. MenuVox will even work in underground malls and food courts.

MenuVox is poised to launch in 2022.