Chief Change Officer
#180 Holly Bond: From Fitness Franchises to Entrepreneurial Faceplants
15 Feb 2025
Who is Holly Bond and what is her background?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is our first ever from Canada, Holly Bond. I used to live in Calgary, Alberta and Toronto, Ontario in Canada.
Talking to Holly really brings back memories of my adolescence and college days in Canada. Holly is special in my eyes. Why? She's now the president of a head hunting firm I'll be honest, in my career so far, I haven't worked well with headhunters. I've mostly landed jobs through networking. But something on Holly's LinkedIn profile and her company's website caught my eye.
It said, we are a talent management and development firm with unshakable belief that change is a good thing. I was skeptical at first. It could just be empty words. But then I dug deeper and discovered that Holly had built a very successful franchise business from the ground up before moving into the headhunting business. From that moment, I knew Holly truly believes that change is a good thing.
She has mastered turning change to her advantage, making her a natural fit for my show. After two months of emails back and forth, I finally convinced her to come on board. We did a 70-minute interview, which I've decided to break down into two parts.
In part one, this episode, we'll hear Holly's story of being a mother of two and taking 17 years to earn her college degree, all while starting and building a fitness business that turned into a successful franchise. In part two, Holly will share why she entered the headhunting business and her human-first approach to serving not only her corporate clients, but also the candidates themselves.
I'm speaking to you from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the east coast of Canada. The population of Halifax is about 500,000 and growing rapidly. The population of our province is about 1.1 million. So not a lot of people here, but as I've grown through the years, the population has significantly increased. We're in a boom right now.
So I was born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and I've spent my entire life on the east coast of Canada. And I absolutely love it. I've traveled many places in the world and I love and I'm always excited to come back home.
So interesting when I go back to and I'll go back to the very beginning of when I was growing up, it was interesting because I have five brothers and sisters and education wasn't a priority. In our growing up, you were probably going to go to trade school, as we called it.
And now it's community college referred to, but trade school and become a secretary or a hairdresser or one of those careers, which is wonderful, but it wasn't for me. So I was more the black sheep of the family. And I fought to talk my parents into helping me go to university. And I did go and I took two years. So I had a sort of business certificate.
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