For starting his own empire early

Jeremy Flynn is used to offering a competitive advantage. As a 16-year-old graphic designer, he had to convince company executives that he was the man—or rather, the teenager—who could revolutionize their image. His offer? “I never asked my clients to pay a cent if they weren’t happy with my work,” says Flynn, now 22 and the CEO of Flynnweb, a Halifax-based graphic design and web-development firm. 

In 2005, at age 17, Flynn started doing subcontracting work for big marketing firms. “I was lucky; I never had to flip burgers or mow lawns,” he says. In 2008 Flynn started his own business to focus on helping small companies get noticed. His company motto, Start Out Standing Out, is what he wants for his clientele, more than half of whom are Atlantic Canadian businesses. “They come to me and say, ‘We’re being beaten out on contracts all over Canada.’ Yet their marketing material is often home-made, using Microsoft Word,” he says. “Corporate identity is the face of any business, and an unprofessional image will lead the target audience to believe the same of a company.”

Flynn has a competitive advantage: he’s able to offer his services for about half the cost of his competition by working from a virtual office and outsourcing technical work to his global production team. A fourth-year business and marketing student at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., in March he was named one of two Student Entrepreneur Regional Champions for Atlantic Canada by Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE), a charitable organization dedicated to helping student entrepreneurs. Last month he competed for the national title and a chance to win $10,000.

“There are so many young Canadians who attend college or university and do only that,” says Jaime Szegvary, ACE’s communications consultant. “The fact that Jeremy is also running a successful full-time business is inspiring.”