About

Legal Disclaimer: This blog is about my thoughts. They are my own, generated by me, representing me and are no way affiliated with my company or any of the organizations I work with. I am responsible for what I say, and all errors, stupid comments, swear words, and humor are my own personal responsibility.

And now with that out of the way…

Hi there,

I’m Craig Cherlet, a managing partner at WYSIWYG Ventures living in Squamish, BC with my beautiful wife @lyrencherlet and my son and daughter.  I’m an entrepreneur and management consultant, board sport enthusiast and all round adventure seeker. I have a diverse background and love sharing my thoughts on many different subjects. Most of this blog will be about my thoughts and ideas about business but you will see other posts on adventure, sports, nature and family life.

My work life has taken me in all sorts of directions over the years. As a young boy growing up in Winnipeg, MB, I understood the concept of entrepreneurship before I could even pronounce the word. Like many young kids, I had a lemonade stand which didn’t bring in a lot of cash but was my first experience with small business. I also had a paper route working for FlyerForce which was my first real paid gig. I didn’t like it too much but it did bring in some money which I did like. After sligning papers for a while, I decided to start my first business; cutting lawns for my neighbors. $20 bucks a cut was great and I did pretty good for a young kid.

Over the years, I’ve had many jobs that have added to my diverse background. I worked at Canadian Tire at the parts counter, I was a line cook at Perkins, a DJ for Crystal Sound where I played in clubs around Winnipeg as well as many weddings and Manitoba socials. I jumped into health care for a few years as a Porter/Orderly at Victoria Hospital where my eyes were opened to the very interesting and challenging life of emergency medicine.

I went to school in Calgary at the DeVry Institute of Technology where I took a year of electronic engineering and 3 years of computer sciences. In my 2nd year of school I took a job as a network administrator for Jim Peplinski Auto Leasing which led me into IT consulting for various clients in Calgary.

In the early 2000’s, I helped an client called Mediagig setup a web development and hosting division within their marketing agency. Following that I helped start a company called GMSI that was building a web based application for the golf industry. The application was a web based golf course management suite that they would use to manage their entire business. Great idea but the dot com boom was over and so was the financing.

I started a marketing agency called Clientseye inc with 3 partners where we worked with clients such as Yamaha Motor Canada, Creative restaurants, Swimco, Gold’s Gym, Action Sports Advertising, Lifestyle Homes, Uptown 17 and many others. We were a digital agency that helped companies leveage their traditional advertsing campaigns with the web and direct marketing. We were one of the 1st agencies in Calgary offering email marketing at the time. I also spent some of my time as the Director of Communications for the Calgary CMA helping with marketing, fundraising and events.

A few years later I decided to get back into consulting and did several projects for Investors Group & Great West Life back in Winnipeg. I did some interface design for Investors Group’s first web application that’s still in use today on thier Client account view site. In that project as a business analyst, my job was to create wire frames for the web application. I decided to create a prototype in HTML & CSS rather than Visio drawings and the prototype worked so well, ended up becoming the app in the end.

My wife decided to go to school in Vancouver so we packed up our life and headed west. I took a contract at Credit Union Central of BC(now Central1 Credit Union) and worked there for several years on banking, treasury, risk management, insurance, financial services and accounting projects. I ended up taking a full time role with them managing a team of business analysts for a few years.

Fast forward to 2012 and you will find me back in the consulting world helping out various organizations with management consulting, business analysis, marketing & technology consulting through our company WYSIWYG Ventures Inc.

Have a question or interested in partnerships or work opportunities? Leave me a comment or contact me through Linkedin.

or… You can find me on the web at any of the following social sites.

Twitter, Google+, Facebook, About.me, Youtube, WordPress, Tumblr, Klout, Pinterest, Quora