Written by Matthew Celestial
I’m never surprised when people are surprised about how I’m able to run so many different businesses under Statement Worldwide. Common questions I get are: “how do you do it all?” or “what’s your background, exactly?” Naturally, I do struggle to answer those questions. In truth, I don’t come from a business background and my days are really packed. But it all comes down to the fact that it’s all problem solving. And like many entrepreneurs, I never really had a choice but to push myself to do everything all at once.
Running a company, especially a self-funded one, is like being thrown into your own personal MBA program, but with higher stakes and no syllabus. You learn not because you’re ready, but because you must. And that urgency can become your greatest advantage, if you approach it with curiosity.
In the early days of building Statement Worldwide, I wasn’t equipped with a financial analyst. I didn’t have a strategy consultant. I didn’t have an HR lead. But I had questions. Lots of them. And I let those questions guide me into every corner of the business I hadn’t yet explored.
So, I started digging into financial planning and analysis. I constructed my own budgets and obsessed over the principles of zero-based accounting. I read about trademarks, learned how to navigate the Employment Standards Act, handled conflict resolution and developed an evolving leadership style in real time.
And you might wonder, how do you have time? I had to pack the learning in my morning coffees, my commutes, the breaks in between meetings, the quiet late night breaks from tasks and even scheduling blocks in my calendar. I had, and still have to this day, this extreme desire to solve the next problem, learn and become even better than I was the day before.
AGILITY ISN’T A BUZZWORD. IT’S A WAY OF OPERATING.
We’ve turned words like agile and adaptable into resume fillers and leadership jargon. But in practice, agility means being willing to jump into discomfort with curiosity and urgency, regardless of your job title. That mindset isn’t just for founders or CEOs. It’s critical across all levels of an organization:
A team member who proactively plugs into a new tool
A manager who learns how to build out a process when none exists
A stakeholder who zooms out and identifies weak points in the system before they become failures
I, then, argue that agility is not about knowing everything. It’s about knowing how to move, and being willing to learn faster than the system expects you to.
THE REAL WORK BEGINS WHEN THE BUDGET IS TIGHT.
One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that great strategy is born from abundant resources. In my experience, great strategy is born from constraints. I had to learn how to fill organizational gaps with no capital, and just creativity. I was forced to think about structuring partnerships than hiring. I borrowed insights from other industries and studied how to reapply it to others. And I’ve learned to accept that sometimes delivering something at first at 70% and then refining it through iteration may help. But it all became theory, practice and experimentation into one.
That’s how agility works in the real world:
You do what you can with what you have… and you commit to doing it better the next time.
AGILITY IS CULTURE-BUILDING, TOO.
Over time, I realized that agility couldn’t just be a personal trait. It had to become part of our organizational culture. But culture is hard to teach. You can’t just say “be agile” and expect transformation.
So I applied it to myself first.
I made transparency a baseline. I share real-time learnings with my team. I narrate decisions out loud so others can understand how problems are solved behind the scenes. When I don’t know something, I say it. And then I go figure it out. That’s the kind of culture I want to build. One where curiosity isn’t punished, where problems aren’t ignored and where agility is celebrated, not as hustle, but as thoughtfulness in motion.
THE PUZZLE PIECE PERSPECTIVE.
Every problem I face, I see as a puzzle piece. Maybe it’s upside down. Maybe it’s on the wrong part of the table. But I trust that it connects to something greater. This mindset has kept me afloat during the hardest chapters, and it’s what I now try to model and embed into the brands, systems and teams that make up Statement Worldwide. Because the future of work won’t belong to the most polished resumes. It will belong to the people who can move through uncertainty with curiosity, fluidity and purpose.
If we can train ourselves, and our teams. to adopt that mindset, we won’t just build better businesses. We’ll build resilient, human-centred ecosystems that are equipped to navigate whatever comes next.
And in a world that keeps shifting, what could be more valuable than that?