Meet Andrew Hall | Co-Founder of No Story Lost

We had the good fortune of connecting with Andrew Hall and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Andrew, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I feel like a lot of times when you hear an entrepreneurs interview, they always tell the story about how they were so entrepreneurial growing up as a child, and they were the type to always be scheming and dreaming and coming up with a business idea even when they were young. That’s actually not me – I was just sort of a normal student in school and worked the odd job around my neighbourhood cutting lawns and shovelling snow.

I graduated from university with a bachelor of commerce degree and got the dream job for business students which was getting into consulting with one of the big four accounting and consulting firms. But being there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that working for someone else wasn’t for me. I felt like outsourcing the decision-making around where I’d be, when I’d be there, and what I would do never felt right.

My best friend growing up who is also my cousin felt the same way. He also had a job with a big four firm and had one foot out the door as well. He and I had always had business ideas together, watch shows like Shark Tank. We would have these phone calls where we would dream of running our own thing, saying “just imagine if on Monday mornings when we woke up we just gave each other a call and planned out our strategy for the week, instead of putting on our suits and heading into the office.”

Around that time, I got my hands on the four hour body and the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss. These were frame breakers for me mentally, paving a path and a structure for how you could run your own thing and set goals, and build a life you dreamed of.

Eventually, Jeremy and I came up with an idea for a nonprofit, which was a buy one, give one program for restaurants. We felt like business was a really powerful vehicle for making positive change in the world, and we thought we could leverage business to make impact. So, we quit our big boy jobs, and started a nonprofit at the age of 23. We ended up running that business for about nine years, and gave over 6 million meals to you in need. It was an amazing ”MBA” and we made a ton of positive impact.

So, for me, the thought process was really around being unsure of corporate life, being passionate about making positive impact in the world, and having the right co-founder and idea to start with. I figured I could always go back and get another job if it failed!

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
No Story Lost has brought the idea of a memoir to every family. Historically, memoirs is worth this stuffy, luxury thing that people only did if they were highly successful business people, or were a baron in some European country or something. We felt like every family has amazing stories to tell and to capture, and that with today’s technology we could bring all the right people and pieces together to make memoirs & biographies more affordable.
No Story Lost is the biography for the average family. The family with the grandparent with amazing stories from 70 years ago that we can hardly fathom – even if it’s just about the farm, or the early days in their hometown that’s changed so much, or their amazing immigration story.
We started now, Story Lost because we interviewed my grandfather about his life growing up and because our family had always said that he had these incredible stories that somebody had to capture. Well, we heard that comment so many times that we figured somebody had to do something about it. Finally, we interviewed him, and turned his story into a little book. To be honest, the first book wasn’t very good, but it was still so cool to have. So we realized that if this was cool for us, there were probably thousands of other families out there who had the same problem and didn’t quite know how to solve it. We definitely figured out a few ways NOT to capture a life story on that first go, but then we started to get the hang of it with some friends and family projects and realized we had a business on our hands.
What we want the world to know is that EVERYONE has a story to tell, and they just need to be asked and listened to. You wouldn’t believe how many people we start chatting to who say they don’t have any stories, but then 4 hours of interviews later and they’re still telling us great stories.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Definitely my Co-Founder, Jeremy – we started both our businesses together. You hear a lot about how you shouldn’t do business with friends or family, and how Co-Founder disputes can ruin a business. Well, we the kind of working relationship people dream of. It’s been nothing but fun and high-trust for us as Co-Founders. And certainly challenges, but always us-against-the-challenge and never us against each other.

With our first business, our non-profit, we had two amazing team members (Derek and Breanne) join us early on who were super instrumental in getting things off the ground. Then Tanya and the rest of our team joined us and we had too many great team members to thank, as well as hundreds of supportive clients.

More recently, I’d like to thank Andrew Wilkinson and Tiny for investing in No Story Lost a couple years ago, which helped us get from our proof of concept stage to the more solid business we are today – and also UVic Business where I got my degree and then ended up winning a little business competition for No Story Lost, also funded by Tiny.

Website: https://nostorylost.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/nostorylost