UnLeadership

42Leadership, a Founder's Story

Erin Bury is the CEO and cofounder of Willful and is the former managing director at Eighty-Eight, a Toronto-based creative communications agency. Before Eighty-Eight she was the managing editor at start-up publication BetaKit and director of communications at Sprouter, which was acquired by Postmedia in 2011. Erin is also a speaker, writes a monthly column for the Financial Post, and is a tech commentator on CTV News. She has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and Canadian Business and was named one of Marketing Magazine's top 30 Under 30 marketers. Her claim to fame is being retweeted by Oprah—twice.

(Highlights from our interview, recorded July 6, 2023.)

WILLFUL IS AN ONLINE ESTATE planning platform, a company I run with my husband, Kevin. I never thought I would be in the estate planning business, but a personal experience with a loved one passing away highlighted the barriers to access. Together, we built a platform to make the process more accessible and easy. I've run my own businesses and been involved in the start-up space for a long time. I consider myself a terrible employee and lifelong entrepreneur. Most of the credit goes to Kevin because he had the idea for the company. I was running a tech marketing agency at the time, working with funded start-ups and companies like PayPal and Telus. Kevin didn't have fundamental coding skills or an MBA to get him off the ground, so we began by building an advisory ...