I sat down with Megan MacKay, a 2019 Ivey Business School HBA alumna, to discuss her experience at Western. Megan co-founded RollUP Solutions, a business that upcycles used mobility devices. A business case study was created about RollUP and social entrepreneurship, and it’s been taught at Western and worldwide.
Megan was also a driving force behind building Enactus Western, a non-profit that focuses on challenging business students to create community development projects and social businesses.
As a member of the RollUP team this year, I wanted to know how Megan accomplished so much in her four years at Western.
Hi Megan! Could you tell me about yourself?
Of course! I started at Western in 2015. I was a history major and lived in Med-Syd during my first year, then went to Ivey. I was also on the History Journal and Theatre Western.
Great! So, why did you decide to help build Enactus Western?
During the summer after my first year, I worked in the Enactus Canada Head Office. I learned how students all over Canada and the world were using business as a force for social change, which was incredible and inspiring.
When I went to join the Enactus team at Western, I realized that the team wasn’t functional. There were no projects, and there hadn’t been significant development in the club for years. So, after my experience in Head Office, I saw no reason why Enactus couldn’t thrive at Western. In my second year, I made it my mission to make the club a success.
The Western Enactus team won the 3M Canada Award at the 2018 Enactus Canada National Exposition.
And how did Enactus lead into RollUP?
RollUP became the foundation of the Enactus club. If I was going to get other students to join, I had to prove that social businesses could work. I was also passionate about helping an ageing population and ensuring that people could find affordable mobility devices. With London having an ageing population, there was an excellent opportunity to do something in that space.
Tell me about your experience with RollUP. It came out of your Business 2257 class (B2257), yes?
I started ideating the idea of RollUP in the fall of my second year and the Feasibility Report in B2257 hit in the wintertime. I found a group of people in my class who wanted to do the project together, and those members of my group served as the initial RollUP team. From there, we received funding, which served as a foundation of our first round of upcycling via RollUP. It was an excellent opportunity to incubate the project and put something substantial together. It’s since been case studied by our B2257 professor, and incorporated into the B2257 curriculum.
That’s an incredible, full-circle moment.
It’s one of the few cases with a female founder or a case with the social enterprise business model. I’m proud to be able to introduce Western students to both of those concepts and show that it is possible as a student at Western to start a business that is good for the community.
In 2019, RollUP won the Community Collaboration Award at the Pillar Community Innovation Awards Gala.
How did running RollUP and your role at Enactus help you develop courage?
There were a couple of crucial points where I had to be courageous, and they all came at moments of failure and conflict.
I’ll always remember at the end of my third year, two years into Enactus, we’d tried a lot of different tactics to make the club successful at Western. We borrowed ideas from what other teams had done successfully, and most of it failed. At the end of two years of work, my leadership team quit. We had one struggling project, which was RollUP. We had no faculty advisor and no proof of all the work we had done to make Enactus successful. I thought it was time to throw in the towel. But, at that moment, I also thought about giving it one more try. Enactus was too valuable to both the community and potential future students at Western.
However, I also needed the courage to try a model that didn’t previously exist at Enactus – what I called our mergers and acquisition model. From there, we experienced exponential success. That was a moment of courage where we were able to do something different and take a stand. We kept going, and now Enactus is thriving at Western.
Do you have words of advice for future AEO/HBA students to develop courage or drive in order to capitalize on their time at Western?
First of all, university is a lot of hard work – there is no question about that. However, there are ways that you can set yourself up for success. A tactic I used was what I called my “40-hour workweek.” I structured my time like a full-time job. For example, I wake up early, so nine to five was when I did classes and work. Personally, it helped me to think ahead and be strategic about how I spent my time without spending 12 hours a day working. My second tip would be to take time to build relationships with people because those relationships will be the relationships that you carry through for a lifetime, ultimately. Maybe I don’t fully remember how to balance a balance sheet, but I do remember the people in my section at Ivey. It’s so important to build relationships.
Thank you so much for your time and advice, Megan! It is so inspirational to see how you recognized an issue and solved it in your community.