Create the Rules is about asking powerful questions and creating change in the world. In a profit first, but anti-colonial capitalist format, we create resilient and prosperous small businesses that support the business owner, the employees and the movement they want to design.

Create the Rules Media seeks opportunities to elevate stories about what business really looks like behind the scenes, out in the marketing field and the opportunities and obstacles facing business owners as we move through a late stage colonial-capitalist economy.

Create the Rules started as a way to live my life and how to run my business.

Hi, I’m Marissa. As an adult, I was diagnosed as autistic – particularly what used to be called Aspergers. What that means is I view the world through a neuro-divergent lens. After working almost 20 years in the corporate world of online marketing, email marketing, business planning, public relations and media relations, I realized that every year I got the same annual review.

“You ask too many questions and you question authority too much.” 

Instead of letting that get me down, I started to explore what that skill looked like in the world and how I could get paid for it. Four years prior to this epiphany, I had started a temporary pop up retail shop and art gallery called On the Spot Pop Ups. We partner with Etsy Canada and host small and large scale pop ups across our city, focusing primarily on handcrafted and artists producing work locally in order to prepare their businesses to thrive on a global market. A part-time business, I realized I could make it full-time. I started to explore the world of business coaching as well. I wanted small businesses to succeed in a global landscape where we see big corporations unable to pivot quickly and respond to rapidly changing consumer needs. I wanted small business owners to thrive. I see so much burn out and exhaustion because we, as a society, don’t nourish and support risk takers. We want them to invest and do the work for us but the risk takers need us. These are the inventors, the designers, the creators, the innovators that make our world so incredibly vibrant and refreshing.

Business coaching is a place where entrepreneurs and small business owners could pay me to do what I do best as an autistic entrepreneur myself – ask really bold, non-judgmental and completely curious questions that help people get clarity on their priorities, deconstruct out-dated belief systems and create clear, actionable task lists and plans that help them achieve their goals.

Before leaving my full-time corporate gig, I trained as a life and business coach through Erickson College. After realizing my coaching client roster was getting too full to handle On the Spot Pop Ups and a full-time job in corporate – I quit my job working for someone else and launched into running my own businesses.

The last five years as a full-time business owner have taught me a lot, combined with my almost 20 years of corporate business planning experience. There are a lot of ways you can make it. Profit margins, customer acquisition plans, financial forecasting, marketing – all of the foundations of that is fundamentally the same. But how you go about achieving it – well what works for you, might not work for me. So we create the rules. We let go of the norms that have worked for others and as the world is changing dramatically, so is the way we run a business and the way we, as business owners work in our business.

We create the rules to build businesses that support the employees, the customers AND the business owner.

We create the rules to thrive instead of survive.

We create the rules to support collaboration over competition.

We create the rules to leave behind the shoulds and focus on the coulds.

We create the rules to say “What if?” and “What would make this even better?”

Together, we will create a new norm in business where small businesses exceed the statistics and build strong diverse economies – both in our communities and on the global market.