Ralph said Jason had witheld information, presumably to include in his talk, so the introduction would be brief. Jason moved to Midland a couple of years ago from Uxbridge. His father had been a founding member of the Uxbridge Club and Jason was involved in Rotaract. He approached the Midland Club and Ralph was glad to invite him to the meetings. He is the President and co-founder of Home Cooked Solutions, a Web support company.
Jason said he'd been coming to the Georgian Bay since he was 3 months old, to a cottage in the Pointe Au Baril area. The cottage is hardly luxurious - hard roof camping is what Jason calls it, no electricity, no running water, but he loves it there. He grew up in Pickering but moved to Uxbridge in time for High School. Throughout he was involved in Scouting and pursued his love of the outdoors and tried to help others appreciate it too. He participated in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards program as well. He went to U of T and joined the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. While parties were certainly part of the agenda, this fraternity works to help others - their food drives are very successful and Jason served as Food Drive Chair and then as President of the Fraternity.
He's been building web sites since High School, thanks to a great teacher who was a great encouragement. He did a site for the school with a friend and served as VP and then President of the Student Council. His first summer job was working on the web site of Travel Cuts and found that more suited to his temperment and abilities than large class rooms and physics so he left university and took a full time job at Travel Cuts. He did continue to take courses, finishing a web certification program at Ryerson.
He has been able to take a series of sabbaticals and spend time travelling in between jobs. He worked at a start up that didn't, quite and then a web site development company. He and his then girlfriend, now wife, Nicole, took off for 9 months around the world. Partly for the experience, partly to see how they travelled together and they maintained a web page recounting their trips and looking for input. They climbed to Everest base camp, snorkled in the Maldives and kayaked in Thailand. In Slovenia he proposed to Nicole.
Nicole is a U of T graduate in Economics and has work experience in marketing. She is the VP of their company, in charge of sales, marketing and graphics. She is volunteering as Chair of the Communications Committee of the Huronia Communities Foundation and has updated all their communications - their letterhead, their web site etc.
Jaons said that between the two of them they are a full fledged web site management company, able to provide marketing, to develop strategies for individual companies and to work to raise site recognition in the Google search algorithm. They have several clients in Toronto that they hardly ever see like Black and Decker, Adobe, and Kwick Kopy. Local companies they have worked with include GI Jane and AWEeast which, with their help, has turned their not too active web site inot a major earner.
They both like winter too and snowboard in Quebec and Wyoming.
Bruce Wilcox thanked Jason for his talk, saying that, as usual, hearing from one of out own is always most interesting. He said we were glad he and his wife picked Midland and the Midland Rotary Club.