369: Leading a Quality Life with Taylor Leedahl

How do you get better over time? Taylor Leedahl, owner and founder of Tiny Horse, joins the show to describe how to approach process improvement and how we can develop a healthier relationship with our businesses. Taylor shares how she got started in the business and the challenges she has faced along the way. We cover the development of new products, the importance of understanding customer needs, and how to keep mission creep from taking over a business.

Main topics:

• Product development
• "selling" products and services
• Brick and mortar store
• Healthy relationship with your business

Main takeaway: Your business is a reflection of you, but it's not everything of who you are.

About our guest:

Community, collaboration and creativity inspire Taylor Leedahl's professional path. Before entering the dog walking industry, Leedahl's career identities included seamstress, arts administrator, published author and lab tech in an entomology lab with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Leedahl has a BA in Art History from the University of Saskatchewan (2010) and an MA in Art History from Concordia University (2014). Her Master's thesis focused on interspecies collaboration in contemporary art.

This background synthesized in a surprising way with Leedahl's experience walking dogs in Toronto, ON. Her design skills, meditations on collaboration across species lines and the community development from her arts career positioned her to break new terrain in the dog walking industry with her company TinyHorse. TinyHorse is an opportunity to identify issues involving managing multiple dogs and to design gear to alleviate some of the stresses experienced in the dog walking industry. Leedahl draws upon her 6 years walking dogs in Toronto and works closely with dog walking companies to improve existing products and develop new ones. Leedahl lives in Toronto, ON with her pocket beagle, Abigail Potato. In 2023, TinyHorse moved out of Leedahl's one-bedroom apartment to a commercial storefront that includes the company's production workshop.

Links:

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Website - http://tinyhorse.ca

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tinyhorse.mercantile/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/tinyhorsemercantile

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Full show notes and transcript

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