Shift by Alberta Innovates
Shift by Alberta Innovates
Balancing entrepreneurship and mental health: insights from Anthea Sargeaunt of 2S Water
Join us on an enlightening journey into the world of entrepreneurship and mental health as we revisit an impactful conversation with Anthea Sargeaunt from 2S Water. Anthea opens up about her personal experiences and revelations during a CEO roundtable, where she discovered that issues like work-life imbalance and burnout are not just startup growing pains but persistent hurdles even for veteran leaders. Our discussion sheds light on the often-neglected mental health challenges faced by entrepreneurs and offers invaluable insights into fostering mental resilience and sustainable work habits.
Anthea shares her strategies at 2S Water for maintaining healthy boundaries, especially within a remote team setup. Discover her approach to leading by example, ensuring team members prioritize their well-being to prevent burnout and maintain productivity. As resources often stretch thin in startups, Anthea underscores the crucial role mental health plays as the bedrock of success for any business leader.
Tune in to gain essential takeaways that challenge the traditional hustle culture and advocate for a balanced and fulfilling entrepreneurial journey.
Shift by Alberta Innovates focuses on the people, businesses and organizations that are contributing to Alberta's strong tech ecosystem.
Welcome to 2025. At Shift, we explore the stories behind innovation and entrepreneurship in Alberta as we kick off the new year. We're focusing on a critical topic mental health for entrepreneurs. It's a journey filled with highs and lows, and staying mentally resilient is key to success. That's why we're going back into the annals of time and picking out an interview we'd done with Anthea Sargeaunt from 2S Water at Adventures 2024. Sit back, settle in, explain to us your personal journey. Why is mental health a focus for you?
Anthea:Well, I think mental health is really important for all entrepreneurs. Mental health is a focus for me because of an early experience that I had in my career when I was at a CEO roundtable and it wasn't a startup CEO roundtable, it was a more established company CEO roundtable. These guys were running big businesses, they had big teams and I looked up to them so much and we went around the table and every single one of them had all the problems that I had but that I thought were temporary because I was in a startup. They were talking about a lack of work-life balance, not seeing their kids enough, grinding into the night, and I realized it wasn't a phase that businesses go through. It's a life choice that people make about how they manage their time and their business, and it wasn't one that I wanted to make.
Jon:So how big of a problem do you think this is? Because we typically don't hear about it in the media, on social media. So, from your perspective, beyond, say, the CEO roundtable- yeah, I agree.
Anthea:I don't think we hear enough about it. No, I think entrepreneurial mental health is such a huge problem because people are encouraged to grind. They're encouraged to work lots of hours to go 110%. There's lots of times in a startup when that's necessary, but if you're doing it all the time, you're going to cause burnout. And it's really important to be a role model to your team as well. So if you're role modeling behavior that's excessive, then your team feels that they have to emulate it as well. Then, when those crunch time comes and you really need them to put in, they're not going to have the energy, they're not going to have the willpower anymore.
Anthea:So you burn up your goodwill, as well as your own energy in life.
Jon:Tell me a little bit about your personal approach then, with 2S Water.
Anthea:So my personal approach with 2S Water is to really make sure that we watch our boundaries. 2s Water is a remote team company, so we have a branch in Edmonton and we have a branch in Victoria. When people are working from home, I find it's especially a problem. One chronic thing that we see at our company is people logging in when they're sick and they'll say you know, I'm not feeling very well today, but I'm here at the meeting. And we have to be firm and say okay, that's great, thank you for tuning in, turn off your camera and go back to bed. You know, people need to take care of themselves and if we don't role, model that behavior and make it part of our culture, it doesn't happen.
Jon:How do you think some you may have some CEOs or business leaders who are like they understand where you're coming from with that, but they're crunched for money or they're pinched for resources and they don't ask for that, but it's certainly not something they'll say go back to bed.
Anthea:Every business is crunched a lot of the time. I mean, that's one of the things that I've learned, and if you don't draw boundaries, then you just burn your people out. There are periods in every startup's life when you need to call on the troops and you all need to get in there and give your 100%. And if you haven't treated people with kindness and if you haven't made sure that they're taking care of themselves first, it's not going to happen.
Jon:Now, how do you think mental health and this focus stacks up against other things that entrepreneurs need to think about?
Anthea:Well, I mean, there's a hundred things that entrepreneurs need to think about, Absolutely, but mental health is so important because it's the ground basis for everything. If you wake up stressed, sad, burnt out in the morning, you're not putting in a good day's work, you're not producing the kind of quality that you want to. So it's the basis of everything. If you wake up happy and enthusiastic, you do great work and you end your day on a high note, that's where everyone needs to be. That should be the goal. It should not be grinding through even though you don't feel like doing it anymore, even though you're too tired or too sad or in an emotional state. That doesn't work. Those things need to be addressed.
Jon:Now talk to me a little bit about those pressures that entrepreneurs and their staff will face.
Anthea:Well, there's a lot of pressures in startups Cash flow, early stage customers, failures in the field and struggling to maintain relationships. You know the classic expression startups are shrimps amongst the whales. We're always about to be crushed right. So it's very stressful and often it feels like life or death. You know if your business is on the line and you know that a misstep can mean losing years and years of work. It can be very, very hard, but that's the game we're playing and you've got to enjoy it. You've got to enjoy it every day.
Jon:How has it evolved the discussion around mental health? How has it evolved throughout your career?
Anthea:I don't think we heard a lot about it. When I first started out, there was a really strong focus on grind culture and I think we've started to see, in general, people moving away from that. A lot more discussion about really living a comfortable life where you are happy every day, where you're not pushing too hard and, if you ask me, I think people are more productive in that state.
Jon:And what sort of advice would you give?
Anthea:entrepreneurs that are very interested in maintaining their sanity, Balance and boundaries are the best advice I can give an entrepreneur who is trying to do this. You have to be your own guardian. The world will continue to push you. There will always be work If you want to stay up till one in the morning. Every night there's always work to do, but it's still there in the morning.
Jon:if you want to go to bed and you're going to do it way better- Now tell me a little bit about some of those support systems that are available to entrepreneurs to cope with mental health and stress.
Anthea:I actually think that that's somewhere we could do a lot better as a province. There aren't a lot of resources available to startups or to really anyone on the mental health front that are easily accessible, so I think it's a challenge. I think in Alberta we rely a lot on the network of other entrepreneurs. You know, we're here at InVentures today and InVentures is always about the community and the startups and how we come together, and for me that's been a really big support group. But I certainly think as a province and as a country, we could be doing better on mental health Absolutely.
Jon:And what are some of the things that entrepreneurs can recognize when that stress is coming on, to nip it in the bud.
Anthea:I think for me it's always how I wake up in the morning. If I wake up and I'm happy, then I know everything's okay. And if I wake up and I immediately start feeling that stress, I know that I have to start looking at the load on my plate and how I can get help from my team so that I can balance my life Now let's wrap it up and tell us a little bit about to change speed somewhat.
Jon:tell us a little bit about 2S Water oh, happily. Tell us a little bit about to change speed somewhat.
Anthea:Tell us a little bit about 2S Water. Oh, happily, yes. So 2S Water have developed a sensor which detects metals in water in real time. We're heavy tech, so we're hardware, and we sell to heavy industry, so it's a difficult combination. We're certainly in a challenging space. I'm a huge fan of challenge, though what's life if you're not doing something difficult?
Jon:Well, that's excellent. So when you're talking, about heavy metals.
Anthea:Are we talking like mercury and things like that? So we have 31 different metals that we can detect yeah, a huge suite of metals. So we're primarily focused on kind of two suites of metals. One is effluent metals for mining facilities, so making sure that the water coming out of a mine is safe and clean before it goes back into the environment, and the other side is extractive metals, so things like lithium brine, where we have a process that's incredibly taxing on water and if we can optimize it, we can both increase revenue and reduce water consumption at a mine.
Jon:Now, when you're talking about lithium brine now I'm going off here when you're talking about lithium brine, are there partnerships that you have with other companies where you know where they're trying to harvest the lithium, or do you guys do that too?
Anthea:So we partner with companies. We're lucky that here in Alberta and across Canada we have some really innovative extractive technologies around lithium and we are partnered with a couple of those companies moving forward to help them optimize their process so that they can optimize the current extraction in the world.
Anthea:it's a great partnership now I have any final words about mental health about 2s about Inventures um, I think that I always want to encourage people to to start a business. If they think that, that's if they have an idea and they want to do it, I think you should go ahead and start a business. I think, when you do it, if they have an idea and they want to do it, I think you should go ahead and start a business. I think, when you do it, though, that it's important to make sure that you are living the life that you want to live and not ending up grinding yourself into the ground.
Anthea:Doing a startup can be the most amazing, awesome thing, and it can also be terrible if you, if you do it wrong. So so I encourage people to go for it and I encourage people to to do it wrong. So I encourage people to go for it, and I encourage people to do it with forethought and with strategy and realizing that this is a long haul and that the point of doing a startup is to be having fun. This is great.
Jon:Thanks for joining us today. As always, we can be found at shiftalbertainnovatesca or online at your favorite streaming service. You can also reach us at shift at albertainnovatesca. On behalf of everyone here, I'm Jon Hagan. Have a great day Until next time.
